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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

This guide provides a false sense of hope, I'm afraid. Securing Windows from Microsoft's invasive policies is basically impossible. Cortana has now become un-removable: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3100358/windows/you-cant-turn...

And those of us who thought we were safe using Windows 10 Pro woke up today to discover that the forthcoming Anniversary Update will actually be removing our ability to disable many of these features via the Group Policy editor:

http://www.ghacks.net/2016/07/28/microsoft-removes-policies-...

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That's a bait-and-switch if I ever saw one. I suppose it's more than a coincidence that this happens just as the free upgrade period comes to an end?

To be honest, it was called the Anniversary Edition from the beginning.

It wouldn't surprise me if this was the plan from the beginning, too.

Not saying it is, just saying big corps usually plan ahead.

> The operating system is not backdoored and you would realize this if you listened to the response of private corporations after learning about the telemetry feature. The were willing to boycott the upgrade because they have corporate secrets that they would rather not freely hand over.

This logic mystifies me.

No need for telemetry if there is a backdoor?

The guide doesn't turn off or remove Cortana so much as uses a race condition to break it. Basically, you attempt to rename the Cortana directoy, inevitably fail, then kill the Cortana process and-then-quickly-click-retry in the error dialog that showed up. If you're fast, you can rename the directory before Cortana can boot and lock it in use again. (I assume you can then purge the directory afterward. Bonus points if there's a way to fubar the directory so that it can't be restored (violent symlinking?))

I'm using group policy extensively to disable things I don't need. If they remove this from Windows Pro, that will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. At least for me.

They probably won't take it completely away, and in fact I think things like the option to disable Windows Store completely being taken away was expected.

I just cannot think of a single decent motive for Microsoft to have done that. This is really unacceptable.

The voice and typing parts can still be disabled.

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