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Windows pc calling home (even while asleep)
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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
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.
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.