Hacker News Reader

I find Microsoft is absolutely crazy. I have a Win 10 PC I mainly use for Prime Video and some idle browsing when I can't be bothered to turn on my main PC (which runs Linux).

All my browsers have some form of adblock extension. uBlock for Firefox/Linux and Edge/Win10, and AdGuard on Safari/MacOS.

According to the stats of my pi-hole over the last 24 hours, more than 50% of the queries originating from my Win 10 PC were blocked (6277 blocked out of 11930 total).

For comparison, my Mac, which is the computer I've used the most for actual browsing since last Friday afternoon, only had 1292 blocked queries out of 7100.

The Linux PC usually has extremely low numbers of blocked queries. It's probably thanks to the combination of uBlock and uMatrix and it running Arch, so practically nothing even tries to phone home.

My numbers are lower, but I've used OOSU10 to disable a lot of stuff.

Not sure if it's still the best tool for this, but in case someone wants to try it: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Here you go: https://github.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocker

They write the system processes.

Blocking some interceptable calls to some of their servers doesn't do shit.

Lobby them or your government to protect your privacy, or switch.