Here's my hat;
First, I agree with pretty much everything that you said in your original post.
Ever since the Windows operating system went from being a "program" to being a "service," stuff like this has become a daily occurrence. "Customer Experience Improvement Program," "Telemetry," "Compatibility Checker," and now this mysterious "remsh.exe," that
wakes my sleeping computers every day at 10:00am and then performs a series of unknown processes, some of which apparently send mountains of data to some Microsoft server somewhere, are just recent examples.
To add insult, the process doesn't even graciously return the PC to sleep, but rather when I walked into my home office yesterday around noon, I found two of my computers, fans churning, running full on.
Idiotically, when this program was fist reported on various MICROSOFT SPONSORED AND SUPPORTED technical assistance forums, some "official" Microsoft respondents labeled it "Malware" and a "Virus." It seems that wherever in the bowels of MS this bit of Devil
spawn originated, even the people charged with trying to help the poor users of their product weren't told about it.
Aside form the egregious behavior of just blatantly waking your computer whenever it wants to and then mining and sending your data off to PartsUnknown, it more broadly speaks to the disregard in which we, the customers, are held by "them," the Corporation.
Changing the operating state of YOUR computer at will, mining and storing your data at will, and modifying the operating system without notice and certainly without your permission is the new normal.
Once Windows became a "service" ostensibly so it would be more flexible, usable, and repairable, you basically signed away every last shred of privacy and control of your machine and your data. Any one of my computers "phones home" dozens of times a session
and with gigabit internet speeds, can send anything anywhere in microseconds.
Long gone are the days when everything that ran on your machine was something YOU purposefully and with forethought chose to install, and allowed to run. Now, obscure commands, buried in the Registry, hidden in the Task Manager, or linked to sign-in, boot,
or start of another program, gleefully chew up CPU cycles, clog your network, and whisk your privacy off to the cloud. Not occasionally, but rather, constantly; all the time your computer is on, and now, even when you thought you put it into sleep or hibernate
until you got back.
I don't suggest you run a packet sniffer like Wireshark during your typical computer sessions, as the results will cause your paranoia alarms to overload. The amount of spurious traffic on the WAN that is constantly buzzing in the background, targeting servers
world-wide is staggering. You could develop a full time hobby trying to resolve the I.P. addresses of just one-day's traffic.
You just have to face the fact that all illusions of data privacy that you may wish you had are completely gone. MS is but one small player in the wholesale erasure of your rights to your own data. In Europe, where they have much stricter computer privacy laws,
corporations just bury permission to access, store, and sell your data deeper in the verbiage of the "User Agreement," and violate you anyway. Here, in the good ole' USA, Equifax, Home Depot, Target, etc. dump all your critical "personally identifying data"
all over the street, and my State government sees fit to make a .pdf of the deed to my house, complete with my signature, available in just a few clicks of the mouse.
Wi-Fi's WPA2 standard had been hacked to death by "Krack," iOS and Android are a Swiss cheese of security, ( I particularly like the whole concept of them asking for "Permissions" when you install
or update an App as to give you the illusion that you have SOME control over what your phone or tablet spews out to the ether about you) and one of the biggest Anti-Virus makers in the world is basically a branch of the Russian Intelligence Service.
So, that's my hat. Remsh.exe is a minuscule grain of pepper in a mountain of fly turds. I'm just pissed that it turns my computer on unexpectedly. It should at least have the decency to sell me down the river on MY schedule, not theirs.
