Windows 10 Chatter

I wanted to take some time to do some forensic analysis on my router (this is another blog entirely).

One of the things I noticed, was how busy the router was.

Well, hey. It's a busy house. And the whole family is here this weekend, all streaming NetFlix on phones, laptops, et al.

But - I noticed an inordinate amount of traffic from one PC.

Upon doing some further investigation, using packet sniffing tools, Task Manager, et al. I realized that Microsoft was calling home for a number of reasons.

I should have looked into this more when I bought this PC, but got busy. Shame on me.  I saw all kinds of things, and starting shutting down services, etc. Finally, I after shutting down so many things, and continuing to see packets flowing, I went out to the web and found this link - which is reasonable recent.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-when-told-not-to-windows-10-just-cant-stop-talking-to-microsoft/?comments=1

I also read the comments, and wound up installing DisableWinTracking. I downloaded the source code first (as a tar file), and looked it over. Deciding it looked clean, I went ahead and ran the program, which is a series of powershell scripts that disable the tracking. There's a considerable amount of it. I un-installed all of the Microsoft apps listed, and disabled the services (I did not delete them - just disabled them). You have to be a little worried about shutting off your security updates on Windows 10, which is something I will need to monitor.  But a lot of that crap, I agreed with and decided was not really in my interests at all, and in fact was sucking up bandwidth and tying up an already-busy router.

Now, I'll go back and start looking at traffic again.