Windows 10 “steals” your bandwidth
lauren.vortex.com
lauren.vortex.com
This isn't transparently helping serve updates to computers on a local network to save bandwidth. It transparently serves updates to the entire world, to eat your bandwidth and conserve only Microsoft's.
Is there a word in English that captures how massively disappointed I am with this being on every Win10 computer and by default?
[1]: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2007100908224845...
1: https://torrentfreak.com/spotify-starts-shutting-down-its-ma...
Back when the only data center was in Stockholm, the only way to meet latency requirements was P2P. Now that we're a grown-up company we've disabled that and use CDN's instead.
That was not their aim at all. Their aim was lowering bandwidth costs by shifting the content delivery costs over to the end users. This was made clear by the fact that when you played a song, it started downloading the song from AWS S3 immediately to minimize latency, then once the P2P sessions fired up, shifted over to that stream instead of their costly S3 one.
"Illegal" would seem to be a good start in many jurisdictions.
For example, as described in the article, I can't see how this behaviour doesn't fall foul of computer misuse and fraud laws in the UK. The best defence might be that somewhere buried in the terms and conditions it's allowed, but I wouldn't like to be the Microsoft lawyer arguing that position before a judge.
I remember when people thought BitTorrent would revolutionize file hosting. Now people think it's stealing bandwidth.
Don't know why ms didn't play it safe and put internet resharing as an opt in...
Oh and I don't remeber but I think you can't set a wired connection as metered.
Are Blizzard up-front with their users about what is happening? The covert nature (or otherwise) of the uploads is a significant concern here. The average geek playing with Linux doesn't complain about BitTorrent also uploading the distro image they're downloading, but the average geek playing with Linux knows the deal and decided voluntarily to participate.
MS may run into some liability for inducing data overages depending on how up front they are about it and how badly it bites people.
I would expect that if the report is accurate and if this behaviour was activated without the user's knowledge or consent then Microsoft would be on the hook for any and all damage caused as a result. That could mean a small extra charge from an ISP for bandwidth over a cap. However, if the behaviour means someone's Internet connection didn't have enough capacity left to do something important that it otherwise would have, whether because the uploads themselves limited the spare bandwidth at the same time or perhaps because it triggered some sort of degraded service from the ISP after going over a cap, that could also mean compensation for any consequences of that degraded capacity.
They are destroying computing autonomy of users by tying online accounts into their products. They include built in search tools that leak information to the vendor and, in some cases, "trusted" third parties. And they try to steer users to their own cloud solutions, which store user data unencrypted.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft all do this. Even Canonical has. But worse to me are those who make weak excuses for all of it; saying that people can use settings to turn it off, even though they know damn well that everyday users will stick to the defaults.
Personally, I am disgusted with the entire situation.
[1] - https://www.gentoo.org/
The funny thing is, if you ignore the fact that it's a big company named Microsoft who's using your bandwidth and that it's enabled by default, this is actually a pretty awesome feature that could help a lot of people in a lot of situations.
Edit: Clarity
But it's highly unlikely that Microsoft can make those guarantees. If this were a robust system, people (especially Microsoft!) would be championing it! But it's clearly not.
In any jurisdiction where you can in practice be held responsible for any data uploaded from your own Internet connection, it's still not OK to upload anything automatically without permission.
Not sure if MSFT does this for Comcast but my Windows 10 machine detected the internet connection of 4G dongles (even when it was over normal Ethernet) and prompted me to confirm if it's a metered connection or not.
On a metered connection Windows 10 (as 8.1 before it) is extremely bandwidth conservative it doesn't pull non-critical updates, and other online features such as updating cards, cortana, store function etc. went into austerity mode as well.
In theory it's pretty great, in practice, with metered connections you're using up the users internet quota and causing a lot of frustration.
I am used to unmetered internet connections, and after moving to the UK I've spent a lot of time investigating why I'm getting an insane amount of packet loss. I'm talking 30% on weekend evenings.
Long story short, a flatmate was uploading data all day without noticing, the ISP's traffic management kicked in, limited our bandwidth, buffers aren't infinite so packets get dropped [1].
As someone said in a similar thread, this may be the reason for ISPs to drop traffic metering and upload quotas, but I somehow doubt this'll happen.
--
1: I've fixed it by limiting the upload quota and bandwidth on my OpenWRT router for that user. I guess I'll have to enable this rule for all other Windows 10 users in my house now.
This OS is slowly turning into a clusterfuck.
My only misgiving is that I love the touch screen, so I have to look into what kind of touch screen functionality I can get under Linux.
- If the p2p feature was opt-in, no-one would have enabled it; but the technology needs most users to have it enabled to operate optimally. And I don't see how it could be done without enabling it by default.
- Since (mostly) everyone has it enabled by default, no peer will have a disproportionate amount of upload traffic.
- It makes sense to download a Service Pack (read: any big update) once and have it sent to all PCs on the LAN automatically.
- It's not enabled on metered connections and won't compete for bandwidth with other apps. It can be switched to operate only within LAN. It can be disabled forever.
I think this is a real concern, and users should know what the PC is doing, but half of HN post are about how we can share data among ourselves instead of relying on central distributors.
Your next post should be about how WebRTC steals your bandwidth.
It does seem rather evil to make this opt-out rather than opt-in. Much in the same way that I'm cool with people using my stuff - just have the decency to ask first.
