Turning off Windows 10 Privacy Features

Turning off Windows 10 Privacy Features

By Strictly-Software 

If you are like me and on Windows 8.1 then you will probably be constantly bombarded by messages from Microsoft about how you can obtain a free upgrade to Windows 10.

However before you upgrade you should beware of all the security and privacy concerns people have about this operation system.

With a little research it is well known that Microsoft have a close relationship with the US security services such as the CIA / NSA.

They have even bought up businesses such as Skype to prevent having to hack in back doors when they can instead have a wide open front door for all your personnal traffic, calls and texts.

As the video states.

This is a quick guide to fixing privacy concerns in Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system. 

The default settings and applications with Windows 10 have numerous security flaws, privacy problems, keystroke monitors installed and turned on by default.

This guide will help you fix the problems in a simple way.

Be sure to read this article as it will explain all the security holes in detail if you want more information on what Microsoft are monitoring and why.

However this quick overview video should help you on the way.





By Strictly-Software

© 2015 Strictly-Software

Windows 8 and Windows 8 RT - Issues and Workarounds to get Windows 8.1 behaviour

Getting around Window 8's issues

By Strictly-Software

I use Windows 8.1 (proper version - thank god) but if you are stuck on Windows 8 or the Windows 8 RT version you should upgrade to Windows 8.1 ASAP as the design of Windows 8 was so that they could use the same display format for both phones, tablets, PC's and laptops.

The problem was that the techies didn't want numptified hidden away features behind a design obviously meant for touch screens and not for coders.

So they introduced Windows 8 RT which was a sort of half way house between Win 8.1 and Win 8 as they realised they were going to have another Vista issue where people hated the OS and many skipped over it or stayed with the previous version anyway Windows XP (I know I did!).

So when they realised they had another Vista/XP issue on their hands they rolled out Win 8 RT which tried to get rid of the main tablet screen and have am option to get back to a normal desktop screen.

Windows 8.1 was a total reverse of Windows 8 with the desktop as the main screen and the horrible tablets accessible by the home button.

As the article says:

If your PC is currently running Windows 8 or Windows RT, it's free to update to Windows 8.1 or Windows RT 8.1. And unlike previous updates to Windows, you'll get this update from the Windows Store.

by following this Windows Knowledge Base article: upgrade from Windows 8.0 or 8.1 RT to Windows 8.1.

Making some changes

The first thing I hated about the OS was that the mouse would change the size of the screen without me asking it to. In Chrome or elsewhere I was constantly manually putting the screen size back to normal ratio 100%.

In fact the mouse was moving so fast I couldn't hardly see it and I needed to make some changes. The list below are those I made.

Increasing the size and changing the colour of the mouse

I changed the colour of the mouse using the "Pointers" tab where you can pick the group of pointers you want to use to "Windows Black (extra large)" in the top selection and in the bottom I chose "Normal Select".

     

Now I could see the cursor much easier due to the colour change as most programs have a white background so a white cursor with a black border is not very helpful.

Changing the auto drag that the mouse does

One of the annoying things about Windows 8+ is the auto drag ability of the mouse which enables you to highlight or drag features without using the CTRL key.

You can turn this off in the "Buttons" > "Click Lock" panel by de-selecting the "Turn on Click Lock" feature.

This was one of the major pains I had when I first used Windows 8.1 especially when I was remote desktopped into my work PC. Then I found a way to turn it off.

Changing the mouse controlling the size of the screen

This is one thing that really pissed me off. When I was surfing the net or just writing a swipe of the mouse would change the whole screen size.

Other Mouse Changes

I also did the following changes in the "Pointer Options" tab I changed the pointer speed to a slower one.

With a bigger black pointer it helps a lot. I also did the following.

• I chose to "Automatically move pointer to default selection in a dialogue box". No point hunting for CTRL keys is there! 
• I chose to "Show location of the pointer when the CTRL key is hit" 
• A nice circle appears helping you find the cursor. 
• I disabled the "Hide pointer when typing" option so that I can always see the cursor.

Other Windows 8.1 Programs

With all the numptyfictation going on with the Windows tablet format there are some actual applications that can help you without going command line.

