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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?

#281

Post by doodlesdev »

gregoryl wrote: post #273
dixie_land wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> Can I be more reliable than Microsoft?

Absolutely.

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

#282

Post by TurkishPoptart »

alophawen wrote: post #134
Twisell wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT3 gone bad?

Yes Twisell, opinions not yours is a rogue AI.

Thanks for backing me up on this. Sadly I don’t think anyone agrees with me on this constant “upgrade culture”

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

#283

Post by isthisthingon99 »

pxc wrote: post #247
twerkmonsta wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Windows Terminal (despite the drama with its devs) is actually pretty good. PowerShell is excellent as a scripting language, and has deservedly been a huge influence on shells which have come after it. WSL is extremely frustrating because it has so many bugs and gotchas, but I'd say it's pretty popular with its intended audience.

I was asked to be a developer on powershell when it was still unreleased. Regret does not begin to cover it.

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

#284

Post by majkinetor »

vetinari wrote: post #279
borissk wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Hype…

Exactly.

It might be bubble compared to entire planet, but its still pretty big bubble. Once you have hundreed K users, you should have responsibility to deliver.

Especially becasue people in that bubble are those moving the others forward.

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

#285

Post by Mogzol »

Eleison23 wrote: post #276
Mogzol wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, "full" internet access is a hard to define term and this simple test doesn't cover all possible cases. But it will work in probably 99.99% of cases and honestly I think that's good enough. If it doesn't work you end up with a little "no internet connection" icon in your taskbar and that's about it. You can still use the connection, so I don't think it's a big deal that this test isn't 100% accurate. It's still more useful to the majority of users to have a slightly inaccurate test than to have no test at all.

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

#286

Post by DangitBobby »

woojoo666 wrote: post #277
DangitBobby wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That is true. I guess I missed that we were comparing the operating systems completely across device categories. However, half of what I said still applies since I explicitly mentioned Safari.

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

#287

Post by DangitBobby »

josephcsible wrote: post #263
DangitBobby wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being able to use the app store is pretty different from not being able to setup the computer.

Since iOS doesn't let you sideload apps, it's actually not very different at all.

It has Safari. But I'm curious why we are comparing Windows to iOS instead of it's desktop counterpart.

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

#288

Post by mike_d »

thakoppno wrote: post #239
mike_d wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hosted on the Azure CDN, which is partially Azure datacenters and backed up by Akamai. msftncsi.com is completely on Akamai. Here is a list of Azure operated locations: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cdn/microsoft-pop-ab...

thank you - any guess on the requests/second? and what about the origin behind the cdn? seems like that it’s still rather critical and would have migrated multiple physical hosts over the past 30 years. This sort of thing is fascinating and I do something similar at a much smaller scale at day job, keeping a simple service running that enables the rest of the stack to survive.

No clue on QPS, but it can't be terribly high. It is a single request, compared to the 200+ requests served when someone loads something like CNN.com.

I doubt there is any origin at all. Since the response is so small and never changes it is likely hard coded into the config. Maybe it is a file on a shared object storage.

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

#289

Post by deafpolygon »

pxc wrote: post #250
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".

Can you no longer install free apps from the App Store on a Mac without creating an account or signing in? I thought that used to work.

This hasn't been a thing for a long time. App store requires an iCloud account.

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

#290

Post by deafpolygon »

samb1729 wrote: post #130
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…

> Microsoft wants people to register online [...] in order to increase the market share of the Windows app store and other Microsoft online services > So it's not malicious I would have to firmly disagree there. Microsoft are pushing the notion that an online account with some identity provider is a necessity for home computing by hiding the (perfectly functional) option to create a local account.

The only reason why that functionality is still there at all is to avoid a lawsuit. "See, it's still implemented!"

This is just frog in a boiling pot. Windows (and iOS) is becoming an OS as a service.

Pretty soon you won't be able to use it without paying for something.

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