Interesting. Is it easy to "firewall" Cortana so that it does local voice processing and connects only to external services you authorize?

You can actually customize a large part of it and turn all of it off.

You can't firewall it off, but you can learn how it actually works and just turn it off.

> turn it off

For now. This crap is going to get a lot harder to avoid when the Intel SGX instructions are widely deployed and it becomes possible to extend the lockdown from SecureBoot to the kernel and kernel-authorized apps.

I suggest fighting it now, while it is still just an annoyance.