Coldblackice
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Aug 14, 2010
- Messages
- 1,152
tl;dr: Windows 10 sucks
I was just in the middle of debugging a network stack when I noticed connections going out to Microsoft going in the background. No biggie, I thought, Windows Update/Defender/whatever. I decided to peek at some of the packets, out of curiosity, and found this:
These sons of bitches are sending out every single thing I do, every program running, every program I even switch to. And sending out constantly. Everything. I thought surely this had to be some local service this was going to, some stupidly designed inter-service/process communication, intercepting the DNS via HOSTS. Nope. It's all going out into the world and into Microsoft's open and waiting arms.
Looking into it, no surprise, it's telemetry from this abortion of an OS, Windows 10 -- telemetry that I've emphatically disabled in full -- yet somewhere along the line, Microsoft in its infinite wisdom (...and power, ...and wanton disregard for whatever the hell we, the peasantry, think or want) decided that that choice had an expiration date, and thus decided to reset it to the default setting of "1984", except this time without bothering to ask for my choice.
Sure enough, this infernal OS has enabled every single last bleeding option for telemetry: sending my app history (not just apps installed, but precise usage, any and every time I use any and every app), service history, voice history (not that anyone uses that), search history, browsing history, media history, location history; it's also reenabled ad tracking and personalization. All under the "feature" of "Windows Timeline." How #Blessed are we to have such a divine feature.
Logging into my MS account, I can see it's been collecting all this data for months and months. I wanted to see how far back it goes to see when it started to maybe figure out why or how it did, but go figure, the only apparent way to access the data is via an infinite pagination loading mechanism -- props to the genius UX designers at Microsoft for knocking yet another home-run out of the Microsoft Terrible-UX/UI stadium (don't get me started on Windows Defender's UX + UI, its senseless layout and design and its functionally obtuse uselessness, like how many clicks it takes just to see where a quarantined threat is on disk, and nevermind that that quarantining happens silently like an MS thief in the night, whisking away whatever it wants, whenever it wants, without so much as a peep about it to the user).
Should I be surprised? Nope. Am I still enraged? Yep. Time to employ the third-party utility route to go Tony Montana on this bitch:
I was just in the middle of debugging a network stack when I noticed connections going out to Microsoft going in the background. No biggie, I thought, Windows Update/Defender/whatever. I decided to peek at some of the packets, out of curiosity, and found this:
These sons of bitches are sending out every single thing I do, every program running, every program I even switch to. And sending out constantly. Everything. I thought surely this had to be some local service this was going to, some stupidly designed inter-service/process communication, intercepting the DNS via HOSTS. Nope. It's all going out into the world and into Microsoft's open and waiting arms.
Looking into it, no surprise, it's telemetry from this abortion of an OS, Windows 10 -- telemetry that I've emphatically disabled in full -- yet somewhere along the line, Microsoft in its infinite wisdom (...and power, ...and wanton disregard for whatever the hell we, the peasantry, think or want) decided that that choice had an expiration date, and thus decided to reset it to the default setting of "1984", except this time without bothering to ask for my choice.
Sure enough, this infernal OS has enabled every single last bleeding option for telemetry: sending my app history (not just apps installed, but precise usage, any and every time I use any and every app), service history, voice history (not that anyone uses that), search history, browsing history, media history, location history; it's also reenabled ad tracking and personalization. All under the "feature" of "Windows Timeline." How #Blessed are we to have such a divine feature.
Logging into my MS account, I can see it's been collecting all this data for months and months. I wanted to see how far back it goes to see when it started to maybe figure out why or how it did, but go figure, the only apparent way to access the data is via an infinite pagination loading mechanism -- props to the genius UX designers at Microsoft for knocking yet another home-run out of the Microsoft Terrible-UX/UI stadium (don't get me started on Windows Defender's UX + UI, its senseless layout and design and its functionally obtuse uselessness, like how many clicks it takes just to see where a quarantined threat is on disk, and nevermind that that quarantining happens silently like an MS thief in the night, whisking away whatever it wants, whenever it wants, without so much as a peep about it to the user).
Should I be surprised? Nope. Am I still enraged? Yep. Time to employ the third-party utility route to go Tony Montana on this bitch: