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Is there any tool like DisableWinTracking for Windows 7?

A Linux machine with two ethernet cards acting as a firewall to the internet?

Do we even know how you'd need to configure the firewall to block the specific traffic that's the problem?

There's a list of domains that came up in a previous discussion on HN (sorry, I don't recall it right away), and was also trending on pastebin.com, which contained all of the known domains Microsoft was using to report back from the OS. Presumably you could route those to "null" or the equivalent on your router and you'd be good to go.

Edit: Here's the pastebin link: http://pastebin.com/RZW74Npk

You could always just do that in Windows' hosts file, too.

You can, and I'm sure most would. There may come a time, however, when a future Windows update rewrites or works around the hosts file for telemetry. Doing it at the router or external firewall avoids that possibility.

Ah, fair point.

Such an update could also add new data harvesting hosts, which would bypass your router's blacklist.

That's a given. The rabbit hole goes as deep as Microsoft is willing to dig it. Like any other vulnerability, there will always be security researchers out there who find and report on new ones.

That's assuming that Windows doesn't circumvent such things because "well we know what we're doing and you don't".

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