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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."
It is possible to disable NCSI by a registry setting if you don’t want Microsoft to be able to check your internet connection.
* HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NlaSvc\Parameters\Internet
* Under the Internet key, double-click EnableActiveProbing, and then in Value data, type: 0.The default for this value is 1. Setting the value to 0 prevents NCSI from connecting to a site on the Internet during checks for connectivity.
Yet another interesting obscure registry key to target for spyware-malware... the registry database is source of all evil on Windows since his creation....
It's even worse on iPad ::
Even with push notification/email/find my ipad feature turned off, it still try to connect to any known WIFI network or 3G network behind your back. (Ever wonder why you always get your wifi connection instantly right after waking it up?) You can't disable it unless you put it on an airplane mode.
Microsoft is still a bit better than Apple here. With Microsoft you can change the ping URL, the same can't be said for iPad.
iPad is the ultimate spyware.
On my N900 I made a similar shellscript that outputs to a desktop widget. It tries to fetch Google.com using the domain name and via a static IP, and based on that it can tell me if the connection's totally dead, uses a captive portal, has bad DNS, or if it's a good working connection. Very handy for mooching off unsecured and public wifi. I just click a widget and know all about the connection I'm on.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Seriously, I know it's hip to hate MS, but why pretend that this is spyware? It's a very nice feature. Whenever I'm traveling and trying to connect to my company VPN from a hotel or airport or restaurant or whatever, it lets me know immediately if I need to open my browser to do so. Back in the XP days, I would just spend a few minutes wondering if I mistyped the WPA key before figuring it out.
It's not like there's any personal info being transmitted. All they know is that a computer running W7 has connected to the internet with a given IP address. Not exactly the most useful information. The logs are probably only kept to help them debug the service.
You laugh at people who get tricked by those "Your computer may be broadcasting an IP address!" malware banners. Why complain about this?
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9752344&tstart=0#9752344
http://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html
those who have privacy concerns for this , no doubt happily use an iphone all day long....
They can't possibly just have a privacy concern you either agree with, disagree with, or don't care about. No, no, no that's not how we do things around here. There has to be something wrong with them too. We're trying to imply that there has to be some flaw, something wrong with someone who takes a pro-privacy position.
Your suggestion that they'd happily use another device with privacy concerns of its own would mean they're hypocrites. Yes, that will do. We'll matter-of-factly portray pro-privacy as the position of hypocrites. The very best thing about this is that it's all about emotional appeal so it's difficult to reason against it.
So difficult, in fact, that sooner or later you'll start sincerely spewing the same bullshit yourself. 'Course you won't have much time left for actually explaining why you disagree with a pro-privacy position, but for you I suppose that has its advantages. Ad hominems are great fun, aren't they?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Are you serious? All you have to do is look at his posting history to determine that he is in fact probably *not* an astroturfing shill. Paranoid much?
That said, I thought this was obvious. The very first time I got that 'no Internet access' message, I reasoned that Windows had to determine this by connecting to a known server, certainly a Microsoft one. It's the same troubleshooting step that I take myself when diagnosing a connection failure - I login to the router and use its tools to ping google or something (to eliminate computer configuration problems).
This shouldn't be surprising, or particularly important.
privacy concerns? they know your IP from windows update!
- open task manager - goto processes - kill any programs that I don't need (like Compaq Assistant, Adobe Launcher, etc) - kill any services I don't need - make explorer High priority
It frees RAM and makes the computer run faster (less hard drive swapping). Hopefully this internet "IP recorder" service is one of those things I kill off. Although now that I know how to do it permanently, I'll do that instead.
Spoiling mod points to call you an idiot.
Start > Run > MSCONFIG
Turn off the programs and services you don't need so you don't HAVE to kill them every time you boot up, and making Explorer high priority isn't going to really do much for you.
This "IP recorder" thing is just your computer testing for an active internet connection by actually running a real DNS query and actually contacting a real server somewhere rather than assuming your internet works because the interface is up.
Shush! Don't inject logic into the discussion - let the zealots show the world how paranoia and hate infects the Linux world. After a while you realize why ordinary people don't want to use Linux if there's a risk of becoming one of these losers.
I'm all for privacy, but what is the concern with this feature? Nobody has said that it includes any identifying information in the request, so the only thing Microsoft knows is that someone behind that IP is running Windows. They can't track you (there's no way of knowing that a request the next day from a different location is from the same copy of Windows) and there's no way to map a request to a particular person or computer, so I'm struggling to think of any way the data could be used maliciously.
> This shouldn't be surprising, or particularly important.
