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Comment by revanx_ | Hacker News Reader

For me personally, support for W7&8 has ended months ago when they tried to sneak in the same privacy invading updates that infest windows 10. Windows update has been disabled since then, can't even install updates manually since I can no longer trust that the package does what the wiki page says.

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For me too. With proprietary software it's all about trust. You can't trust Microsoft anymore. What they have done with recent Win7/8 security updates and Win10 is obscene and more than just shaddy business. Win10 also has hardcoded whitelisted domains and IPs in the kernel mode network code - the only way to avoid the phone home crap is to run in behind a thight hardware firewall (good luck with a notebook/tablet/phone). Only with the expensive LTSB license the admin can deactivate all the bad elements of Win10. With Win10, the user is the product. How dare you! Why do they get away with this? No other operating system is such a trainwreck, not even close. Why is Microsoft such a mean company?

Damn, yeah, same for me actually. After I found out that Microsoft was including that crap in updates for Windows 7 & 8, I also completely disabled Windows Update.

It would be really nice if there was some site that kept an up-to-date database listing of all the KBXXXXXXX update numbers that include this crap (up-to-date being the key here since Microsoft actually renames old KBXXXXXXX numbers every once in a while to include the same crap the old KBXXXXXXX did).

Even Susan Bradley don't bother and simply recommends disabling the Diagnostic Tracking Service instead. It is not exactly the same as in Win10 BTW.

I don't think they rename them. They make a new version that unhides the update, but it keeps the same KB number.

There have been some updates in the past that people are suspicious have been renumbered¹, although I suppose that without confirmation from Microsoft, we can’t say for sure.

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¹ — http://www.eightforums.com/windows-updates-activation/66805-...

It would be really nice if there was some site that kept an up-to-date database listing of all the KBXXXXXXX update numbers

Possibly of interest?

https://voat.co/v/technology/comments/459263

If you disable Windows Update, you're dumb. Either re-enable it or stop using Windows altogether.

> Windows update has been disabled since then

That does not seem very smart to me. I think personally that Microsoft is adding telemetry to make Windows more secure and compete with Apple and Google who do the same. But if you don't trust it, it seems better no not use it at all.

Google has no desktop PC OS. Apple offers options in the settings to opt-out and doesn't change those with an update.

Google has something way more powerful than a desktop OS: Android devices know your every move, everyone you know, all your communication, etc. These devices are packed full with sensors and know way more about you than a desktop ever can. They send all that home, by default, for a big chunk of the world's population, yet this is perceived very differently than what Microsoft does.

The topic is about the desktop PC.

Yes all this is somehow true, yet they offer an opt-out in Settings that doesn't change with updates behind your back. I'm sure you'll understand by now what I'm pointing at with recent MS practices.

The topic is Windows. Windows is not only a desktop OS anymore. The exact same code (since a few weeks even the same build numbers) is running Windows Phone and Windows tablets too.

This is what is causing the issues that the OP is about: new hardware (both x86 and ARM) comes with new features in power management and virtualization (i.e. connected standby) which Windows needs to abstract and they find it too hard/risky to backport the OS and driver changes to every device now running Windows 7.

They don't send that out by default.

They ask about it in the welcome wizard. Once the preference is set, it is not changed behind your backs by updates.

For a few years, Microsoft seemed to have really cleaned up their act and showed promise to become an ethical OS vendor that you could trust. The loss of that Microsoft is the tragedy here, the loss of the last commercial mainstream computing platform that didn't want to do everything it possibly can to snitch, spy, analyze, advertize or gamify the living hell out of its... "customers."

Yeah literally every single apple, android app uses telemetry to improve the app.

Microsoft plays catch up, and then everyone loses their minds about it.

It's not about telemetry, it's about MS trying to sneak W10 into your W7/8 PC disguised as a casual update.

Apple and Google who do the same

What? I use Little Snitch to monitor all outgoing connections. I don't see a log of outgoing connections to Apple outside my iCloud account, location services (which has to be enabled explicitly during the installation) and Spotlight searches. And these are easy to disable. In fact, Preferences App has the obvious Security & Privacy prefpane:

https://imgur.com/EPCSQL6

Isn't Little Snitch relying on the OS? If you are going to inspect the OS itself is doing, you need to do the packet sniffing from another computer.

Let's disambiguate OS first: do you mean the kernel or userland?

If userland: Little Snitch loads a kernel extension and monitors every userland process.

If kernel: The XNU kernel is open source, so you can check that it doesn't work around Little Snitch and Apple doesn't do telemetry in the kernel (which would be... weird).

Of course, theoretically, Apple could work around this using e.g. malicious code in the EFI firmware. But I am pretty sure that someone would've already found this by monitoring at a router.

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