I have a network-wide pi hole and I noticed that it requested activity.windows.com, a url blocked by my pi hole, even while my pc is suspended. I pinged 10.0.0.217 and it is currently unreachable. So, somehow, windows pc’s turn on networking, phones home, and turns off even while suspended.
Creepy behavior
You must log in or register to comment.
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
- 0 users online
- 57 users / day
- 383 users / week
- 1.5K users / month
- 5.7K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 3.12K Posts
- 78K Comments
- Modlog
So, let me grasp your comment, are you saying that this is not creepy at all?
EDIT: To clarify, I find both things creepy, the telemetry and the insistence to ping home no matter what.
The fact that windows has so much telemetry is creepy yes. The fact that it will keep trying to ping the domain when blocked is not creepy and is basic tech functionality.
Definitely creepy that it phones home in the first place.
But it’s not necessarily creepy that it keeps trying; it could just be sloppy programming. Hanlon’s Razor comes to mind. Microsoft Teams behaved in a similar way apparently. If you blocked it phoning home at the network level it would buffer gigabytes of data on disk until the disk was full.
removed by mod
I guess so - I’ve actually never used Teams. There are lots of potential mitigations, but sandboxing is not really a solution to buggy code. For some better engineering discussion on the topic, there’s the series of articles Transparent Telemetry, in particular The Design of Transparent Telemetry.
removed by mod