Microsoft to World: All your BITS are belong to us!

If WindowsCentral is to be believed, as of 7/31/2015, over 67 MILLION PC devices have already been updated to Windows 10. Microsoft has already set sustained bandwidth records surpassing Apple with this latest launch. And the pace of bandwidth utilization will continue to grow, especially considering the massive amount of "Internet of Things" meta data this latest OS will be sending back to the Mothership.

At least, unless you are Opting Out of a LOT of stuff. 

My earlier post on WUDO and its background enabling of peer-to-peer sharing of updates (unwittingly turning us all into miniature Microsoft Windows Update Servers) is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the amount of data LEAVING these newly updated PCs. 

Not in a Tin Foil Hat kind of way, but in the way that your Android and Apple devices have been doing for years. 

Robert Heinlein used the expression TANSTAAFL in a lot of his books: "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch". And to be honest, this is why this latest release is "free". The informed consumer will already be aware of this passive heuristic data that is being collected, but others are not as informed and may not be aware of the cusp that we are sitting on between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 - that this heuristic data, when applied correctly, enables a passive and frictionless consumption of ALL DAT DATA. 

Microsoft has essentially, with this release, made their cost of customer (meta) data acquisition $0. This can, in turn, be leveraged for things like:

Agile Development focus - what are customers actually USING? Let's invest in THOSE areas and not waste time on fictitious requirements that someone thinks may be needed. 

Improving how we navigate our work day - by looking at things like calendaring and traffic, passively alert us about things like "Hey, your meeting across town is at 1:00PM, and for the last 2 weeks construction has slowed it to the point where you may want to get going a little earlier. Actually, here's a way different from your USUAL route that gets you there quicker."

Enter Cortana, the end user face of all that data chomping. 

The fact is that, nowadays correlating the massive data sets for the insights above is possible. And this new OS is a bold and ambitious grab for this new age of Heuristic Web. But it's only cool if you WANT to PARTICIPATE. 

So here are some links to opt out of stuff, in the event that your latest Tin Foil Hat has been sparking with weird vibes from Windows 10. 

Boy Genius already has some of it posted so rather than copypasta or recreate, here is a link with some suggestions:

http://bgr.com/2015/07/31/windows-10-upgrade-spying-how-to-opt-out/

Also check out my WUDO post if you want to get out of the WUS bidness. A quick FAQ for those settings can be accessed from Microsoft itself:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/windows-update-delivery-optimization-faq

Windows 10 Review - Day 4 and WUDO

While it hasn't been perfect, my Windows 10 experience has been pretty damn impressive. Considering I am one of tens of millions of users that upgraded, I have to admit any gripes I have are insignificant considering the daunting scale of this bit-torrent inspired, massive scale canary deployment of the latest OS.

Bit torrent? What? Yeah - in the event you didn't know there is new peer-to-peer bit sharing going on in the background. Called Windows Update Delivery Optimization (WUDO), it might be a bit of a bandwidth nibbler for those of us under a bad cable providers metered data caps.

What's that, you say? Shot - I didn't know that! Yeah - expect the privacy and disclosure bombs to drop in steadily for a bit. When you think about it, it makes too much sense not to do. A distributed torrent model makes highest and best use of largely otherwise vestigial resources. But its the kind of thing privacy advocates want out there in your face, ya know?

Good news is that if, like me you will get a bandwidth nastygram from your provider, you can disable in the Advanced options of "Let me choose how updates are delivered", as pictured below:

With the "bad" out of the way, here's something cool I found: visualization of my app reliability. Nestled in settings:

With every turn I keep learning more and more about this neat new OS. I will continue to share in the hops it helps whoever needs the info.