Windows 10

[BlueTangerine]

^They came for the sheep, but I wasn't a sheep, so I did nothing.

 

[blueincy]

 

[meltonblue]

For the record, every intelligence agency in the world has abandoned Windows and several major countries such as Germany, China and the like of have banned Windows in any public sector purchasing

Have you got a link for that? Genuinely curious! I use macs instead but not sure if that is much better or not in that regard?

 

[Damocles]

Have you got a link for that? Genuinely curious! I use macs instead but not sure if that is much better or not in that regard?

http://wolfstreet.com/2014/05/21/ch...ked-warning-by-germany-about-backdoor-to-nsa/

http://investmentwatchblog.com/leak...-entities-not-to-use-windows-8-links-the-nsa/

Obviously they have Windows based systems for their own devices but all of their servers and secured machines are Linux based. Even though there have been rumours for years that the inventor of Linux was asked by the NSA to install a Microsoft type backdoor (which was refused).

http://falkvinge.net/2013/11/17/nsa-asked-linus-torvalds-to-install-backdoors-into-gnulinux/

And how now even using a Linux running computer that avoids any Government backdoors is enough to put you on the watchlist for traffic, and they classed Linux Journal as "an extremest website" which is obviously no problem and fine.

http://www.eweek.com/security/linux-lands-on-nsa-watch-list.html

If you ignore every link above then it's fine but the one article to read is about XKEYSCORE (XKS) from the Guardian and why the Edward Snowden reveals were so important in disclosing this stuff in a publicly acceptable way, that many in the netsec community have been seeing for years but couldn't credibly tell people about.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data

Just read the link.

 

[meltonblue]

Cheers mate, I'll have a read.

 

[Damocles]

More Windows based fun, taking advantage of a "feature" built into Windows for hardware manufacturers

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/...-to-ensure-its-software-could-not-be-deleted/

A recently uncovered feature – which had been swept under the rug – allowed new Lenovo laptops to use a Windows feature to automatically install the company’s software and tools even if the computer was wiped.

The oddity was first noted by Ars Technica forum user ‘ge814‘ and corroborated by Hacker News user ‘chuckup.’

The users discovered the issue in May when using a new Lenovo laptop that reportedly automatically and covertly overwrote a system file on every boot, which downloaded a Lenovo updater and installed software automatically, even if Windows was reinstalled from a DVD.

The only problem is that nobody actually asked for this software, and it supposedly persisted between clean installs of Windows. If true, Lenovo was essentially exploiting a rootkit on its own laptops to ensure its software persists if wiped. We’re working to verify how widely the mechanism was used.

 

[Little by Little]

POS broke SLI for me.

Also flooded me with automatic driver installs that didn't even install properly.

 

[Centurions]

POS broke SLI for me.

Also flooded me with automatic driver installs that didn't even install properly.

POS?

 

[Damocles]

Piece of Shit.

Microsoft have said that you can turn off all tracking in Windows - this was found to be a lie.

http://arstechnica.com/information-...ndows-10-just-cant-stop-talking-to-microsoft/

Windows 10 uses the Internet a lot to support many of its features. The operating system also sports numerous knobs to twiddle that are supposed to disable most of these features, and the potentially privacy-compromising connections that go with them.

Unfortunately for privacy advocates, these controls don't appear to be sufficient to completely prevent the operating system from going online and communicating with Microsoft's servers.

Other traffic looks a little more troublesome. Windows 10 will periodically send data to a Microsoft server named ssw.live.com. This server seems to be used for OneDrive and some other Microsoft services. Windows 10 seems to transmit information to the server even when OneDrive is disabled and log-ins are using a local account that isn't connected to a Microsoft Account. The exact nature of the information being sent isn't clear—it appears to be referencing telemetry settings—and again, it's not clear why any data is being sent at all. We disabled telemtry on our test machine using group policies.

And finally, some traffic seems quite impenetrable. We configured our test virtual machine to use an HTTP and HTTPS proxy (both as a user-level proxy and a system-wide proxy) so that we could more easily monitor its traffic, but Windows 10 seems to make requests to a content delivery network that bypass the proxy.

 

[Pride_In_Battle]

I see they conveniently forgot about Windows ME in this!