How Windows 7 Knows About Your Internet Connection

An anonymous reader writes "In Windows 7, any time you connect to a network, Windows tells you if you have full internet access or just a local network connection. It also knows if a WiFi access point requires in-browser authentication. How? It turns out, a service automatically requests a file from a Microsoft website every time you connect to any network, and the result of this attempt tells it whether the connection is successful. This feature is useful, but some may have privacy concerns with sending their IP address to Microsoft (which the site logs, according to documentation) every single time they connect to the internet. As it turns out, not only can you disable the service, you can even tell it to check your own server instead."

Comments

Re:The relevant bits

[atomicbutterfly]

Ok that's a bit harsh. The religious wars should have ended a year ago, but apparently some people think it's still cool to trash one or the other. I'm not a CS grad, and occasionally I need the CLI in Windows too. Computers are evil. GUIs have bugs. CLIs suck if you can't type 80 wpm like hackers can. I'm proud to say that I can use Linux, Windows and MacOS (and any other thing that might be dreamed up) equally well, and I make no criticisms of any OS, except to say that none is perfect.

I've contributed a lot to the open source community, and I'm glad that Linux exists. On the other hand, I don't begrudge Microsoft or Apple for existing, and I recognize that most people prefer to use something that's a little less power-user than Linux.

We need more users like you, seriously. :)

I'm an occasional Linux user, but what pisses me off more than anything is the bashing and hate that comes from the Linux side. They're the minority, and hence have to compensate by whining so much about Microsoft ($ sign included usually) that after 10+ years of this bullshit it's become really grating. It's as if they're unable to convince anyone to use Linux without bashing the competition, and can't convert people solely by positively talking about their distro.

I use Windows because it has the greatest level of software support (commercial or otherwise) and the least level of pain. I mean that last bit - using a variant of the most widely used desktop OS has its benefits in terms of doing the things you want to do, as well as focus and attention on its development. Maybe one day I'll kick it to the curb, but the hoards of Linux zealots aren't going to factor into it. Most of them have horrible technical knowledge about Linux anyway. :)