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“Basic” telemetry level — which is the default if you install Windows 10 — sends the following info:
- Operating system info (edition, build number)
- Hardware info (CPU, memory, disk types and sizes, configuration values of certain BIOS features, battery sizes, printers)
- Installed drivers and version numbers
- If if you have mobile broadband, it sends the IMEI number and mobile operator
- App crashes and blue screens
- Success/failure information related to Windows Updates
- Malicious Software Removal Tool results
- Windows Defender results
- List of IE add-ons
- Usage of the Microsoft Store app (e.g. how you navigate through the store pages)
There is also basic monitoring of specific things they’re trying to improve, like sleep/wake performance.
“Basic” does not watch the following:
- Application usage
- File usage
- Internet usage
- Performance data around how the OS and built-in applications are running
- Detailed crash dump information (which can sometimes leak personal data that might’ve been in memory when the crash dump is captured)
The “Full” diagnostic level allows Microsoft engineers the ability to collect detailed diagnostic data from groups of machines that are exhibiting problems; “Basic” disables that, too.
But here’s the thing, right…. if Microsoft has a database of this information before you run a Windows Update, then they can proactively and automatically place a hold on updating specific machines if they suddenly see a spike of crashes after that update gets installed. Or, a driver update that fixes a known bug can be pushed to you before the update.
Disabling the “Basic” diagnostic level through various means (firewall blocks, stopping services, editing the hosts file, etc.) may help you feel better about protecting your privacy …. you know, just in case you’re dead-set against Microsoft finding out that you’re using a Kingston SSD and Bose wireless headphones…. but it also opts you out of this protection.
Microsoft has been trying to get this right for, like, 15 years. Those “Windows is checking for a solution to the problem” dialogs are just an earlier iteration of what they’re trying to do now with the telemetry data collection.
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There aren’t any.
Almost all the differences to this document since it was originally published are purely grammatical in nature — changing “doesn’t” to “does not”, “can” to “may”, and “we” to “Microsoft Edge team”. Stuff like that.
They did add a section titled “Import Browser Data”, which describes that feature… and they removed some text about data collection related to pinned apps (you’d have to ask them why), and that that’s about it.
You don’t even need to look at the Wayback Machine to verify this… the privacy whitepaper, like all Edge documentation, is Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0 to be precise) and available on GitHub. Its full history of changes may be observed by anyone.
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Lucky you! Gordon’s been on the scene for a long time… at least 15 years by this point. The thing is, he has a Literature degree — not journalism, not science, not engineering — and has spent pretty much the whole time writing about tech, instead of actually…. y’know… being responsible for it.
Contrast this with someone like Tom Warren from the Verge, who has actually walked the walk in the IT world before years before taking up writing about it at WinRumors. Or Mary Jo Foley, who has had her share of controversial statements over the years but has always been grounded in journalistic practice — and the degree to prove it.
And you have guys like Woody, who has written a huge stack of technical and “for Dummies” books in his career, which requires a vast amount of research, dedication, and deep understanding. That counts for a lot, too, when it comes to knowing who to trust to give you good information.
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Huh?
Susan is doing what any good professional office IT admin does — keep spares.
Yes, SSD failure rates are low, especially the newer ones from Samsung and the like. But the failure rate isn’t zero. SSDs and HDDs are the components with the longest recovery times since you can’t just swap in a new unit like you would with a power supply, motherboard, monitor, or whatever. Having an extra on-hand saves valuable hours (or days) and gets the user back up and running sooner.
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The fact that Gordon gets paid to write this trash is an embarrassment to the whole tech journalism industry.
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It’s better to delay it and get it right.
That’s what they did with Windows 2000, and that worked out well — it’s one of the most well-regarded OS releases of all time, on any computer.
That’s what they didn’t do with Windows 8, which proved to be a critical mistake they’re still paying the price for today.
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Adobe Type v1? Yikes… yeah, that code is easily 25 years old at this point.
Other than for extremely specific backwards compatibility situations, I can’t see any reason for Windows to even support that format anymore. Type 1 stopped being relevant in production work by the late 1990s.
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The large company I work for uses all three extensively.
Zoom is the preferred platform for video chat. Our CEO is hosting hour-long Zoom calls with thousands of people connected at once, and everything is working well. The instant messaging features of Zoom are not used at all….. it really doesn’t help that you can only have the Zoom client logged in for chat on one machine at a time.
Slack is the preferred platform for general text chat. We have a Zoom plugin for Slack, so whenever people want to do video chat, they just type “/zoom” and off they go. Tons of people are posting pictures and videos of their home offices, as well as screenshots of their Zoom meetings.
Teams is more like the “glue” for Office 365. Some people do use it for chat, but the preference expressed by IT and corporate leadership is Slack. Teams is widely used for project management and coordination. We also use it to power our IP phone system…. you call any of our sales & support numbers, it’s powered by a Microsoft PBX.
I know people think of Teams and Slack as direct competitors, but they do have a ton of divergent features. Slack is much stronger at ad-hoc structures and is very easy to get channel-specific workflows up and running… but you can’t receive calls from the outside world and its “everything is a message” concept makes it more difficult to provide custom user interfaces. Slack’s administrative tools don’t scale super well to very large (10,000+ user) environments. For instance, you can’t disable “@channel” so if a newcomer to the company wanders into a channel with 10,000 people and uses @channel…. thousands of people get notifications on their phone or desktop. Not good.
Meanwhile Teams has a full calendar built in and full integration with your Office 365 “recently used” list, which is nice if you want to get back to a document you looked at last week. But, Teams doesn’t have a concept like “#random”, so you end up having to structure conversations around projects. This is a better system for large companies with tons of different things going on.
Therefore, I’ve come around to the view that Slack is better for small companies and Teams is better for large companies…. but there’s also nothing wrong with keeping both around.
I will say this though: In the last two years, Teams has improved -much- faster than Slack.
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There’s nothing odd about updating http.sys. Why would this be questioned?
There’s a whole stack of bug fixes in this update that address specific performance issues that could easily be traced back to timings in the networking stack.
There’s also work being done on HTTP/3, and some of that might be included in this update. Or maybe there’s something in there to smooth out the handling of TLS 1.3 on older versions of Windows 10 that will not otherwise be getting TLS 1.3 support.
Or maybe they’re improving error handling and reporting.
Or maybe they compiled this driver with the newer version of the VC++ compiler that includes a software workaround for the JCC bug on recent Intel chips.
Lots of possibilities….
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