Agreed. There is a general antipathy towards MSFT here, but this is a fairly innocuous and important thing for almost everyone. The very few people who have serious concerns about it also can use very restrictive firewalls or change a setting. No big deal.
Also, after the article referenced in this story yesterday, Microsoft could be reading my credit card and bank statements and taking daily webcam photos through my machine, and they still would not even 1% creepy, comparatively.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
My Grandma uses Linux. I installed it for her, yes, but I wouldn't expect her to install Windows or any OS for that matter. I didn't have to touch the CLI to install it. I enabled auto-updates, showed her how to "open the Internet", and where the "app store" is. It's been 2 years. She "accidentally" upgraded to the next LTS release by herself, with no CLI -- A single button click...
My Brother, Uncle & Aunt all use Windows. In the same space of time, They've each gotten infected with malware at least twice, some more than others. Two of them have shelled out cold hard cash for Win7 because "it's more secure than Vista", had to take the computer to a technician to do the "upgrade" for them, and both of them have been infected with malware on for Win7.
Grandma tried to use my Uncle's computer -- She said, "Can you make the mouse less shaky, dear, I have shaky hands and I end up making the files disappear" (she means accidentally dragging them into adjacent folders) -- Gnome has drag & drop threshold... My Uncle's OS's window manager doesn't... her response: "Well, just turn it off and on again and go into the Linux." -- She was a bit upset that my Uncle B. didn't have "the Linux"... "Well why don't you have it? It doesn't cost anything, and the whole screen can zoom in when it's hard for me to read..."
She has a point -- it is free, why not have a dual boot just in case the other OS gets hosed?
My 75 year old neighbor started using Linux last year. He couldn't use a CLI to save his life. Same story as my Grandma -- Now they call me to shoot the shit, not guiltily ask me to remove malware -- My brother and uncle have both asked me to install Linux on their computers at the father's day family get together.
Please -- Stop spreading FUD. If these barely computer literate people can use Linux just as well as they can use Windows, I don't see what all the fuss is about.
I always wonder when one of you idiots is going to pounce on some pro-Linux post and accuse the poster of being a shill so everyone can see how perceptively cynical you are. I expect I'll be waiting a while.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Google makes most of their money off giving their users as little privacy as possible so their targeted ads become even more valuable to advertisers.
Microsoft makes most of their money by making people and organisations pay for using their software. They could care less about digging clients private information. Bing is a bit of a different story, but bing is just a small division inside microsoft that has very little connection with windows division, which is what we're talking about here.
Aforementioned difference in income models makes for all the difference in the world when it comes to being a threat to privacy.
The distros turn this behavior off. On Debian and Ubuntu, Firefox, Thunderbird, and VLC have their self-autoupdate disabled (and is non-trivial to enable). If you download the standalone binary and install it yourself, it has the autoupdate feature turned on. Same for Windows.
All 3 programs have a checkbox to turn that feature off if you really think it's intrusive to your privacy.
And also, since Windows XP, Windows has come with an NTP client on by default, set to their time server. So they've been "spying" on your IP address for a long time!
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Seriously? How do you plan to map "There is a Windows 7 machine at 192.160.3.14" to "Bob@hotmail.com logged on from 192.160.3.14" without also getting incredibly confused when "Mary@hotmail.com logged on from 192.160.3.14" at virtually the same time? After all, 192.160.3.14 is a Comcast web proxy server, and THOUSANDS of people are using it.
Let's also say that 50% of the 240M licenses sold at October last year connect to the Internet. And retrieve the page every 15m on average (TFA are unclear on the frequency, but my experience suggests a few minutes is about right). That's 480M log lines per hour (at 64 bytes each say?) or nearly 700GB a day. Why on earth would you bother trying to match that against the dozens of TB of hotmail, MSN or other logs? What possible advantage is there in knowing that the Win7 machine checked in with NCSI ... when you already know it was a Win7 machine at hotmail, because the OS version is in the HTTP headers!?
If you customized the url to your own personal server this could be very helpful in tracking down a stolen laptop.
MS has LONG been using our information. And they SELL IT TO HIGHEST BIDDER. You can get information about MS's customers if you pay them (name, addr, and phone). OTH, Google will NOT give you the information that you want (say name, addr, phone). They WILL use the data to target ads at you, but then again, so does Apple, MS, Yahoo, amazon, e-bay, etc.
You do know there are companies that sell Linux products, including Linux support, right? You can shill anything that makes someone money. Shit, you can shill free stuff you developed for ego gratification if you really want.
Seriously if your friend is that paranoid you would be better off just getting him a tinfoil hat.