Its Not Just Windows Snooping On You, Win 7 and 8 are spyware too

Windows 10’s warm reception has been sullied by concerns over data collection, usage tracking and spying, which is enabled in the new operating system by default. In fact, many people have avoided updating to Windows 10 solely due to concerns surrounding these issues.

We told you how you can opt out of much of these data-collecting features, and we also pointed you to six free tools that will help stop other Windows 10 functions that may compromise your data.

But as it turns out, Windows 10 isn’t the only Microsoft operating system collecting your data without your knowledge. Now you might think Little Nicky is off the pace here, Win 7 and 8 have beeb around a while. Not so actually, I still use XP for legacy Windows software having switched to Linux for browsing in 2009 because of concerns about Microsoft’s unethical attitude to my right to privacy.

Unfortunately for those who have Windows 7 or 8, an article on gHacks reveals new updates include features that introduce some of Windows 10’s heavy duty, US Govrnment sponsored spyware data collection and tracking features that many users will be uncomfortable with.

So how do you stop Microsoft’s Spyware? Simples …

First, if it isn’t too late, do nor install these updates:
KB3068708 This update introduces the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service to existing devices.

KB3022345 (replaced by KB3068708) This update introduces the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service to in-market devices.
KB3075249 This update adds telemetry points to the User Account Control (UAC) feature to collect information on elevations that come from low integrity levels.

KB3080149 This package updates the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service to existing devices.

If you run auto updates these four will already be in your system. They can be uninstalled from within the Control Panel (here’s How To a guide), or advanced users can type the following four commands using an elevated command prompt:

wusa /uninstall /kb:3068708 /quiet /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3022345 /quiet /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3075249 /quiet /norestart
wusa /uninstall /kb:3080149 /quiet /norestart

Once uninstalled, the Windows Update mechanism that Microsoft don’t like to talk about, offers you a way to “hide” them (here’s aHow To guide) so that your operating system doesn’t try to reinstall them.

Europe in Free Fall – The 28 member EU makes no economic sense

The omens have been clear for a long time (for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see. The ideologues who have been driving the Federal European Superstate project are blind to their own folly as ideologues always are, and also blind it seems to the unfolding social, economic and political catastrophe that is unfolding and threatens to destroy not only the european Union but its individual member states.

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Europe in Free Fall – The 28 member EU makes no economic sense

One in four Jeremy Corbyn supporters believe world is run by ‘secretive elite’

YouGov analysis of Labour supporters also finds most Mr Corbyn’s backers see America as the ‘greatest single threat to world peace’ in revealing research

And they call us conspiracy theorists …

The analysis went on to reveal that most of Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters believe America is the “greatest single threat to world peace” and one in four think a “secretive elite” controls the globe, according to pollster analysis.

Some 74 per cent of the Labour leadership front-runner’s backers would identify themselves as left-wing – around double the amount of any other candidates, according to YouGov research.

The vast majority of Mr Corbyn’s supporters also overwhelmingly back renationalising energy companies and the railway, decreasing private involvement in the NHS and redistributing wealth.

The findings come after YouGov looked into the views and beliefs of 3,777 people eligible to vote in the Labour leadership election.

It appears to confirm Mr Corbyn’s supporters are significantly to the Left of the other three candidates – but also hold views that are at odds with the population at large.

This is great news for UKIP of course. Not only does it show that the people branding Kippers ‘swivel eyed loons’ are in fact insane, swivel eyed fanatics themselves, but it also underlines the fasct that UKIP are the only party that stands for independence, personal liberty and traditional values.

And also that as I have always said, Labour are a party for lawyers, academics and self righteous elitists who despise the working class and everything to do with it.

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MH17 Perception Deception: Truth 0% Spin 100%

In the 21st century the US may be incapable of winning wars or even pursuing its own national interest but the media manipulation around the shoot-down of MH17 proves it is reaching new heights (or depths) in the art of perception management.

This article, by Ray McGovern originally appeared at Consortium News. The author is a retired CIA analyst of 27 years. He served as chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch, and prepared and personally conducted early morning briefings of the President’s Daily Brief.

During a recent interview, I was asked to express my conclusions about the July 17, 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, prompting me to take another hard look at Official Washington’s dubious claims – pointing the finger of blame at eastern Ukrainian rebels and Moscow – based on shaky evidence regarding who was responsible for this terrible tragedy.

Unlike serious professional investigative reporters, intelligence analysts often are required by policymakers to reach rapid judgments without the twin luxuries of enough time and conclusive evidence. Having spent almost 30 years in the business of intelligence analysis, I have faced that uncomfortable challenge more times than I wish to remember.

So, I know what it feels like to confront issues of considerable consequence like the shoot-down of MH-17 and the killing of 298 passengers and crew amid intense pressure to choreograph the judgments to the propagandistic music favored by senior officials who want the U.S. “enemy” – in this case, nuclear-armed Russia and its Western-demonized President Vladimir Putin – to somehow be responsible. In such situations, the easiest and safest (career-wise) move is to twirl your analysis to the preferred tune or at least sit this jig out.

But the trust-us-it-was-Putin marathon dance has now run for 13 months – and it’s getting tiresome to hear the P.R. people in the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper still claiming that the U.S. intelligence community has not revised or updated its analysis of the incident since July 22, 2014, just five days after the crash.

