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Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

I've not done any in-depth analysis of this app, but have used it on a machine that required windows 10 at the time. My family and friends have also used it. I can say that after they use it, the DNS activity to the Microsoft tracking endpoints appears to stop and other DNS activity is reduced but I am no windows expert so I can not say for sure if 100% of telemetry is truly nullfied. The real time dependencies on the activity DNS/HTTPS endpoints does appear to be removed after usage. From a network perspective it does stop the "chattyness" of Windows 10.

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> I can not say for sure if 100% of telemetry is truly nullfied.

I'll leave this here: https://ameliorated.info/

No Windows Update for you, so security is debatable.

This looks interesting. Is there something like a Vagrant build image for this so that you can easily automate the build process to pick up the updates and adjust the configuration/customization in a json or yaml file?

I prefer the script[0] instead of the hacked ISO since you can install the script in later versions of W10 using your own preferred ISO.

Only caveat: There's no way of telling what versions of W10 it's compatible with (I imagine it breaks some versions). I have an old VM with AME installed and manually enabled updates by hacking the registry. (You could also alter the .BAT script to enable updates, but you have to know what to remove).

This project is cute, but I only ever used it for an offline sandbox for running low resource games and cracked versions of Photoshop. I am scared as shit to connect this thing to the Internet. I only connect to receive updates.

[0] https://wiki.ameliorated.info/doku.php?id=documentation_20H2

> Since AME is no longer maintained

What do you mean by that? AME 21H1 was released just the other day.

> This project is cute, but I only ever used it for an offline sandbox for running low resource games and cracked versions of Photoshop.

It's perfect for VM use, but I would never use it as my main OS.

Wow only learning that now. I thought the project got abandoned

Thanks for the update!

I mean, it doesn't make much sense to replace an abusive feature with a software that has the same abusive potential.

If it was open source, then maybe there would be some reason to trust it.

It is sad that things like this are even required in the first place. I would really like to have more trust and confidence in Microsoft. To earn that trust they could provide one page with all PowerShell sub-commands and links from each command to a man/help page with real world examples so I don't have to trawl through technet and google or random github gists.

They could also give people a true option during installation to really for-really-real disable telemetry regardless of what license home, pro, enterprise, ltsc they are using.

Fragmentation is not in ms best interest, but they could actually license just the nt kernel with a bootloader capable of launching it. Then people could build nt based distros with carefully chosen packages. Just like it is done with GNU/Linux.

Maybe some one could write an application to delete as many files as possible from a pristine windows copy to turn it simply into a kernel launched by a bootloader. Is there any project that does that?

That's an appealing idea. From watching the behavior of XBox One and Windows 10, I would be really surprised if they created such a thing. It really seems more like they want people to have dumb terminals with their binaries pseudo-cached and operate more like a mainframe/cloud model.

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