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0 pointswackget1d ago0 comments

I admire your effort to increase user privacy but it's very difficult to argue that allowing a piece of proprietary closed-source software to make fundamental changes to your operating system is a good idea.

For starters, it doesn't explain what exactly it does. This is all I could see on the info page:

> Privacy Enablement Center: Politely ask already installed Windows 10/11 to phone home less, or add Privacy Enhancing DNS Proxy to already installed Windows, in order to block Telemetry, Windows Updates, OneDrive, builtin advertisements, tracking of your location and other types of potentially unwanted Windows network activity — making Windows 10/11 completely quiet online — something competitor’s tools can’t achieve.

That sounds an awful lot like using the hosts file or a firewall such as Portmaster[1] to block known tracking domains, no?

[1] https://safing.io/

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mkup1d ago

Pure hosts file solution won't cut it for several reasons:

1) certain domains (the most offensive privacy infringers) are whitelisted by Microsoft's DNSAPI.DLL to always bypass hosts file lookup (DNSAPI.DLL is a place where hosts file parser lives on Windows, so this parser just ignores hosts file records which don't align well with data vaccuming purpose of modern Windows versions)

2) hosts file can't blacklist domain hierarchies (domain + all subdomains), it can blacklist only apex domains

3) some domains to block are not quite domains, rather domain names regexps (set of domain names to block is not finite)

So, I would say it's rather list of regexps to block than list of domains to block (in our product it's compiled to highly efficient finite state machine in C, plus a user-friendly list of categories to choose blocking preferences from); but in principle you are right: all of it currently boils down to DNS packet interception.

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