oh noes. It's almost like we live in a cloud oriented world that tries to sync our devices.
And the list goes on and fucking on. All of those things require reaching out and getting data from servers. Turn off those that you don't want. I get that there is telemetry data that you don't have control over. They should let people turn it off. The number of people that turn it off is going to be pretty small relative to the population, which is a good thing considering it's anonymous error logs and shit.
The test was seriously flawed and all of its conclusions should be pretty discounted - a proper test would have left the door wide open and monitored what went through.
For instance, MS phones home on a regular basis to a static page to test if you have internet access (which is how the little connection status icon in your taskbar changes). If it can't connect, it's going to keep trying until it can (at which point the polling interval increases). That alone likely caused hundreds of connection attempts.
And the sad part was that it proved nothing yet got circulated as some irrefutable proof, when it wasn't actually conducted very well.
It didn't try Windows 10 with all the privacy options actually disabled. It didn't try registry tricks or Spybot Anti-Beacon to see if Windows 10 was circumventing these things. It also was focused on Microsoft IPs, when there's concern over the P2P systems now implemented into the OS that blocking access to MS now isn't possible without operating all network connections via a whitelist. Let alone the fact the the connections were never allowed.
Even as someone who was significantly concerned about Windows 10, it seems the anti-Win10 team really jumped the gun and ended up spreading FUD.
Get real, linux lost, you can give up on the fud now.