[kryten]

This. We have a firewall in our company to stop things escaping as much as letting them in. There are so many things built into windows that phone home its scary. Even a VLK 7 with internal KMS has a good bash at trying to get out of the network. The problem is that it is virtually impossible to stop it without affecting users as everything goes over HTTP and pokes holes in windows' application level firewall.

Our shift to Java EE recently has resulted in us switching a few users to Ubuntu 12.04. Removing a couple of packages makes it 100% network silent plus we can host a mirror in house of packages.

Windows is going to end up inside virtualbox on a private virtual lan on the workstation if this works out.

I dread to think what nefarious code phones have in them if these are the problems we have with a desktop OS.