It seems now that Windows 10 is trying to push adverts onto its users via the lockscreen. There are two modes this appears to be impact, you can see what yours is set to by going into the ‘Personalization’ area and looking at the ‘Background’ drop-down.

If you have it set to ‘Windows spotlight’ then you’re going to get adverts. This mode rotates between a range of images provided by Microsoft. You can click a button on the lockscreen to say you “don’t like” the advert but the long term impact of this is unknown. 

In ‘Picture’ mode shown below, you can disable the adverts by turning “Get fun facts, tips, tricks, and more on your lock screen” (“and more” would appear to mean adverts all up in your grill) to “Off”. 

I recently participated in the Guernsey Global Games Jam 2016 and with our team we’ve created a cracking game called ‘Sacrificial Inferno’. Here is the website.

Here are a couple of work in progress videos…

Also, I’ve uploaded a couple of real life photos from the event onto my gaming website, gamelydigest.com. See here.

The latest release of Windows has quite a few settings for privacy which I’ve documented below.

General

These settings relate to advertising in Windows Store apps and via the Internet. I’ve turned both off. The SmartScreen Filter suggests it will block known dodgy URLs from being accessed in third party Windows Store apps.

Taken from here your Advertising ID is “is a unique identifier, consisting of a random string of characters, which Windows generates for each user on a device. When turned on, apps can access the ID in order to deliver advertising that is relevant to you based on your app usage. You can turn it on or off at any time. If you turn it on again, a new identifier will be generated.”

Location

I have this off on my desktop and on, on my laptop. The answer to this one comes down to “Do I need this?”. You can read more here.

Other Devices

I’ve switched this off on my desktop and laptop. I don’t want anything being synced. From what I can find on Microsoft’s website this will sync things like your theme, browser settings and passwords. Also, this seems to suggest these are synced via Microsoft’s servers rather than peer-to-peer.

Speech, Inking and Typing

If you want to use Cortana you’re going to need to leave this option on. Leaving it on will send speech, inking, typing, contacts and calendar to Microsoft. I’ve turned it off. You can read more here.

Wifi Sense

Wifi Sense is a feature allowing Windows 10 to share Wifi passwords with your contacts. This means the Wifi passwords are potentially hackable and so this setting should be switched off. On the first screen below, click “Manage Wifi settings” to get to the Wifi Sense settings. You can read more here.

Feedback & Diagnostics

This section is a bit sneaky. Microsoft have lumped diagnostic (e.g. crash data) in with general usage data. Looking at the documentation you want to set this to “Basic” which is the minimum. Basic still includes sending Microsoft what software you have installed but there does not appear to be a way around that.

You can also disable the prompts for feedback here too.

I recently came across this message after installing an SSL certificate on one of my websites.

The message means that although the site is secure, some active content is not. Content can be passive or active.

Passive includes tags like…

  * <audio>
  * <img>
  * <video>

As you can see, these all tend to be view type content.

Active includes tags like…

  * <script>
  * <link>
  * <iframe>
  * <object>
  * @import

Although some of the active tags can be used for view type content like the passive ones, they can also be used to make Document Object Model (DOM) changes which means they have the potential to be insecure.

In my case it was due to Google Fonts import. This line in particular…

@import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto:400,700);

The fix is to remove the http allowing your browser to determine the protocol. You could also just set it to https instead (if supported).

@import url(//fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto:400,700);

My website data.gg recently had some local publicity and I appeared on local BBC TV and BBC Radio. These links won’t work forever so if you’re from the future you’ll have to take my word for it 🙂