Windows pc calling home (even while asleep)
Windows pc calling home (even while asleep)
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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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.
The thing is, the device was in suspend for a couple days now.
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.
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.
I have only seen like 1 device ever that actually stops trying to ping the internet when it's in suspend mode, and it was 1 smart TV. My other smart TV pings domains regardless. If you want a device to stop being connected then simply shut it down.
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.
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?
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.
You had me in the first half
What do you mean?
including when you're sleeping