For example, even with no Live tiles pinned to Start (and hence no obvious need to poll for new tile data), Windows 10 seems to download new tile info from MSN's network from time to time, using unencrypted HTTP to do so. Some of the traffic looks harmless but feels like it shouldn't be happening. The request for this file appears to contain a random machine ID that persists across reboots. 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.įor example, even with Cortana and searching the Web from the Start menu disabled, opening Start and typing will send a request to to request a file called threshold.appcache which appears to contain some Cortana information, even though Cortana is disabled.

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. Windows 10 uses the Internet a lot to support many of its features. I still recommend if people care about their privacy at all, don't use Windows 10, and learn about some of the telemetry changes that have been made to Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 with updates over the past 1.5 years as well which weren't in place when those OSes were originally released but the capability has since been added to them. PeerBlock is one such tool that can do it rather easily, there are many others as well - note that PeerBlock is not a firewall, per se, just a tool capable of blacklisting or whitelisting connections based on IP lists you can edit at will. You'd have to use a proper set of outbound rules with a firewall (software or hardware) to fully be able to block anything and everything going back to Microsoft.

Also, using 0.0.0.0 potentially could leak info because of how it's utilized (I'm not going into the technical aspects of it but it's possible) - using 127.0.0.1 ensures that the data is not routed anywhere but the local machine meaning it never leaves the localhost, ever.

The really relevant telemetry data is hardcoded into system files (because Microsoft was well aware this crap of using the hosts file would be put into play) and therefore you can't block or misdirect or redirect the telemetry from getting to Microsoft with any hosts file edits of any kind.

Peerblock replacement 2015