“Windows 10 uses the Internet a lot to support many of its features,” Peter Bright reports for Ars Technica. “The operating system also sports numerous knobs to twiddle that are supposed to disable most of these features and the potentially privacy-compromising connections that go with them.”
“Unfortunately for privacy advocates, these controls don’t appear to be sufficient to completely prevent the operating system from going online and communicating with Microsoft’s servers,” Bright reports. “For example, even with Cortana and searching the Web from the Start menu disabled, opening Start and typing will send a request to www.bing.com to request a file called threshold.appcache which appears to contain some Cortana information, even though Cortana is disabled. The request for this file appears to contain a random machine ID that persists across reboots.”
‘Windows 10 will periodically send data to a Microsoft server named ssw.live.com. This server seems to be used for OneDrive and some other Microsoft services,” Bright reports. “Windows 10 seems to transmit information to the server even when OneDrive is disabled and logins are using a local account that isn’t connected to a Microsoft Account.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Obviously, Windows sufferers should be able to actually disable such reporting if they so desire.
There needs to be an audit of all virgin installed operating systems, and what they routinely communicate with. We need to know if this is a government condition or some kind of advertising condition.
There’s a difference?
Yes and no. Both are undesirable, and wrong. One is used to judge you, the other to manipulate you. IE: Big Brother vs Parasites
This is why public schools have failed. Thinking that advertisers (obviously of variable size and scope) are the same thing as the government (much larger scope, backed up by force, controls the money supply) is extremely lazy thinking.
That comment was obviously a snarky attempt to say that lobbyists have our government in their pocket. It would seem that your prestigious education didn’t teach you to detect humor and/or sarcasm.
So it is like a chrome OS, with out Internet is doesn’t do much. We should let know Rick from pawn stars.
One wonders if White Star was still sending messages to the Titanic after it slipped beneath the sea.
It sent dunning letters to at least one family of the musicians, demanding payment for the lost uniform.
Sounds like something Microsoft would do.
Simple, disconnect PC’s from the Internet, as you should. There also must be the equivalent of Snitch for Windows as well.
That is the way I use Win7. Once configured and apps installed, it never hits a wired or wireless network again.
I use it on BootCamp & Win7 has survived 5 years of use w/o problems. WinClone is used to archive the BootCamp partition so it can be easily reinstalled if a hard drive fails, etc.
All
…and that’s why they named it Windows, because that’s where you want to throw it out of.
So where is the DOJ and that comedian? Hello? Stop barking at the wrong tree and go after the real culprits.
I remember the fun modification of the old Windoze add. “Windows, where did we want you to go today?”
Microsoft is the Evil Empire of Software.
Ah bless you MDN.,..trying to find negative new about Windows 10?!
Exactly…beating a dead horse, more like.
Clearly they didn’t have to look very hard.
Examples?
Windows 10 is “free” so, you are the product being sold.
The Pro versions of Windoze 10 are rented and the consumer versions the users are rented.
is that what you said about Apple when it decided that operating systems should be freeware? Everyone seemed so happy until they discovered that Apple phones home regularly too. Apple’s pushing iCloud as hard as it can to get subscription-based computing foisted onto users, just like the evil Microsoft. With Ive at the helm, the interfaces went to shit as well. As time goes on, Apple continues to lose the advantages that made OS X superior. Cook, Cue, and Ive have to go.