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

deleted by creator

He pinged the local IP to check if the network card was up on his suspended machine…

Oh god another one of these posts…

When pihole blocks a dns request, devices often keep trying to connect until the connection is successful. So yea, no shit it’s ginna keep trying to query that domain repeatedly, including when you’re sleeping.

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.

Oliver Lowe
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are you saying that this is not creepy at all?

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.

Can Teams not be run inside Chrome as an addon, preventing this disk space nonsense?

Oliver Lowe
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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.

There actually exist a couple options on Linux, Snap and Flatpak versions of Chrome based browsers. Both of them are sandboxed forms of software packaging.

The thing is, the device was in suspend for a couple days now.

deleted by creator

Modern sleep modes are internet connected, with the intent to allow systems to perform updates while sleeping.

I don’t like it but that’s how it’s designed to work.

voxel
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aka S0 sleep/Modern Standby.
It has some legitimate benefits like returning from sleep immediately. Kinda want it on linux but without all the telemetry crap (but it’s really, really hard to pull of at an OS level)

Holy crap. What are you going to do with these 2 seconds saved?

Last 2 seconds longer while bangin ur mom

Your username is terrifying

Then just shut it down lol. It’s gonna ping windows microsoft domains unless it’s actually off.

You had me in the first half

What do you mean?

including when you’re sleeping

smug Linux noises

Yeah so smug…it only stops accepting input from my touchpad if i close the lid on my laptop which puts it in sleep mode.

JackbyDev
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Astral projecting

Ain’t 10.0.0.217 an private IP?

yes, it’s for LANs

did you expect it to be a public ip?

Probably the IP of the device, not the IP resolved through DNS

Yes that is the local ip of the pc phoning home

umami_wasabi
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Yah. That make sense now. I thought that’s what the domain resolved to.

Never used PiHole but Blocky.

DacoTaco
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Thanks pihole!

(Also, hibernate > sleep imo )

TWeaK
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Shutdown is hybrid sleep anyway. Best of both worlds.

Also FYI you have to restart to properly shut down Windows now. If you shut down and then turn it back on it will just resume from S4 hybrid sleep. Shut down does not normally shut down, it enters a zero power sleep state. Restart actually shuts down and reboots the OS.

I think hybernation is really meant for when you want near zero power but a little trickle for something specific to wake the PC, eg an external device or network port. You can also sometimes do this directly in BIOS, if it has the facility.

icedterminal
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You’re a bit confused.

  • Sleep keeps the system on but in a low power state. User and kernel sessions are kept in RAM. If power is lost, you start from a clean session. The system can resume full power with a key press or mouse movement.
  • Hibernate dumps the user and kernel session from RAM to disk and completely powers off. Upon startup, the hiberfil.sys file is read and put back into RAM. The physical power button must be pressed to turn on.
  • Hybrid Shutdown uses a feature called Fast Startup. The user session is discarded, while the kernel session is written to disk before the system completely powers off. Upon startup, the hiberfil.sys file is read and puts the kernel session back into RAM. The last logged on user has their profile preloaded, including any apps that support the feature. The physical power button must be pressed to turn on.

You can disable Fast Startup or simply hold SHIFT and click Shutdown. The feature requires the user to press the Shutdown button within Windows for it to function. If you press the physical power button on your case, that is an ACPI initiated shutdown and bypasses the Fast Startup feature. This is by design.

Your motherboard firmware controls whether or not the USB ports will continue to supply power when the system is off. It’s essentially like a wall brick at this point.

Fast Startup was really meant for HDD. With SSD it’s not really necessary. It’s negligible time savings and with how buggy drivers can be, days or weeks old kernel sessions are bound to start causing problems.

TWeaK
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Thanks for the extra detail. Yes, Fast Startup can be disabled in various ways. The point I was making was that clicking Windows, Shut Down by default doesn’t really do what most people think it does, what it used to always do.

It’s Big Brother Microsoft just protecting you. If you got nothing to hide you got nothing to worry about!!!

Come on man, he probably just misses his mom.

deleted by creator

Windows… With this only word you already have all the abswers

Sleep is no longer what it used to be. They killed off S3 sleep in favor of some always connected mode, much like you cell phone.

I only learned this during the pandemic when i started working from home and my work laptop would wake up at 1am, fans blasting 100%

Or my laptop would wake up in my backpack during my commute and drain the whole battery…

I opened a helpdesk ticket and they didnt know why. Their solution was “just turn off your laptop”…

After doing my owm digging, i realized S3 was gone and windows just does whatever the fuck it wants

Which has its pros and cons, but that still doesn’t mean it should invade your privacy.

ares35
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that’s only newer hardware that meets specific requirements.

It got disabled one day on my 8th Gen i7 XPS. It was driving me crazy trying to figure out why it keep cooking it self alive in my backpack. It’s since been demoted to house use, sleep is still useless even after many FW updates and fresh os install. That thing used to last weeks on battery just closing the lid. Now it can’t make it though the night. I wish I could turn it back on in this case, my new laptop is much better about it.

How dare you not allow Microsoft use their PC

thanks for the input Nabeg

Thanks for the nick lol, took me a second :D

q47tx
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True, it’s their PC.

Yeah. It’s amazing how my windows laptop, whilst sleeping, whirrs all its fans up on the middle of the night. I am not suggesting that is it sending out telemetry, but it is fucking infuriating for sleep to mean anything other than “stop doing anything until I tell you to wake up”.

That is because recent laptops don’t “sleep” like before with s4 (hybernate) or other sx.

They have some sort of tucking clock waiting for windows to wake up to check for updates.

In theory it allows to keep everything up to date while people are not working.

However un proactice, it drains battery and overheats laptops, because Microsoft implemented that feature like crap, or the partners did some stupid things.

It was supposed to only activate when the laptop was plugged in. However if the laptop was plugged in, put on sleep, then unplugged, windows still believed that the laptop was plugged in.

Now I don’t know if windows ever solved that issue after people brought it up and Linus from Linus tech tips complained to Microsoft.

switch to enterprise if you havent already. enterprise is the only version from “0” data collection mode in Group Policy.

use this for activation: https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts

How trustable is this script?

Check the code yourself

If I were that code literate I wouldn’t have asked would I?

its the most recommended one on r/piracy and FMHY.

Here’s another one, its created by a mydigitallife forum member https://github.com/abbodi1406/KMS_VL_ALL_AIO

Thank you.

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

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