Reddit user sammiesdog discovered recently that Visual Studio 2015 C++ compiler was inserting calls to a Microsoft telemetry function into binaries. “I compiled a simple program with only main(). When looking at the compiled binary in IDA, I see a call fortelemetry_main_invoke_trigger and telemetry_main_return_trigger. I cannot find documentation for these calls, either on the web or in the options page,” he wrote. Only after the discovery did Steve Carroll, the dev manager for Visual C++ admit to the “feature” and posted a workaround to remove it.
A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the existence of this behavior to InfoQ, adding that the company wil be removing it in a future preview build. For those who wish to get rid of it, the blog writes:
Users who have a copy of VS2015 Update 2 and wish to turn off the telemetry functionality currently being compiled into their code should add notelemetry.obj to their linker command line.
There is a little trick to disable “Known IDE Packages”: you can stop Delphi from loading one by either making “Value data” of the registry blank, or prepending it with an underscore:
packages that might have been disabled, by checking any string entries where the data has been pre-pended with an underscore OR is blank
I’ve pre-pended underscores to some packages in the registry key [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Borland|Codegear|Embarcadero\BDS|Delphi\#.0\Known IDE Packages] and intend to keep the list below updated over time.
Note that you have to prepend the description with an underscore: it is not sufficient to add these to [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Borland|Codegear|Embarcadero\BDS\#.0\Disabled Packages].
Empirically, the Disabled Packages seem to work only for packages starting with dcl in their filename.
A while ago I bumped into this interesting bit: LLLPG (Loyc LL(k) Parser Generator) is a new recursive-decent parser generator for C#, with a feature set better than ANTLR version 2.
Windows has the built-in ability to function as VPN server, although this option is hidden. This trick works on both Windows 7 and Windows 8. The server uses the point-to-point tunneling protocol (PPTP.)
When firewalls, proxies, etc prohibit the boots-trapper that upgrades an existing Firefox or download stub (like “Firefox Setup Stub 38.0.1.exe”) installs a fresh one to function correctly:
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The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
