Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021)

helgeklein.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 296 posts

Re: Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021)

#31

Post by rob_c »

norman784 wrote: post #27

I read a lot of comments here wanting to block the connections, but wouldn’t be easier/better to switch to an OS that doesn’t spy you? The answers possibly is no, because they might use X or Y that requires them to use Windows, so a better question is, what holds you back to switch to Linux? (macOS also talks to a lot of servers and collect telemetry as Windows, maybe in a different scale, so isn’t an alternative if…

> I personally prefer Linux, but what’s holding me are the streaming services

Yes but then these turn off, drop the content you were watching with little/no warning and are unreliable. Buy physical media while you can at least then you have a licence to watch it when you please until the media degrades. (Or better in the territories which allow for backing up across media formats)

Re: Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021)

#32

Post by rob_c »

Gigachad wrote: post #29
cpach wrote: post #10

Anyone feeling tempted to play the Devil’s advocate here? :)

IP address and domain name count mean nothing. Why would you care if windows pinged 1 Microsoft domain vs 20,000. If they are all controlled by the same entity and send the same data, these numbers mean nothing.

Ok so if we all send data to azure it's safe or to ovh that's just fine.

It's not terrifying but it does reveal the scale, this isn't a licence check against something like genuine.microsoft.com this is a completely different scale all together

Re: Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021)

#33

Post by walkingby111723 »

walkingby111723 wrote: post #19
tmdh wrote: post #3

Is there any way to block connection to these sites with DNS or something?

Install free Comodo Internet Security. Disable DNS cache service so that all your apps resolve DNS themselves (can only be done via the registry, change the service's startup type from 2 (auto) to 4 (disabled)). In CIS, create a new group for all files under c:/windows. Create a rule denying all in/out requests to that group. Create a rule allowing only DHCP and NTP requests (255.255.255.255:67 and :123) for svchost.…

No post body was provided.

Re: Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021)

#34

Post by joekrill »

dijit wrote: post #18
mobilio wrote: post #2

I wish to see this also for macOS, iOS and Android.

Aside from fsflovers link; there's a fantastic (paid) firewall software called littlesnitch. You can use it to watch every process send network traffic, you can even collect samples of the traffic and plot it on a map: https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html (not affiliated, just a happy customer; it's one of the few things I like the mac ecosystem for.. there's attempts to port it to linux with https:/…

I've been using this for years and love it, too. But didn't Apple recently make some change to macOS recently that allows many "system" processes to bypass this?

Re: Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021)

#36

Post by [deleted] »

jiggawatts wrote: post #26
mananaysiempre wrote: post #17

There seems to be some degree of overcounting in the reported figures: the number of “hosts” is the number of unique hostnames in the table, but the number of “IPs” is a straightforward sum of IP address counts that the table segregates by service, and I refuse to believe that ( e.g. ) the IP address of login.live.com as resolved by OneDrive is always different from same as resolved by Skype. $ curl -fsSL 'https://he…

> DigiCert’s OCSP service A weakness of the OCSP protocol is that it gets sent the certificate hash as an input. This means that to a significant degree, an OCSP provider can track what software you are using, what sites you visit, etc... For the code signing certificates, they could also determine which year (or two) it came from. DigiCert could sell that to marketing companies, and spy agencies / state-sponsored ha…

[deleted]

Re: Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021)

#37

Post by pmoriarty »

norman784 wrote: post #27

I read a lot of comments here wanting to block the connections, but wouldn’t be easier/better to switch to an OS that doesn’t spy you? The answers possibly is no, because they might use X or Y that requires them to use Windows, so a better question is, what holds you back to switch to Linux? (macOS also talks to a lot of servers and collect telemetry as Windows, maybe in a different scale, so isn’t an alternative if…

Another option to consider is FreeBSD, which can be especially attractive for those of us who want to avoid systemd.

Re: Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021)

#39

Post by jsiepkes »

jiggawatts wrote: post #26
mananaysiempre wrote: post #17

There seems to be some degree of overcounting in the reported figures: the number of “hosts” is the number of unique hostnames in the table, but the number of “IPs” is a straightforward sum of IP address counts that the table segregates by service, and I refuse to believe that ( e.g. ) the IP address of login.live.com as resolved by OneDrive is always different from same as resolved by Skype. $ curl -fsSL 'https://he…

> DigiCert’s OCSP service A weakness of the OCSP protocol is that it gets sent the certificate hash as an input. This means that to a significant degree, an OCSP provider can track what software you are using, what sites you visit, etc... For the code signing certificates, they could also determine which year (or two) it came from. DigiCert could sell that to marketing companies, and spy agencies / state-sponsored ha…

OCSP is indeed broken in many ways.

On the bright side, with the ca/browser forum limiting the max length of a certificate to about a year it would be pretty easy to just use a single revocation list. A CRL 2.0 so to say. Just like the browser downloads the Google safe browsing list.

EDIT: Just to be clear; With CRL 2.0 I don't mean blockchain...

Re: Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021)

#40

Post by dijit »

joekrill wrote: post #34
dijit wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from fsflovers link; there's a fantastic (paid) firewall software called littlesnitch. You can use it to watch every process send network traffic, you can even collect samples of the traffic and plot it on a map: https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html (not affiliated, just a happy customer; it's one of the few things I like the mac ecosystem for.. there's attempts to port it to linux with https:/…

I've been using this for years and love it, too. But didn't Apple recently make some change to macOS recently that allows many "system" processes to bypass this?

Seems like it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24838816

Concerning.

Post reply on HN