Updating 3-4 machines on the LAN is much quicker with Windows 10, SOHO machines that aren't routed into the internet or are heavily firewalled can be updated easily, and heck the vulnerability window for machines which weren't connected to the internet is much smaller now since they can grab critical updates without even being exposed to the internet which previously required backporting or having enterprise update software (WSUS and the likes).
The conspiracy theories around it are also quite silly considering that MSFT has complete control over the OS just as any other major OS vendor unless you tinker with it yourself.
For example, I installed and fully updated Win 10 on my Surface. Soon I'll be traveling to the bandwidth-deprived middle of nowhere to visit my family and will likely be updating their systems to 10 while I'm there. If I connect my Surface to their network, will the install and update process on their machine automatically look for my Surface and pull updates from there, rather than spend hours trying to download over a sub 3Mbps connection?
Having "PCs on my local network and PCs on the Internet" on by default is not cool, but allowing "PCs on my local network" could be a huge help for situations like this.
Pretty much as long as the update can be uninstalled (usually 30 days or so) the update package will be in your cache.
If the update package is compatible with the SKU of other machines in your network (language, version, bitness etc.) then they might pull it from your machine instead of the internet.
Windows 10 so far seems good, but what a bunch of terrible launch decisions.
If it's on the order of tens of megabytes this is a lot of outrage over nothing. You blow more than that loading a few youtube videos.
P2P is the future, don't try to fight it...
[1] http://www.bigfishgames.com/blog/walkthrough/fairway-solitai...
[1] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-07/30/windows-10-pa...
While the approach chosen by Microsoft is not necessarily the "cleanest" I still dont fully agree with the article.
She complains about the EU not already hoisting pitchforks for this rather minor issue but at the same time completely ignores that Microsoft already got pitchforked enough by the EU for things Google got easily away with.
But her disclaimer that she was consulting Google might explain that complaint ;).
Mirror for the ctrl+f folks
----------------------------------
Windows 10's New Feature Steals Your Internet Bandwidth
A couple of days ago I discussed a number of privacy and other concerns with Microsoft's new Windows 10, made available as a free upgrade for many existing MS users:
Windows 10: A Potential Privacy Mess, and Worse: http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001115.html
The situation has only been getting worse since then. For example, it's been noted that the Win10 setup sequence is rigged to try fool users into switching to an MS browser, irrespective of their browser settings before they started the upgrade:
Mozilla isn’t happy with Microsoft for changing how users change the default web browser in Windows 10: http://microsoft-news.com/mozilla-isnt-happy-with-microsoft-...
Pretty bad. But we have even lower to go, as we've seen that by default, Windows 10 actually steals bandwidth from your ISP connection so that Microsoft can use your computer, and your connection, to send MS updates to their other customers.
Huh? Say what?
Yep. It's a devious little feature called Windows Update Delivery Optimization. It's enabled by default. For Enterprise and Education users, it operates over the local LAN. For ordinary Home type users, Microsoft can send their data update goodies to potentially any PC on the global Internet -- from your PC, over your Internet connection. On your dime.
We could get into the pros and cons of local updates being staged between local machines on a LAN as opposed to the outside Internet.
But as soon as MS decided that it's A-OK for them to use my Internet connection to cut down on their bandwidth costs serving their other customers -- without asking me for my specific permission first -- the situation blows into the red zone immediately.
Microsoft makes the predictable excuses about this high-tech thievery.
There's a way you can turn it off. Yeah, buried down deep in the settings, assuming you even know about it in the first place. MS claims they only use your connection when it's "idle" by their definitions. Thanks a bunch.
Oh yes, and (how generous of them!) Microsoft notes that they won't steal bandwidth this way from "metered" connections.
But here's the catch -- you have to manually indicate that a connection shouldn't be used for MS' update delivery scheme. Otherwise, Microsoft has no way to know if (for example) you're paying by the gigabyte or have a low bandwidth cap.
Above all, the sheer arrogance of Microsoft to enable this bandwidth theft by default is stunning.
I don't care if they want to move 1K or 1gig to their other happy users, I want to damn well be asked permission first!
Obviously, this general category of peer-to-peer data transfer is used on the Net in other contexts, such as torrents for example -- but that's something you do voluntarily, of your own volition. Comcast uses the bandwidth of many Comcast users to turn modems in people's homes into public Wi-Fi access points. This has been highly controversial, but at least Comcast is typically doing it over modems they supplied, and has claimed that they over-provision the connection speeds to take this into account -- and don't apply that public usage against home users' bandwidth caps.
But Microsoft didn't even bother with such rationalizations. They simply said in essence: "Hey, you've got bandwidth, so we're gonna use it however we please unless you tell us differently. Suckers!"
If you're running Windows 10, you may want to terminate this travesty.
The settings you need are buried down in:
START->Settings->Update & Security->Windows Update->Advanced options, under: Choose how updates are delivered.
It's worth noting at this point that if Google had tried a stupid stunt like this, there would likely already be EU commissioners running through the streets of Brussels hoisting pitchforks and flaming torches, all yelling for Google's blood.
For a while there, it was starting to look like there indeed was a new kind of Microsoft coming into view, one that had evolved beyond the hubris that had so long been Microsoft's single most defining characteristic.
As we can see, any such hopes are now ... Gone with the Win10.
--Lauren-- I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently doing so. All opinions expressed here are mine alone.