Even though the start bar is pretty crap you can either use the "Search" function to find an app or just go into the app page and start typing. The words will just start to appear in a search box in the top right of the page e.g "Paint" to get the Paint application.

The Windows App Store is one of the great features that Windows 8 has introduced and there are lots of great programs you can download for free including "Live TV" to get TV from freeview channels as well as US and European TV shoes.

With WiFi and network connectivity you want to check that your broadband speed is fast and everything is okay. One of these programs is "Network Speed Test" which you can get from the App Store.

This application tests your broadband or WiFi speed and tells you whether you would have the capabilities of downloading high or low quality video, your internet status, network details and other ISP related information.

So now you know how to get Windows 8.1 features, change some annoying ones in the OS related to mouse usage and use the Windows App Store to download apps to test your WiFi for you.

You should now be on your way.

Running WAMP on Windows 8 alongside IIS - 403 Forbidden Index

Problems with WAMP on Windows 8 - Forbidden 403 - Running IIS and Apache side by side

By Strictly-Software

I have just got a new laptop which has come with Windows 8.1.

Thankfully this version of Windows gives me more of  a Windows 7 feel as I really hate those big tablet like buttons. I can't use them as a touch screen anyway and I code not spent all my time on Facebook so they give me no benefit.

I want to get where I am going without Windows telling me how things should look and feel and Windows 8 is numptyfing the user interface even more so that old people can buy their wool with a few swipes but a coder has to hack about for ages to get anything working.

Anyway as I develop in PHP and C#, ASP I need to run both IIS and WAMP side by side on the same PC.

If you have read my earlier article on getting round issues with IIS blocking port 80 you will know that I like to change the port Apache uses to 8888 (a common HTTP alternative) so that I can run both web servers side by side without having to switch IIS off before switching WAMP on and vice versa.

Quick overview is to edit the httpd.conf file and change the listen port from 80 to 8888 e.g

Listen 8888

Also changing the line that mentions the server to:

ServerName localhost: 8888

You can read this article here. Troubleshooting WAMP Server on Windows 7

However with Windows 8 I found this didn't fix the problem and when I tried to access localhost:8888 I would get a Forbidden 403 status error code back when accessing index.php or phpmyadmin.php.

Apparently there are multiple solutions depending on what you want to do with your server.

As Windows 8 is an IPv6 Operating system and WAMP is IPv4 the loopback address is NOT 127.0.0.1 but ::1.

A simple ping to localhost in your command prompt will prove this as you will get back ::1 and not 127.0.0.1.

To fix this problem there are two solutions depending on whether you want to run IIS alongside WAMP. If you don't mind toggling between IIS and WAMP then follow Method 1. If not try Method 2.

Method 1

To get round the differences between WAMP being IPv4 and Windows 8 being IPv6 you need to edit some files.

Instead of changing your httpd.conf file as my previous article does you change the following line.

Listen 80

to

Listen 0.0.0.0:80

Then you would need to edit your hosts file in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc to comment out the line ::1 localhost e.g:

# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
127.0.0.1       localhost
# ::1                   localhost

However this doesn't stop the issue of running WAMP alongside IIS.

Therefore if you do want both to run side by side without toggling them on/off ignore what I just said and instead follow method 2.

Method 2

Follow all my steps in the earlier article: Troubleshooting WAMP Server on Windows 7 and then you need to also change the following lines of code in your phpmyadmin.conf file which will be in your c:\wamp\alias\ folder to the following:

<Directory "c:/wamp/apps/phpmyadmin3.5.1/">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride all
        Order Deny,Allow
 Deny from all
 Allow from all
</Directory>

And then in your C:\wamp\bin\apache\apache2.2.22\conf\httpd.conf file (or whatever version you are using) you need to have these lines of code.

Remove the allow from 127.0.0.1 and replace with allow from all like we did in the previous file.

<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
</Directory>

Now you should be able to access phpmyadmin with either http://localhost:8888/phpmyadmin/ or http://127.0.0.1:8888/phpmyadmin/ and still get your .NET or ASP classic code running with IIS from a simple http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1.

These two methods should sort you out if you get stuck like I did and I am sure when the next version of Windows comes out we will all have some more problems to solve to get WAMP running alongside IIS!