Back then, Clapper’s office, trying to back up Secretary of State John Kerry’s anti-Russian rush to judgment, cited very sketchy evidence – in both senses of the word – drawn heavily from “social media” accounts. Obviously, the high-priced and high-caliber U.S. intelligence community has learned much more about this very sensitive case since that time, but the administration won’t tell the American people and the world. The DNI’s office still refers inquiring reporters back to the outdated report from more than a year ago.

None of this behavior would make much sense if the later U.S. intelligence data supported the hasty finger-pointing toward Putin and the rebels. If more solid and persuasive intelligence corroborated those initial assumptions, you’d think U.S. government officials would be falling over themselves to leak the evidence and declare “we told you so.” And the DNI office’s claim that it doesn’t want to prejudice the MH-17 investigation doesn’t hold water either – since the initial rush to judgment did exactly that.

So, despite the discomfort attached to making judgments with little reliable evidence – and at the risk of sounding like former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – it seems high time to address what we know, what we don’t know, and why it may be that we don’t know what we don’t know.

Those caveats notwithstanding I would say it is a safe bet that the hard technical intelligence evidence upon which professional intelligence analysts prefer to rely does not support Secretary of State Kerry’s unseemly rush to judgment in blaming the Russian side just three days after the shoot-down.

Read all >>>

Reprinted here under Creative Commons licence. Attribute, non commercial use.

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Americans Don’t Know that the Rest of the World Views U.S. as Biggest Danger, Rogue State

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MH370: Why Would People Believe Fairy Stories

As new media began to scoff at the latest episode in the Flight MH370 saga, one ‘aviation expert’ who is on the United Nations payroll sneered, “Of course even now some people will not believe this find proves the plane went down where we said it did.

Well I’m not up to speed on this one, having been preoccupied writing fiction, but it did strike me ass interesting that the official version had the plane going into the water to the south west of western Australia. And the wreckage was washed up on Reunion Island, near Madagascar (and Diego Garcia) on the other side of the Indian Ocean.

Having noted that point I shrugged and moved on, leaving it to the relatives of the Flight MH370 dead to point out the peoblems with this latest bucket of whitewash thrown into the Indian Ocean. And one of them duly obliged to the chagrin of the interviewer on BBC Radion 4 today. The Tap reports:

“On BBC Radio 4 this morning, one of family representatives said they are not yet convinced the flapperon is from MH370. James Naugtie tried to steamroller her into saying it was, but she resisted.
If it was supposed to have crashed into a 4 mile deep area of the Indian Ocean, and it took 5 men to lift it, what kind of currents and forces were supposed to allow it to wash up on a beach?”

Yeah …

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Massive Explosion in China: Do We Know the Full Story?
The massive explosion at a chemical plant in the city of Tianjin in northern China was a shocking eveny by any standard. But as usual in recent years, once the initial horror recedes the unfortunate accident narrative starts to unravel. The first thing we notice is that the disaster is very convenient for certain parties, the second is that official news reports just don’t make sense, and the third is that eye witness reports contradict the edited news stories. Now read on …

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I was doing jokes in my brief and emotionally exhausting career as a stand up thirty years ago about Leon Brittan, Ted Heath and the restSayle). So I want to know why it took the police and crown prosecution service so long to catch up.

Here’s a taster from a long article by investigative journo and documentary maker Tim Tate. Unfortunately Tim does not do deep linking on his blog but you can see the full article HERE .

Over recent months two separate police forces have been carrying out enquiries into a snippet of 30-year-old gossip about a dead man. The Met and North Yorkshire Police have been interviewing people who, in the early to mid 1980s, heard a rumour that the then Home Secretary Leon Brittan had molested a young boy at a weekend retreat. I am one of them.

There are a number of oddities to this story, and, together with the rest of the strange saga of Leon Brittan, they shine a light on the frustratingly opaque progress of historic child sex abuse investigations. They also provide a litmus test for Lord Justice Goddard’s Independent panel Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

The rumour first.   In the early 1980s I was a researcher on Roger Cook’s BBC Radio 4 investigative programme, “Checkpoint”.  The editor of the series had a source inside 10 Downing Street who was in the habit of passing on juicy titbits of scurrilous gossip about members of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet.

Why he did this was something of a mystery: “Checkpoint” was a fine programme, but it rarely strayed into political investigations. I never met the source, but according to our editor, he simply enjoyed gossiping over drinks at a private club both belonged to. To my knowledge, nothing had ever been done with the tittle-tattle he related.

The Brittan story, though, was different. According to the source, Brittan had been attending a weekend house party somewhere in North Yorkshire (he was initially MP for Cleveland & Whitby, then Richmond, N. Yorks): at some point he was supposed to have molested a young boy.   Local police allegedly attended, but very quickly were ordered off the case by Special Branch officers. There were no details of where exactly this happened, nor what exactly Brittan was supposed to have done.

Despite the sketchy nature of the rumour – and perhaps because I still lived in Yorkshire and had some relevant police contacts – I was instructed by my editor and the BBC’s (then) assistant director-general, Alan Protheroe, to make some discreet enquiries.

Over several weeks I spoke to a succession of contacts within the police. All said they knew nothing. Finally, I approached an officer in the neighbouring West Yorkshire Police Special Branch with whom I had an occasional, if slightly uneasy, working relationship. He agreed – reluctantly – to make some enquiries: very quickly thereafter he told me he was not going to pursue them.

And there our own investigations stopped. We told Alan Protheroe that we could find no evidence to support the rumour and I went back to work on more regular “Checkpoint” stories.

We were not, of course, alone in hearing this rumour. Private Eye had also picked it up and subsequently ran a short piece suggesting that members of the security service were trying to smear Brittan with false child abuse allegations.