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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?

#271

Post by thaneross »

LocalH wrote: post #245
RunSet wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are so quick to assume malice whenever a multinational conglomerate practices deception in pursuit of profit. Whatever happened to engaging in good faith?

The pursuit of profit, purely for the sake of profit and no other goal, is malicious.

I think most people don't realize this given how normalized it is. Wealth is a mechanism of distributing limited resources, and thus profit seeking without concern for externalities or creating value makes everyone else worse off.

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

#272

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

ddlutz wrote: post #269
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #39

Two things I’ve always wanted to do is figure out how to cache windows updates on my local network without an enterprise windows install, and how to block windows updates by sinkholing domains and/or ip addresses (I work in IT security). Can anyone give any tips on either of these?

I'm surprised "in-home router-level network caching" hasn't become a thing, really. Lets say you have a family of 4, all with iphones that need updating, windows updates, downloading same games from steam, app store, etc. It could be significantly sped up for whole house to download file 1 time instead of 4.

I believe Microsoft use BitTorrent to distribute updates. It took me a while to realise that many Linux distros use unencrypted http to enable caching, using signature checks to verify file integrity

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

#273

Post by gregoryl »

dixie_land wrote: post #259
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…

> but several apps refuse to work properly if "internet" isn't detected For me it's very bad code smell when the developers try to check some sort of a global flag ("has internet") instead of just perform the action (eg send http request) and fail gracefully

You can mess around with that description to understand the reasoning.

Why maintain code to duplicate functionality that is provided by the OS? Can I be more reliable than Microsoft?

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

#274

Post by pqs »

twerkmonsta wrote: post #231
DoctorOW wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Genuinely curious what Microsoft products people actually like? VS code might be the only one I’ve ever heard of.

ToDo

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

#275

Post by borissk »

vetinari wrote: post #222
borissk wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works perfectly well for 99.9999% of the users. The few exceptions are people with proxy servers, virtual machines and other exotic network configs.

"Exotic" network config, like having the default hyper-v adapter present? That one, that windows creates automatically once you enable hyper-v?

Mate, you live in a bubble (as everyone else). There are over a billion Windows PCs out there, how many of them do you think have hyper-v enabled? Keep in mind that even among the small minority of users who have a hypervisor installed VirtualBox, VmWare and Qemu are a lot more popular than hyper-v.

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

#276

Post by Eleison23 »

Mogzol wrote: post #28
silisili wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just fire off a DNS request ? Not blocked by captive portals, and you get free caching.

The whole point is to determine if you have full internet access, so you want to make sure that an HTTP request returns the data you're expecting. You may be able to get DNS responses but not have full internet access, like when on a public wifi that redirects all requests to a login page.

What is "full" Internet access?

I mean really, what does it mean to you, or to Windows, that I have "full" access to the Internet?

For me personally, I only visit a few walled gardens, so as long as I had my Google, my Wikipedia, and my work-related sites, I wouldn't miss 99.99% of the Internet anyway.

But what if your ISP blocks a whole bunch of ports? What if Adware has taken over 33% of your DNS space? What if you're behind a Great Firewall of ? What if there's some sort of Balkanization or segmentation of your side of the 'net and you can't reach a lot of stuff? What if Cloudflare's down again?

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

#277

Post by woojoo666 »

DangitBobby wrote: post #258
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that on these Apple devices the Apple store is literally the only entry point for running actual programs on these devices, I would say it is indeed pretty equivalent to "not being able to setup the computer".

You might have bad information. Very little of the software I run on my Mac comes from the App store. Even if your assertion were accurate... You'd still be able to use Safari, and web browsing accounts for the lion's share of most people's computing needs. So the score is: Windows 11: lay-users can do literally nothing of value with their computer without signing in to an account they probably don't want MacOS: lay-…

franga2000 was saying they bought an iPad, not a Mac

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

#278

Post by mbrodersen »

twerkmonsta wrote: post #231
DoctorOW wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Genuinely curious what Microsoft products people actually like? VS code might be the only one I’ve ever heard of.

Excel is brilliant.

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

#279

Post by vetinari »

borissk wrote: post #275
vetinari wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Exotic" network config, like having the default hyper-v adapter present? That one, that windows creates automatically once you enable hyper-v?

Mate, you live in a bubble (as everyone else). There are over a billion Windows PCs out there, how many of them do you think have hyper-v enabled? Keep in mind that even among the small minority of users who have a hypervisor installed VirtualBox, VmWare and Qemu are a lot more popular than hyper-v.

> Keep in mind that even among the small minority of users who have a hypervisor installed VirtualBox, VmWare and Qemu are a lot more popular than hyper-v.

Keep in mind, that these do require Hyper-V nowadays. Especially if your Windows 10/11 has virtualization-based security enabled (mandatory in 11); then using Hyper-V is the only way to virtualize anything.

Hyper-V is also requirement for WSL2.

So given this, Hyper-V might be enabled on a good chunk of these billion PCs.

It's not that Hyper-V would be my first choice either. But it is not exotic configuration at all, and the fact that it is a first party product which breaks this makes it even weirder.

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

#280

Post by vetinari »

kiwijamo wrote: post #221
majkinetor wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly I've never seen the issue you described on any windows machine on any network anywhere.

I've seen this problem pop in randomly; like having three identically configured VMs, two work fine and in third causing trouble. Good luck finding out why.
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