Windows 10 spying way worse than thought ....

So, a series of tests have been conducted on Windows 10 shows that the "spying" cannot be fully stopped. In fact, in the tests, the OS tried to send data to 51 different Microsoft IPs over 5500 times in a single 8-hour period.

Details on these findings can be found here: Windows 10 Worst Secret Spins Out Of Control

Alarming, to say the least.

 

Well... I guess it's time I move to Linux? I've been way too comfortable with Windows 10 though. Can't just change operating systems. I feel inconvenienced even with Windows 7. The more comfortable you get the harder it is to move to less user-friendly OSs.

Frankly, I'm fine with data collection as long as there's no keylogging and my passwords are safe, but what Microsoft did with the forced upgrade is just a dick move. Shame on you Microsoft. They claim to offer support for Windows 7 until 2020 and then force you to upgrade only half a year later?
I'm officially against anything Microsoft does from now on. Whenever I find a good alternative for Windows, I'll jump on it right away.

 

On a related note, someone posted a link to this article in the comments:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/when-i...=nl.e539&s_cid=e539&ttag=e539&ftag=TRE17cfd61

Can anyone with experience in networking confirm/refute?

 

As a general rule, I am not opposed to an OS reporting back specific things to the company. Provided, of course, it doesn't have my identity, it is secure, and I can opt out. It looks like Microsoft, as per usual, is going the heavy handed "black box" approach. It is yet another reason why I won't be upgrading to Windows 10 anytime soon. On the big machines, I'll continue to run Windows 7 and on the notebook Mac OS X.

 

Are you not getting the "Upgrade to Windows 10" notification on your Windows 7? Or did you disable the updates? I heard some people left their computers open for a while and came back just to find it automatically upgrading to Windows 10 without them having to click on anything, so you better take extra precautions because Microsoft are being real dicks about this.

 

Is this honestly a surprise to anyone though?

 

It's a vOS - Virus Operating System with a pretty front-end that runs former Windows programs, steals your data, uploads and downloads your private works, and hopes people will be foolish enough to permit it. What's not to love, right? If I hadn't seen the absolute decline of America and most of the world these past 12 years, I would say Microsoft doing this is sheer madness. Knowing how people are now and how they permit corporations to do anything they want at the expense of the people, it is no longer much of a surprise. Anyone who is "ok" with data collection like this should not be using a computer, and certainly never handling data for others without their consent. The problem with data harvesting is that it can happen from other sources and anyone trusted to manage your data privately who doesn't know better or care to and uses something like Windows 10. These are the people who make it extraordinarily easy for black hats to get what they need without wasting any time to exploit a system. It used to be more difficult to do, but now Microsoft has made it easy for them to steal private information from nearly everyone because they are now doing most of the work for them. They went from being a software company in the 80's to a diabolical digital espionage front in the 2000's.

 

This is really sad and at the same time makes me glad I decided not to switch to Windows 10. It's terrible, I knew they'd find a way to bypass all those measures I knew it, you can never outsmart those people with their own software.

 

Oh that is bad, very bad of Microsoft! Where is our rights in this matter? Some hot shot lawyer should file a mass class action lawsuit for forcing us and for spying.

 

ask how effective management ram on win 10

 

Somewhat bizarrely, on my main home workstation, I'm not seeing the obnoxious upgrade Window. Though I do keep the OS updated. I did see it on a work machine and on my wife's notebook and I disabled it there. I haven't booted into Win 7 on Boot Camp for a long while, so I don't know if it shows up there or not.

 

My laptop is on Windows 7. It is issued by our office so we also have to abide with the issued software. But some colleagues have their own computers on Windows 10 although on a test basis. They are still observing. There's one who mentioned about spying, that the Windows 10 is always connecting to some websites (probably Microsoft). One colleague opined that it may be doing an update but it looks more like giving some info to the website.

Isn't that connection an impediment to the efficiency of the computer? And maybe it couldn't connect if you have no internet so a stand-alone computer is more like it.

 

It is. Windows 10 is just a spyware OS that looks and acts like Windows 7. There is nothing private or safe on a Windows 10 machine.

The data and what you do on it is sent remotely to Microsoft's servers for data collection of your private information, and there is no way to change this since it is part of the operating system itself now.

Technically, Windows 10 is a virus in the truest sense, manufactured by Microsoft to run real windows programs overtop of it with a mobile-styled interface.

