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Comment by eastendguy | Hacker News Reader

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eastendguy·

The point of the report above is that you can NOT disable all telemetry, not even in the Enterprise version of Windows.

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...through official means.

I don't for a second doubt you can turn it off completely. But unofficial solutions come with tons of potential issues.

Could just block all communication with Microsoft by the OS. Or, move to non-Windows OSes like the retail giants already have. Kroger and Walmart run Suse Enterprise Linux (relevant Uptime Funk reference) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYRlTISvjww

Not in a government or business environment using Office 365. 365 requires all sorts of open connectivity to function.

If your using Office 365, telemetry in Windows is the least of your concern.

> Could just block all communication with Microsoft by the OS.

Easier said than done when there's a minefield of firewall-bypasses for it.

Care to elaborate? Afaik and tested w10 does NOT bypass its own firewall when set to 'drop all' traffic.

From what I've seen "drop all" works at the moment but directly blocking the telemetry programs keeps getting undone whenever the file changes and it intentionally doesn't use the hosts file.

Dont know what you mean by undone, but running firewall in drop all + whitelisting works fine and block all telemetry (one caveat : dnscache needs to be disabled to remove possibility of dns tunneling)

From what I remember, when you say "block all connections by this program" on the relevant files it doesn't just use the filename, it tracks the exact version of the file, and as soon as windows update touches it your firewall block stops working.

So a whitelist method works, good, but I think it's fair to said that specifically blocking telemetry is extremely difficult with the way blacklisting works.

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