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Comment by jrapdx3 | Hacker News Reader

Long story, but my Surface Pro 2 wound up with Win10 Pro. The Pro version is slightly more configurable for privacy than Home, but only the Enterprise version can completely turn off the telemetry and so on. Of course Enterprise is not easily available to end-users and it is expensive.

There are some utilities available that are supposed to improve the privacy/security of Win10 installations, e.g., [0].

My wife kept asking me if she should upgrade to Win10 and I said "don't do it". Since Win8.1 will be supported until 2023 or so, it really didn't matter. Now, thankfully, the "free upgrade" period is over and she won't be nagged to do the upgrade.

After all the years in the game, we'd think MS should know better than pulling all this crap on its users.

[0] https://github.com/10se1ucgo/DisableWinTracking

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> Note: Windows Defender may report the EXE as a trojan (Win32/Pocyx.C!cl), and may therefore prevent you from extracting the EXE to anywhere on your computer. Set up an exclusion in Settings > Update & Security > Windows Defender > Exclusions by adding the folder you intend to extract the EXE to.

I swear, it seems like people are okay with the idea of everyone BUT Microsoft have access to all their personal information on their PCs. Why would anyone install software that has this kind of recklessness in the official documentation?

Not quite sure what recklessness you are referring to. If necessary, the exception is only for the one directory the EXE is in. IIRC the program isn't really installed, it just needs to run once to make changes in firewall rules, etc., that prevent MS telemetry. AFAIK it doesn't increase external access to the computer being configured.

After making modifications, the exclusion can be deleted if desired. If you have more info about risks of using the dwt utility, I'd be real interested to hear about it.

No, uh, look, running an EXE one finds hosted on GitHub, deliberately disabling the virus-checking on that EXE file and running the EXE is the reckless behavior. Even assuming that the person who made the EXE didn't mean so maliciously, any kind of a MitM attack or other way of sureptuously putting a payload in that EXE is an attack vector.

Why is it particularly worse than downloading a binary hosted anywhere else, upstream binaries being the standard way of obtaining software on Windows?

As for the virus checker, their program's raison d'etre is making registry changes. It's not difficult to imagine that being flagged by Windows Defender is unavoidable.

I think the recent situation with SourceForge, where binaries were changed to add a malware-ridden installer[1] shows why GitHub is potentially worse than trusting some other provider. I think it's a low likelihood that something like that happens with GitHub ever, much less soon, and SourceForge has reversed that action already. But it is one reason to potentially trust binaries from a third party like that less.

But that's not really the thrust of the point. It's software from an unknown provenance, and yes, that's pretty standard for Windows but it's not great and it's getting worse all the time. Virus scanners are not a great solution, but not having them are worse. Without any kind of a checksum on that page, it's impossible to verify that the binary you have is the one that you should have. (Not that it's guaranteed that you can do so if there is a checksum.) So you're already in a bad situation, and you're turning off one of the few safeguards you have.

As for registry changes getting flagged by Defender... programs that change the registry aren't rare.[2] They do not universally share this problem. I imagine it's probably a false positive and I don't know how it could be avoided, but the proposed remedy is reckless.

1) http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/source...

2) http://windowsreport.com/windows-10-registry-cleaners/

I've seen some reports that DisableWinTracking is too aggressive and can cause problems. Personally, I use and recommend O&O Shutup10.

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Yes I'm strongly considering downgrading to 8.1. It's time for a fresh install anyways. I dread when that goes EOL because I'll have no where else to turn but whatever Windows is out at the time.

What you're going to do when a telemetry patch comes bundled with a security one? MS just announced they are doing updates in bulk for 7 and 8.1.

Honestly, I do not know. Telemetry isn't my biggest gripe with Windows 10, but besides that at some point the only version of Windows with security support will be Windows 10 or some descendant of it and I have no reason to believe my issues with 10 will be fixed by then.

As I said elsewhere, I'd love to be *nix only but my gaming preferences will not allow it.

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