 

Pardon me for this question. It's not that I don't believe your post, it just seems incrdible to me for Microsoft to do that spying of continually connecting to the Microsoft website to send data to the Microsoft's servers. But if that is true then Microsoft can be sued on the ground of deception that their Windows 10 is, as what you said, a spyware OS.

I am not that techie but if this can be proven there should be a group, if not an individual, to raise a case against Microsoft.

 

It's completely different from Windows 7. Have you tried it yet? Sure, it has its fair share of bugs but that's what updates are for. It's extremely responsive and has so many features that I've become comfortable with to the extent that I feel the same way about 7 now as I felt about XP when I started using 7. It's way better in almost every way, and much more user friendly.

Although the spying controversy is still an issue. I personally wouldn't mind anonymized personal data sent over to them for whatever reasons they could be using it for (like new features), but they've yet to confirm or deny anything about that so I remain neutral on that.

I can't say Microsoft is helping me go on their side with all the crap they're pulling nowadays though.

 

There have been cases for years against Microsoft on them doing this even in very small amounts in contrast to what they are doing and getting away with today. During the 1990's, Microsoft was sued by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in the United States over proven spying and compromise of both civilian and government systems (along with a list of class-action suits compounded by businesses and even non-profit organizations against them). Most of these were settled out of court, but Microsoft was able to get the DOJ to drop the case in exchange for help and support from foreign countries to do so.

Microsoft made friends with the Chinese government in the middle of the 1990's, who required that to do business in China (in any province and with the Chinese government), the source code to Microsoft Windows had to be given to them to inspect and to approve of for use. It also meant that they could remove any spying found being done by Microsoft, and could freely add their own to monitor and do with as they wished. That was the requirement for doing business with them, and Microsoft agreed to it.

This hurt the American people and many in Europe significantly, along with the people of Taiwan who China would later use this against.

Since that time, the US government not only dropped charges against Microsoft, but began to require tech companies to implement backdoors and would turn a blind eye to their spying, as long as they accepted payment and turned a blind eye to government spying on businessmen and individual computer users alike. They did. They have. And they still do, only worse. Now, they have become so bold and brazen that they have made it a part of your terms of service for using the mainstream systems...and people are using it anyway, willingly compromising themselves...to which no defense or protection can further be made.

There are currently Class Action Lawsuits against Microsoft for illegally forcing and downloading their Windows 10 spyware OS onto users systems without their consent. More each day.

 

I refuse to let it touch my network or my physical systems in any way, shape, or form (even in a virtual machine I don't trust it, and that's bad). Its trivial graphical interface changes from Windows 8 (which I had used temporarily on someone else's machine and hated it completely), are not of importance to me as a system programmer and embedded designer as a functional, safe, and secure operating system is.

No matter how flashy they try to make it look while wasting ram and resources to convince the masses that it is pretty, my primary concern is if it works correctly without controlling or restricting the user, and if it is stable and safe.

Windows has not been stable for a long time in comparison to other operating systems. Windows server environments, which are more stable than the user ones on average, still have significant downtime in relation to unix-based machines. Even after all this time, they still struggle to produce a working system, but you see after a while that their interest is not to produce something stable like unix, but to instead produce something that is "easy" and can be sold quickly for lots of money. It may crash or only work partially, but it was "easy", so people will spend money on it, and keep spending money on it, because they do not have to think and can be told they are safe, even when in reality they are not.

That downward spiral got to the point that after the forced changes from XP to ista and Windows 7, Microsoft lost a very big part of their marketshare and had to try and recover from it however they could. They tried cheap gimmick moves like buying Powerset's semantic search technology in 2008 to try and launch "Bing", and other moves and companies ruined like Connectix (the reason Microsoft has any form of Hypervisor or virtualization technology at all. Microsoft's virtual PC platform came from Connectix - all of it), and then there's SysInternals which they acquired simply to keep them from releasing better products than what Microsoft already had. Microsoft does not innovate, they desecrate or facilitate after they buy out their competition or use underhanded tactics to destroy them. his has always been their motto since the late 1980's, and possibly as far back as the late 1970's.

I am convinced that anyone today using computer systems or connected technology over a network in any form should not be doing so if they feel it is acceptable for a for-profit corporation that is easily bought out by sinister organizations (both known and unknown) to do anything they want with their data, including sending or recording it in whole or in part without their consent.

