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
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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.
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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.
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