Ive used his stuff
fyi- None of the software or utilities are written by him.
Perhaps there's some truth to that, perhaps there isnt. He is at least offering a solution to the spying that windows does, instead of saying people don't know what they are doing.
He is jumping on the youtube gravy train by making content he knows people want to view. The "solution" is primarly to use Windows 10 Pro and disable these features; I used Group Policy Editor to set the "Allow Telemetry" setting to 0 - Security. Then I also ran Task Scheduler as Local System and removed/disabled as many scheduled tasks as I could find. Since I suspect those could be reset by a Feature Update, I also added added registry settings to configure the Execution policies of wsqmcons.exe and compattelrunner.exe. (There are a few others, mostly because I found them annoying, like MusNotificationUX.exe which takes over the screen and fades it out and insists you go to Windows Update when there are updates available). None of it required third party tools.
Third party tools don't offer much of a solution for Home Edition either. Their "fixes" typically just directly set the same registry keys that would be set by using Group Policy Editor or perhaps re-enable GPEdit.msc, which sounds fine except that Home Edition doesn't check and use those policies to begin with.
"Destroy Windows 10 Spying" also has a delicious irony, since it has a phone home function that will connect to renessans.bz to check for a payload, if one is available it will download it, compile it, and execute it. Since the program requires Administrator permission in order to arbitrarily add firewall rules and change the HKLM settings it adjusts, that means whoever controls renessans.bz controls every single person's PC that is running this utility.
I asked for a second opinion because this is the first time I've had an issue with any of his tools, as when there are issues, his main followers provide feedback.
Well, The utility in question Adds Firewall rules that block over 100 IP Addresses and nearly 400 Domains. Presumably, some parts of Windows and UWP depend on those, or use them to check for connectivity to the Internet. Perhaps it sometimes works because the list is incomplete and it doesn't always check for connectivity with a Domain that is listed.
