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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?

#191

Post by jonathantf2 »

albertopv wrote: post #127
photoGrant wrote: post #2

Doing this during a Windows 11 install will result in a road block until you fix said connection issues. You literally can't proceed without finding a hidden terminal and disabling the process and restarting. Insane.

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...

Your company hasn't set it up properly then, there's an option to "disable consumer experiences" (https://admx.help/?Category=Windows_10_2016&Policy=Microsoft...)

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

#192

Post by intelVISA »

Kwpolska wrote: post #183
intelVISA wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet access is when your machine can exfiltrate data to Redmond, CA.

Yeah, right. The Redmond you’re thinking of is in Washington, BTW.

Never was good at geography, thx :)

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

#193

Post by joxel »

database64128 wrote: post #187
vladvasiliu wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that. The account it creates is somehow "special". I have not yet figured out a way to connect to a computer with an MS account via RDP (yes, RDP is on and allowed through the firewall, the user is a local admin (the default)). Ditto for accessing that PC's shares.

You have to delete the PIN it forced you to create during OOBE. This forces the system to apply your MSA's password to the actual account. Without this step, the account has no password. You can still recreate the PIN afterwards and it won't delete the password.

Lmfao, how does a company with the resources of Microsoft be so bad at writing an OS. Mind blowing.

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

#194

Post by sour-taste »

rightbyte wrote: post #188

Why do I get the feeling Raymond is the only human at Microsoft? Does he have some kind of special deal to be able to be one? Writing all these cozie Windows trivia blog posts. That I like. Why is he not smashed by some manager? Could everyone else do this if they liked?

He's been around a long time and likely built up a lot of good will. I strongly suspect that he does these blog posts as a side project and is encouraged by management because they are popular and people like them. It would be foolish of a manager to kill something that people like.

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

#195

Post by iggldiggl »

fulafel wrote: post #173
iggldiggl wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without NAT I don't necessarily want any old program to be immediately immediately reachable from the outside, so I still want a default-deny inbound firewall, and as long as it happens under your control, there's not much of a difference between having to configure my router's NAT and having to configure its firewall (in the case of my home router it's literally the same settings page). I.e. no big deal for me,…

Are you referring to port forwarding? This can work around only a small part of the stuff NAT breaks, and even for those it covers it's a major barrier to application adoption. A new application relying network effects needs to work for the vast majority of users to be able to take off. If you prevent 30-50% of users adopting it, it's not going to take off for example in gaming or communications / sharing apps. For e…

Well yes, NAT might pose some additional constraints, but my main line of argument is that even in an alternative timeline where we never had the IPv4 address shortage and therefore no pressure to develop NAT because every device can be assigned its own address just as is possible now with IPv6, we might still have ended up with default-deny-inbound firewalls for home networks anyway, because it might have turned out that letting random programs run world-accessible serves on random computers without any special user authorisation isn't such a good idea.

IPv6 doesn't require NAT, but my bog standard home router still firewalls it, and I need to manually allow inbound connections (or give up and just use UPnP).

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

#196

Post by majkinetor »

lzooz wrote: post #180
majkinetor wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not my experience and you can't just imagine number like that. I am currently on basic OS install without anything in between and it doesn't work. I just switched from home router to my phone's hotspot and its the same. It seems its not only Windows problem. Viber desktop has exclamation icon and it will persist until it is restarted, Mattermost works, Signal works etc. Check it out: https://i.imgur.com/Oi5gm…

What happens when you try to load http://www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt or http://www.msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt ? If they don't load for you you probably modified your install with shutup10, block microsoft domains using your firewall or /etc/hosts or something else and you're out of support.

I can access those files, like I said

    irm http://www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt
    Microsoft NCSI

    irm http://www.msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt
    Microsoft Connect Test
I had this on number of Windows computers, private and corporate. Almost all of them don't have anything like OSU10, simplefirewall etc.

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

#197

Post by DoctorOW »

sour-taste wrote: post #194
rightbyte wrote: post #188

Why do I get the feeling Raymond is the only human at Microsoft? Does he have some kind of special deal to be able to be one? Writing all these cozie Windows trivia blog posts. That I like. Why is he not smashed by some manager? Could everyone else do this if they liked?

He's been around a long time and likely built up a lot of good will. I strongly suspect that he does these blog posts as a side project and is encouraged by management because they are popular and people like them. It would be foolish of a manager to kill something that people like.

I'd argue Microsoft management has been perfectly fine killing off things people like.

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

#198

Post by ryandrake »

Kwpolska wrote: post #182
fulafel wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they still unknowingly suffer from the harm it did to network effects and ability to deploy new types of internet apps.

I do not want my home computer to be exposed to the Internet. I do not want your fancy new Internet apps, the existing ones with explicit user-initiated connectivity are more than enough for 99% of people. And even if you somehow have a non-NAT, non-CGNAT, no-ISP-filtering home connection, do you have full Internet access if the server behind NowhereNews.com refuses all your connections because you’re in Europe?

You probably know this but NAT is not the same thing as a firewall. You can have one without the other or both. Just because your machine is addressable doesn’t mean it is accessible. You can have machines on your home LAN that have public IP addresses but are not publicly accessible. NAT exists because historically ISPs didn’t give out blocks of public IP addresses, and now that they are running out of them, they are expensive. It’s not really a security measure.

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

#199

Post by xxs »

unnah wrote: post #120
josephcsible wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What explanation other than malice is there for Microsoft not giving you that button all the time?

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…

that's tying, an anti competitive feature. Illegal too

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

#200

Post by loginatnine »

woodruffw wrote: post #44
httpz wrote: post #38

I'm not sure if it's still in use but iPhones used to hit http://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html to test connectivity. I used to use it to test connectivity on my own apps because Apple is probably better at making sure a url reachable than I am.

I believe they hit http://captive.apple.com now (and that's what I use).

For french speaking gals/guys, there's http://perdu.com too (lost.com basically)
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