Windows 10 logs your keystrokes (and you can't turn it off)

* The use some kind of swarming protocol, kind of like bittorrent, to distribute updates. This means that they use your bandwidth to deliver their updates to other users. What makes it worse, the people who cares the most about updates are organizations, and they will block that function, so they will not take their part of the load.

* If you run an earlier Windows, it downloads the Windows 10 update to your hard disk, just in case you'd want to install it. This uses a lot of disk space and bandwidth. I suspect the real reason is to provide more sources for the swarming protocol, as a described above.

* They have a feature which allows them to stop certain programs from running if they don't like them, and even remove them. Cloaked under the disguise as anti-piracy, it is bound to harm legitimate use as well (such as using a cracked version of a game to make it work because they've effed up so the originals no longer work). Also, it would be trivial for them to say "We don't like LibreOffice and OpenOffice, they compete with MS Office. Let's block them.".

* They seem to have removed the option of "Don't install updates", only providing "Download and install" and "Download and install later". This is a huge risk, as it allows them to, at will, replace just about Everything in the operating system or on your disk.

* It has tools to redirect "unsuitable" internet sites to other sites. It would, for example, be perfectly possible to use this to block, say, Wikileaks, and redirect to, say, NSA.

Sorry to necro, but I've never gotten any answer for any of this here or on any other site. Is this swarming protocol stealing my bandwidth even though I'm on win 7 and have disabled all updates?
 
If people are bothered by this, I have some news for you about Android, iOS and every cell phone service provider in the western world.
This may come as a shock, but some people actually don't use their cellphones as their online gizmo. Just like how some people actually don't use facebook and twitter.
 
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This may come as a shock, but some people actually don't use their cellphones as their online gizmo. Just like how some people actually don't use facebook and twitter.
I guess I'm going about it all wrong but yeah, not everyone gets the most out of their phones it seems.
 
I guess I'm going about it all wrong but yeah, not everyone gets the most out of their phones it seems.

In my case I was colossally poor through the advent of the whoopity shit cell phone and never really dug social media so I never got into the habit of social mediaing on my phone every minute of the day.

My current phone does some basic gizmo-ing, like it can read mp3s and tiny crap videos I download off youtube and put on the sd card, so I've got a couple of albums, some light reading, and a mess of MST3ks. But I haven't found a need for more than that so I never got a data plan or anything because meh. I've done fine so far.
 
If people are bothered by this, I have some news for you about Android, iOS and every cell phone service provider in the western world.

Want to get even more paranoid?

Look up keyboard buffers. It's how literally every computer in the world works, and you can dump and extract it with pretty much 0 effort.

My programming teacher used to use it to demonstrate why you always need to make sure you do a hard shutdown of your computer by pulling out the school terminal access name and pass on a given computer.
 
So can anyone who actually knows computers (I don't) tell me what the difference between this swarming protocol and a botnet is? Because I don't see one. And is there a way to opt out of it on win 7 without simply never turning updates on again?
 
So can anyone who actually knows computers (I don't) tell me what the difference between this swarming protocol and a botnet is? Because I don't see one. And is there a way to opt out of it on win 7 without simply never turning updates on again?

I set up a task that auto deletes the $Windows.BT folder once a night. (Not because of the botnet thing but because of drivespace.)
 
How do I do that?

You'll have to create a batch file with the following lines:

echo off
rmdir C: /$Windows.BT /sneed /q

Then go into Windows scheduler and set it to run whenever you want. Set it to run under an Administrator account. It might not work though. Some people run into permissions issues when attempting to delete it even through Right-click, Delete.

(Get rid of the space between the : and the /)
 
Can you turn Cortana off?
Cortana reminds me of Spotlight on OS X (which can be deactivated with "sudo mdutil -a -i off" in Terminal). What's annoying is when Spotlight is off, one can't search for files. I wonder if OS X (at least later versions) does any of this spying stuff (logging keystrokes, etc) as well?

Anyway, to answer your question:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/turn-cortana-on-or-off
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-enable-and-disable-cortana-in-windows-10/
 
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