First of all, as others have said, this source may be slightly dubious, but I have seen a handful of similar sources saying similar things, but I have yet to se

First of all, as others have said, this source may be slightly dubious, but I have seen a handful of similar sources saying similar things, but I have yet to see an extensive reverse engineering effort. For the time being though, because of the variety of similar reports and side effects, I am considering Windows 10 an surveillance state approved operating system. For example, in another HN submission where someone posted a tool to delete/disable tracking services and add ip lists to the hosts file, a user has reported startup errors. To me this indicates Windows 10 is trying to communicate even during boot without the users knowledge! That's a big deal in my book... I don't know about yall. The one reason I have suffered the slings and arrows of Windows so long is for gaming purposes, more recently because I wanted to release my hobby side-project, a game in Unreal Engine 4, on Windows and so I have kept one of my computers on Windows 8.1. Last night that machine was compromised, and despite my fairly extensive malware fighting abilities, I couldn't get rid of it. That means a complete wipe and only moving data over that I must have, and not trusting that data, not to mention never trusting the HDD again (going to have to throw it away). I also question my bios, so I'll need to flash bios too. I run three main computers, Windows on a Asus laptop, OSX on a Mac Air, and Linux/DragonFlyBSD dual boot on a Macbook Pro 2014. I think Windows 10 just might be the excuse I need to push myself completely away from the MS ecosystem. I've been talking about it for years, but the power of their tie-in is not to be trifled with. I also fear for the state of linux in the same way though. At >10 million lines of kernel code, I think the many eyes theory has a weakness, namely that complex and huge codebases are antithetical to the many eyes theory working. that's why I personally think the future of computing will be in code simplicity and pairing down existing codebases. A good example of a try at this is Minix 3. <10k loc. (of course lacks many features). That's also why, even thought I'm a huge GPL/GNU guy, I am increasingly leaning towards the top down ecosystem of the BSD's. I think there are a lot of fundamental issues in personal computing that many of us just ignore and don't want to discuss because the implications of the conclusions could be uncomfortable. I think it's time for those of us who are considered power users to start having this difficult discussions more often and in more public ways.