Even with anonymity...it's not enough. I'm from a time when trying to do things like this to people without their consent meant a corporation would be forced to dissolve, and the members and owners of that corporation would be facing prison time for what they are doing now. I remember a time when people were not willing to sell their rights or freedoms away for a free cookie and a glass of milk simply because the cookie had sprinkles and the milk tasted good. My, how times have changed.

The other problem with people using dangerous systems is that they compromise anyone and everyone who has any access to anyone elses data with or without their knowledge of it. So the inseucrity now extends far beyond the user now, and it is a threat to each and every other user who does not even use or make excuses to use the entrapment OS because it is pretty and popular while it is spying on them and compromising their private works and data.

It places people in a world to where even those who do know better are now being hurt by the ignorance of those who do not know better. Without any permission of the other group, everyone is compromised as the result because of one side not knowing better.

You have to understand that there isn't anything in Windows 7 that couldn't have been added to the kernel in Windows XP or released as a service pack, and that systems were forcibly made not to allow installation of XP anymore onto most hardware; Microsoft paid vendors to remove IDE compatability from the BIOS of their motherboards by majority and force AHCI only, intentionally crashing installations of XP with blue screens of death. You now had to slipstream AHCI drivers on a case-by-case basis for each new hardware vendor and do additional work that Microsoft and hardware vendors knew the public would not do. I spent 16 days and 21 hours modifying Windows XP SP3 to correct this before I received a cease-and-desist notice from Microsoft's lawyers indicating that what I was doing would harm their release of Windows 7 and cause loss of profit if successful. This was back in 2008-2009. Everything in Windows XP could have been added to Windows 2000 SP4 as SP5 by the way, including wireless support built-in. There were a few differences where XP used a linux lilo modified boot kernel, but even that could have been adapted to work with Win2000. Windows 7 was not even necessary.

Microsoft was trying to make Windows 7 a gimmick to the public just like Bing, and had to employ Lebron James and Jerry Seinfeld to try and con the public into using it instead of staying with XP. When that didn't work, they decided that cutting off support and forcing driver signatures more and installation problems for programs that normally worked fine would be the best way to make people move to 7 even when they were fine with XP and could do anything they needed to with it.


Windows 7, truth be told, has some very bad spyware and malware in it that extends UPnp and bluetooth hacking in addition to other features that seriously cripple it in security and efficiency, using almost twice the resources in some cases as what was needed for XP.

Microsoft had all their little advocates out by the droves trying to tell people that they couldn't use more than 4GB of ram on their XP programs or operating systems unless they downgraded to Vista or downgraded to Windows 7 which was also untrue. They forgot about the fact that Microsoft released Windows XP 64 bit a year before Windows Vista which can still use and run both 32 and 64 bit programs in XP, and is able to use both 32 and 64 bit drivers through wowExec overlay, eliminating most of the problems that were introduced with Vista! Not only did Microsoft stop letting people know of the 64 bit XP, they completely pulled it from the market and refuse to sell it anymore. I still have a few copies of it here, and sometimes install it whenever I want to use XP on a system with more than 4GB of RAM.

Please understand that Microsoft is not using the information they collect for new features. They, just like Google, Facebook, and so many other companies, are recording your data and selling it to anyone from foreign countries to drug cartes because it is worth $$ money $$ to them, and they can always use you as their product to compromise and make money from when they can no longer intentionally compromise their own releases of operating systems and software to fool the public and force them to upgrade for pay any longer.

 

Wasn't expecting this kind of lengthy response heh. I guess what you're saying makes sense. I don't nearly have as much knowledge about them as you do so I'm not in a position to counter-argument. Corporations are all about money in the end even if it means betraying their customers' trust, so what you're saying doesn't look that far fetched to me.

Now Cortana looks even more scary. This thing listens to your Microphone 24/7 if you leave it on. Again, glad that it's not available in my region. But then again I also don't really value my privacy all that much unless it's too intrusive like Cortana.

 

But that's how it is regardless of the OS you have. This doesn't shock me at all.

 

I swear Windows 10 is just...something else. My problem initially with it was the huge amount of memory it uses. I found out it was my Antivirus so I found a lighter one, but it still is such a resource hog. I had no clue it was actually spying on me. That really burns my biscuits that Microsoft can get away with such things, but what can I do? They know we need an OS and we'll put up with a ton of stuff just to have spiffy features like Cortana. I am a business user so needless to say, she's a godsend. I have thought about going to Linux, but I'm not nearly as technical adept to do such a thing.