Are Toshiba Notebooks 'Phoning Home'?

Tangential notes puzzledly: "At our company (software consulting) we equip our consultants with Toshiba notebooks. I received this message today from one of our consultants who was just upgraded to a new Satellite Pro 4300 ... 'My new Toshiba laptop appears to call home. While working on something else I opened port 1214 on my firewall and started monitoring it with a packet sniffer. To my amazement, I see my laptop communicating with a Toshiba server on that port. Are you guys aware of this?'... Has anybody else seen this behavior? Is this some new 'support' feature? Does anybody care?" Curious Toshiba notebooks owners, speak up!

Comments

Might be something else entirely

[Anonymous Coward]

The company I work for uses a program called computrace on our Dell Machines. This is an asset tracking and theft recovery tool. It loads from the MBR at boot time into memeoery and calls home on a schedule to report its where abouts. So if the machine is stolen, or otherwise not where it oughta be(lots of departments seem to raid other departments for equipment around here) it can be recovered. Our users don't know its there, infact I think only about 12 of us total know its there.

Not just toshiba: here's how to tell

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a satellite and it took three tries to kill off *most* of this behaviour. I had to recover from the rescue CD several times, but here's what I found... and it was ugly.

I'd seen this kind of stuff before with netscape and that talkbalk client they used, but simply renaming the filename.exe to nofilename.exe usually did the trick. Works great with find fast, btw.

However, for a good time, look through the registry. Toshiba stuffs so many URLS into this system that I felt like my laptop was a giant banner ad.

The registry has a nice search function - and while I was surprised at the amount of stuff I found, it made me wonder how much more is hidden elsewhere in the system.

Simply use the registry search function to search for "www" or ".com" or "http:" or "https:" - you'll see things that'll make you tremble. Real Player is the worst, followed by Microsoft. ALL software today phones home, so remember to install adobe.com and microsoft.com in your hosts file and alias them to 127.0.0.1 as well.

I simply replaced most of the addresses I found with either 127.0.0.1/whatever. It certainly prevents my laptop from chattering away when I don't expect it. I don't look forward to XP.

Dunno if this has anything to do with it but...

[True Dork]

port 1214 is also the port used by KaZaA and MusicCity's Morpheus for the direct semi-gnutella style communication for the file sharing network. Are you running either? Is it possible that it was a coincidence that you were on this system as well as someone from Toshiba?

Is it "VirtualTech"?

[Lish]

Perhaps it has something to do with this? The 4300 is listed as one of the models it's installed on. Might be a starting place to look, anyway. Here is a "white paper" on it.

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Re:Wipe the hard drive...

[Rick the Red]

As soon as a new system shows up here at work, I immediately wipe the hard drive and do a clean installation.

Even the laptops? That's what this is, a laptop. Where do you get the hardware-specific drivers? I loaded WinME on a wiped-clean IBM 600 laptop and it loaded just fine, but it didn't really work right until I downloaded all the IBM patches and BIOS upgrades, essentially turning my over-the-counter copy of WinME into an IBM-Specific OEM copy of WinME. If Toshiba laptops run with over-the-counter Windows, that's a neat trick. Usually no two laptops from any given manufacturer share the same drivers, let alone use the generic drivers provided by Microsoft (if they share the same drivers they ususally have the same model number; IBM has dozens of "Model 600" laptops because each one requires a different driver mix).