Posted on 02/15/2016 10:52:46 AM PST by blam
Feburary 14, 2016
Paul_Behan
Don’t Keep Your Personal Or Financial Data On A Windows 10 Machine!
Well not if you want to keep it private. Like many people I was surprised at the Edward Snowden revelations a few years ago. Nothing has seemed to change and in many cases things have got worse. Some corporations are in partnership with government agencies in regard to collection of data.
(snip)
According to this an article, (1) even after turning off all the tracking options on a computer, the researcher left the computer on overnight and tracked the traffic. He was surprised to find that Windows 10 had attempted to contact 51 Microsoft IP addresses 5,508 times. Some of the website addresses contacted include: (2)
(snip)
If Windows is left unattended for about 15 minutes, a large volume of traffic starts being transmitted to various servers. This may be the raw audio data, rather than just samples.
If you are still running earlier versions of windows you would think you would be safe from this tracking, but updates have been released that install this tracking into the earlier versions. Fortunately these updates can be removed. I found that these updates were installed on my Windows 7 computer on the 25th of November 2015. The updates in question are: (3)
* KB3068708 – This update introduces the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service to existing devices.
* KB3022345 (replaced by KB3068708) – This update adds the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service to in-market devices.
* KB3075249 – This update adds telemetry points to the User Account Control (UAC) feature in order to collect data on elevations that come from low integrity levels.
* KB3080149 – This package updates the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service to existing devices.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at marketoracle.co.uk ...
Microsoft Is About To Start Automatically Downloading Windows 10 Onto PCs
You can’t keep the government from getting your data. But you can keep some private company from doing it. Back off Microsoft.
Ping.
Time to start putting more of the load on the Linux partition it seems.
XP.............still the best!........................
Sure you can. Just don't connect to the Internet, and just use paper........................written in cursive.....................
Also ping.
Not perfect, and certainly not impenetrable
but certainly better than Windows 10
Give me back my NT4.
can/should i buy a preloaded linux desktop and skip the microsoft OS altogether? all my business data is stored on the cloud via qbooks online. so i just need a good web browser
“Not perfect, and certainly not impenetrable
but certainly better than Windows 10 “
Indeed.
Pretty much anything is better than Windows 10.
If our government was not behind this from the beginning, they would have already shut down microsoft and jailed the perpeTRAITORS
With the latest technological advances, WW2 spy tricks for sending messages are now the most secure available.
Very good point!
Bookmarked.
NT4/2000 oh man those were the days. Memories
just download and install yourself, I use ubuntu, but mint is fine also, the only thing I need windows for is Quickbooks, so I setup VirtualBox on Ubuntu 15 over the weekend and installed clean win7 and quickbooks, and will permanently switch to Linux this week.
Keeping your business in the cloud, in my opinion is even more dangerous than windows10
To completely clean up the W10 updates from W7 and W8 follow these steps:
Click Start and search for Disk Cleanup. Right-click the application that appears, and select Run as administrator. Select the drive you want to clean up — this should be your system drive — and click OK.
Click on Clean up system files, and select the drive again. In the list you’ll see Temporary Windows installation files. If this contains a sizable number of files, select it and click OK to remove the contents. This will clean out everything in the $Windows.~BT folder, but not in the $Windows.~WS directory (Disk Cleanup doesn’t target this particular folder at the moment). You can delete it manually though.
As for preventing the files being downloaded again, go to Start > Control Panel > Programs > Uninstall or change a program. Click View installed updates on the left. Use the search box to locate the following updates: KB3035583, KB2952664, and KB3021917 (Windows 7) or KB3035583 and KB2976978 (Windows 8). Right-click each one and select Uninstall. When done, go to System and security in the Control Panel, and select Windows Update > Check for updates. Right-click each of the above updates in turn and select Hide update.
Here’s my approach:
Haven’t purchased a new laptop/desktop computer for a couple of decades. Instead I buy refurbished units (just recently a 2009 Dell Optiplex with Win 7).
I then bring Windows up to make sure all works then remove the drive and keep it in a safe place. This allows me to run Windows for the 1% or so of time that I need it, and also have a way to verify hardware independently should I encounter any problems.
Install a fresh drive, which typically brings a lot more capacity, and zero run time on the drive. Then install a downloaded Linux system, Mint 17.3 Rosa in this case. Had it up and running, surfing the web in 15 min. or so. My combo printer/scanner needed a driver downloaded from HP’s site (hplip), executed the driver program which after several prompts and had functionality within several more minutes. It can’t get much easier!
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