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How does Windows decide whether your computer has full Internet access?

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: How does Windows decide whether your computer has full Internet access?

#141

Post by lloydatkinson »

brirec wrote: post #133
albertopv wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows experience is worse and worse. On my Windows 10 company provided PC I found games installed remotely. In a professional PC! A friend of mine found Spotify installed [1]. That's insane. [1] https://www.windowslatest.com/2022/09/28/spotify-app-is-auto...

I’m not saying it makes it okay, but the “Professional for Workstations” edition does not have any sort of sponsored start menu items or auto-installs.

Does workstation edition have the same dumb properties as LTSC such as "Visual Studio won't install because reasons" or any other restrictions?

Re: How does Windows decide whether your computer has full Internet access?

#142

Post by tveyben »

divbzero wrote: post #87

I suppose you could spoof having full Internet access by hosting nsci.txt or connecttest.txt locally and editing your hosts file to direct www.msftncsi.com or www.msftconnecttest.com to 127.0.0.1 ? Conversely, if those Microsoft websites ever failed, countless Windows machines would determine that they have limited or no Internet access.

   Not if they parse the payload of the response
   Yes if they only use the http status
(I Think they rely on the payload…)

Re: How does Windows decide whether your computer has full Internet access?

#143

Post by jeroenhd »

mrjin wrote: post #53

Not sure when Micro$oft can stop such abusive moves. Why the user have to be able connect to your endpoint to prove they are connected? Why keep nagging me to set active hours coz I regularly use my computer 8am to 6pm? Anyway, won't be my problem much longer.

Every competent UI does this.

http://connectivity-check.ubuntu.com/, https://nmcheck.gnome.org/check_network_status.txt, http://captive.apple.com/hotspot-detect.html, http://connectivitycheck.gstatic.com/generate_204, http://www.archlinux.org/check_network_status.txt, http://networkcheck.kde.org/

You can disable the checks if you want. Any application that uses the operating system API/DBus to evaluate network connectivity rather than building its own bespoke online check will probably break if you do, though.

Because all of these have to use HTTP, you can also easily override the standard network addresses in your hosts file and pick your own server if that's what you prefer.

Re: How does Windows decide whether your computer has full Internet access?

#144

Post by GlitchMr »

tech234a wrote: post #52

I believe Nintendo uses http://conntest.nintendowifi.net/ for their consoles. Edit: an update (3.0.0) to the Switch changed it to http://ctest.cdn.nintendo.net/ but I can't seem to access it from a web browser.

For ctest to work, it's necessary to start your User-Agent string with "NX NIFM/" (the console itself sends "NX NIFM/00" as an User-Agent string).

Re: How does Windows decide whether your computer has full Internet access?

#145

Post by 867-5309 »

tveyben wrote: post #132
unnah wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was becoming common knowledge that you could disconnect your machine from networks during installation to use Windows with a local account (i.e. the normal kind of user account that people have used for decades). Microsoft wants people to register online during installation and to use the online account on all their computers, in order to increase the market share of the Windows app store and other Microsoft onlin…

- This is My procedure (with Lan) to obtain a local Account on W10 Install Windows 10 and go through the OOBE - Select Region - Select Keyboard Layout - SKIP Secondary keyboard layout - Network connection - ENABLE Allow PC to be discoverable - Setup = For personal use - Account = Offline account - like old times - a completely standalone PC - Sign in = Limited experience - ignore the nudging to make an online account…

you can just skip enabling internet. weirdly, on some machines this results in a reboot, but it's fine

Re: How does Windows decide whether your computer has full Internet access?

#146

Post by jeroenhd »

gerdesj wrote: post #11

This really gets on my nerves! Some twit of a programmer (probably via a committee) "knows" whether a system has connectivity. For some people Facebook is the internet and for others it is Outlook. Somehow a twiddler at MS has decided that a file on a web server at some wanky location is the internet and that's the final answer. "I cn haz a file" is fine lovely internets! No it bloody well isn't. You should be constr…

The beauty of Windows is that everything is configurable through the registry if you look up the documentation. Usually you don't want to configure everything so in these cases Windows comes with sane defaults, but Microsoft has a way to override the URL that's being checked. See this article from eight years ago: https://www.ghacks.net/2014/02/07/disable-customize-windows-...

If you need some complicated algorithm, write a quick simple web server that runs on 127.123.45.67 and does all of these checks for you when the magical portal URL is requested. Then update your registry to point to that IP (or use hacks like editing your hosts file) and you've just added your special logic to every WinHTTP application on your computer. You can even point Windows to an endpoint only reachable over VPN if you want so the Internet check becomes "is my VPN operational", though that may break the VPN software itself.

Microsoft did a good enough job for all normal use cases of the Internet. Bespoke use cases need bespoke solutions, and they provide the ability to set that up without hacks if you want to change the standard behaviour.

Re: How does Windows decide whether your computer has full Internet access?

#147

Post by [deleted] »

thelittleone wrote: post #131
gambiting wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, sorry, but I consider that malicious. The OS can create a local account but doesn't give you that option specifically to make you create a windows Live account. That is almost textbook definition of malicious for me.

What's may be more surprising than their malice is your surprise at their malice. These 'dark patterns' are so numerous now it's exhausting to remain duly outraged. I hope there's a future (or alternate universe) where dark patterns, such as this, result in economic loss rather than economic gain.

[deleted]

Re: How does Windows decide whether your computer has full Internet access?

#148

Post by jeroenhd »

r1ch wrote: post #51

Unfortunately it's not that simple. On my system with bridges for hyper-v and wireguard tunnels, the NCSI service happily ignores my default route and tries to establish connectivity through one of the other devices when resuming from sleep. It wouldn't be that bad if it was just the status indicator, but several apps refuse to work properly if "internet" isn't detected. The workaround is to disable every other adapt…

Why not point NCSI to a host that's always reachable, like a local web server? There's a lot of configuration you can do to the connection check service that won't get your antivirus all anxious (i.e. https://www.ghacks.net/2014/02/07/disable-customize-windows-...)

Re: How does Windows decide whether your computer has full Internet access?

#150

Post by tlaundal »

askvictor wrote: post #119
bombcar wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They use more than that, I've seen it on the wire (to prevent DNS caching I believe). http://neverssl.com also works And https://1.1.1.1 breaks people's brains if they know enough

Even more fun: https://16843009

And there's https://1.1
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