The more that technical types examine Windows 10, the less of a good thing it seems to be. For ordinary users, that is. For the software giant of Redmond and the National Security Agency, however, Windows 10 might be the answer to a dream.
Researchers have found, for instance, that even with every data-sharing setting turned off (all 13 pages of them) and no programs running, Windows 10 contacts some 50 servers in Redmond somewhere around a staggering 500 times an hour! This is all due basically to a special backdoor that cannot be closed.
Could this be for technical reasons? While some monitoring might be helpful, such intensity makes it highly unlikely. So perhaps Microsoft is actually partnering with the NSA to collect – who knows? Furry fan fiction? Surf history? Email addresses? Camera stills of users’ naughty bits? Audio? Keystrokes? All of the above?
Being in bed together with Big Brother would make sense, given the sneaky ways Microsoft keeps steadily moving to make everybody adopt the new OS, or at least its spyware features, like it or not. If users relent or do not actively prevent this from happening, they’re very likely stuck. Not only is Windows 10 hard to uninstall, but once up and running, Windows Updates cannot be turned off by home users. For them, Windows 10 updates are mandatory as well as automatic.
Not only that, but unless users have disabled the default Wi-Fi sharing option, Windows will steal bandwidth to run peer-to-peer torrents to send those updates to other users. Those updates, by the way, include the entire Windows 10 installation package, all 3.5 gigabytes of it to any Windows 7 or 8 system which has not had the specific “updates” to do so uninstalled (click here for more information). Clearly, that’s why they need torrents.
It would be a relief to shrug all this off as too much paranoia. But in a post-James Bond world where it was just discovered that the CIA is financing a women’s cosmetic product startup to find ways to surreptitiously collect DNA, anything may be possible.
