Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
I have a network-wide pi hole and I noticed that it requested activity.windows.com, a url blocked by my pi hole, even while my pc is suspended. I pinged 10.0.0.217 and it is currently unreachable. So, somehow, windows pc’s turn on networking, phones home, and turns off even while suspended.
Creepy behavior
Honestly if you're still trying to find workaround for Microsofts crap at this point - just switch to Linux.
At this point for me, trying to get games working on Linux has become easier than trying to get telemetry to stop working on Windows.
And since Ive never bought the problematic games before it's so much easier for me.
I'd encourage anyone to ditch the crappy anticheat broken crap and just go back to playing good high quality games.
I game on Linux every day.
I wish multiplayer worked across the board but it’s whatever. I don’t have time for it any way haha.
Oh, my daily driver is a linux, i just have a spare surface book 3 i use occasionally for gaming (the thing is surprisingly powerful)
Idk how well linux would support detaching and touchscreen with pen. But I’ll definitely switch the os to linux sometime in the future when i get a new gaming rig.
I am using linux-surface on my surface book 2, works perfectly. BUT the webcam doesn't work :-)
I have a convertible laptop with pen and it works fine.
Is this machine by any chance a recent laptop?
Newer laptops with Intel cpu (not sure about AMD) don't have a real sleep mode anymore. Instead, they have a mode where, besides the ram, the cpu and the network device are also kept alive for communication.
In theory, this means that when you wake up your device all of your apps and stuff will already be updated with the latest information from the web with little battery loss. In practice, it just overheats your laptop while in your backpack and kills the battery.
The ping you see while it is "sleeping" might be from this.
It's such a dumb fucking feature too.
"Oh god forbid my email client and messaging app refresh 5 seconds after I wake my laptop instead of being already refreshed"
Who actually cares? Who on earth asked for this zombie sleep state?
Nobody asked for it. And it's not like they add anything people ask for (or remove things people ask them to get rid of) anyway.
Macbooks are the same way. I have one of my System Bots running on my work laptop (now that I can get away with it) and it wakes up... let me see... somewhere between every half hour to three hours, whether I want it to or not.
This "always on" bullshit is frustrating.
Don't forget the added feature of your laptop overheating and crashing when you put it into your backpack.
Or my personal favorite is when it doesn't overheat and crash it drains 20% of it's battery in 15 minutes then goes into hibernation.
I think the worst part is not that they added it, but that they removed regular S3.
Linus explored that bug, it's not so much with recent laptops as it is with Windows sleep in general. For some god forsaken reason, if your laptop is connected to a network while plugged in and you put it to sleep, and then unplug your laptop from the power, it will burn through its battery and die. This doesn't happen if you unplug your laptop before you put it into sleep mode. My guess is that while it's plugged in, Windows thinks it's fine for it to run a bit hotter, but when you unplug it while it's in sleep mode, it doesn't realise it's not plugged in anymore and drains the battery. Idk how they have still not fixed this after many years, but it is still a problem.
Here's Microsoft's information page on it:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/modern-standby
As the time goes I just miss my old laptop more and more. What's next, no shutdown feature?
Same for most AMD laptops as well.
Sleep is no longer what it used to be. They killed off S3 sleep in favor of some always connected mode, much like you cell phone.
Which has its pros and cons, but that still doesn't mean it should invade your privacy.
I only learned this during the pandemic when i started working from home and my work laptop would wake up at 1am, fans blasting 100%
Or my laptop would wake up in my backpack during my commute and drain the whole battery...
I opened a helpdesk ticket and they didnt know why. Their solution was "just turn off your laptop"....
After doing my owm digging, i realized S3 was gone and windows just does whatever the fuck it wants
Oh god another one of these posts...
When pihole blocks a dns request, devices often keep trying to connect until the connection is successful. So yea, no shit it's ginna keep trying to query that domain repeatedly, including when you're sleeping.
The thing is, the device was in suspend for a couple days now.
Modern sleep modes are internet connected, with the intent to allow systems to perform updates while sleeping.
I don't like it but that's how it's designed to work.
aka S0 sleep/Modern Standby.
It has some legitimate benefits like returning from sleep immediately. Kinda want it on linux but without all the telemetry crap (but it's really, really hard to pull of at an OS level)
So, let me grasp your comment, are you saying that this is not creepy at all?
EDIT: To clarify, I find both things creepy, the telemetry and the insistence to ping home no matter what.
The fact that windows has so much telemetry is creepy yes. The fact that it will keep trying to ping the domain when blocked is not creepy and is basic tech functionality.
are you saying that this is not creepy at all?
Definitely creepy that it phones home in the first place.
But it's not necessarily creepy that it keeps trying; it could just be sloppy programming. Hanlon's Razor comes to mind. Microsoft Teams behaved in a similar way apparently. If you blocked it phoning home at the network level it would buffer gigabytes of data on disk until the disk was full.
My Windows 10 machine comes up from sleep when nobody is anywhere near it. Seems weird to me. Also sometimes I wake it, sign in and the folder Music>Pictures (the regular Pictures folder… for some reason that’s where it is) is open in explorer. Couldn’t figure out whether it’s malware or Microsoft.
Go to your NIC's properties and scroll down to disable WAKE ON MAGIC PACKETS.
If you have any device that scans for your MAC (probably your router) it will wake up. Drove me crazy until I figured it out
Yeah, that sounds like ghosts.
Come on man, he probably just misses his mom.
switch to enterprise if you havent already. enterprise is the only version from "0" data collection mode in Group Policy.
use this for activation: https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
Yeah. It's amazing how my windows laptop, whilst sleeping, whirrs all its fans up on the middle of the night. I am not suggesting that is it sending out telemetry, but it is fucking infuriating for sleep to mean anything other than "stop doing anything until I tell you to wake up".
That is because recent laptops don't "sleep" like before with s4 (hybernate) or other sx.
They have some sort of tucking clock waiting for windows to wake up to check for updates.
In theory it allows to keep everything up to date while people are not working.
However un proactice, it drains battery and overheats laptops, because Microsoft implemented that feature like crap, or the partners did some stupid things.
It was supposed to only activate when the laptop was plugged in. However if the laptop was plugged in, put on sleep, then unplugged, windows still believed that the laptop was plugged in.
Now I don't know if windows ever solved that issue after people brought it up and Linus from Linus tech tips complained to Microsoft.
Windows... With this only word you already have all the abswers
Thanks pihole!
(Also, hibernate > sleep imo )
Shutdown is hybrid sleep anyway. Best of both worlds.
Also FYI you have to restart to properly shut down Windows now. If you shut down and then turn it back on it will just resume from S4 hybrid sleep. Shut down does not normally shut down, it enters a zero power sleep state. Restart actually shuts down and reboots the OS.
I think hybernation is really meant for when you want near zero power but a little trickle for something specific to wake the PC, eg an external device or network port. You can also sometimes do this directly in BIOS, if it has the facility.