On 2/20/2016 11:37 AM, Mayayana wrote:
| You CAN turn off virtually all the spyware by doing a custom install
| (during upgrade) and answering NO to everything

No, you can't. Read my links. It's intrusive
by design. People would like to think they can
fix it because that would make life a lot easier,
but it's just not the case.

When you finish reading those links, here's
another one that's even more surprising, from
just a couple of weeks ago.

https://voat.co/v/technology/comments/835741

Note the line:

"I have chosen the customized installation option
where I disabled three pages of tracking options."

Over 5,000 calls out in 8 hours! There's been some
criticism that that may be a high number because the
author blocked the attempts to go out, so some may
have been multiples. Even so, it tried to call out to
numerous IPs after all available privacy options had
been selected.

As I said elsewhere, MS is controlling EVERYTHING in the
box. They can do anything they want and you are powerless
to prevent it or interfere with it -- if they so choose.

The "obvious" solution is an EXTERNAL firewall between
the machine and the 'net -- something that MS *can't*
control.

But, it's relatively easy to tunnel through most firewalls;
especially for (relatively) low bandwidth connections.
E.g., send a DNS request to resolve databeingpassed.microsoft.com
and the registered name server for microsoft.com will *see*
an incoming request to resolve "databeingpassed" *from* your IP.
MS decides to resolve this as 127.127.127.127 (knowing that
*it* will be the entity "seeing" this information) and then
interpreting it as "User not registered. Shut down system".

Of course, they can simply refuse to RUN unless they
manage to get a phone call off to "home"! (So, you'd
have to be able to have some other device that masquerades
as MS -- no doubt using an encrypted technology -- to
trick the OS into thinking that the call succeeded.)