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Comment by jakobdabo | Hacker News Reader

I have to use Windows once in a while (circumstances).

Best way to forget about the existence of spyware (aka telemetry) that I found is to not connect a Windows box directly to internet. I configured my router to give it a gateway and DNS IPs which don't exist in the network. Eat that, Microsoft. And I can still connect to internet by manually setting a SOCKSv5a proxy to the router in Firefox and other software that I trust (make sure there is no automatic proxy discovery mechanism in the router).

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Since the 21H1 update you might start noticing connection drops since a new wlan autoconfig feature has been added: if windows can't ping home reliably, it will restart your nic.

Yep.

I don't think the reason for this is malicious. Back in 2012-2018 many Windows laptops belonging to friends and relatives had frequent WiFi issues. The only reliable way to fix the issue was to restart the NIC.

RedHat's NetworkManager already does something pretty similar [1].

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NetworkManager#Checking_con...

Link please? I run Windows for work, which includes connecting to industrial networks with no Internet connectivity. If this happens, it's going to be a nightmare.

Sorry for the delay.. I actually couldn't find any official docs on this feature but this thread covers the bases:

https://www.tenforums.com/network-sharing/178379-disable-wla...

And it appears it may be part of 20h2, not 21h1 update.

Damn, that's hostility on another level. Do you have a link to more reading on this?

Sorry for the delay.. I actually couldn't find any official docs on this feature but this thread covers the bases:

https://www.tenforums.com/network-sharing/178379-disable-wla...

And it appears it may be part of 20h2, not 21h1 update.

Thanks for the link! I'm searching for 'reboot' and 'restart' but I don't see anything mentioned about rebooting -- only a restart of the network service. Are you sure it actually reboots the PC?

No, it restarts the wlan interface, not the entire pc.

Whoops, I somehow read nic as pc! Thanks.

Wow! Thank you for that tip. Block the machine's internet access with a firewall but connect the browsers over a SOCKS proxy.

I mean, I do have a couple of containers up and running on a Raspberry Pi offering nothing but intranet SSH services while the containers are connected via OpenVPN to differnt VPN servers, so that I can use different browsers which connect via SOCKS each to one container in order to have one browser per country on one machine.

It never occurred to me that I can use this same technique (but without OpenVPN) in order to disallow that machine to connect to the internet but still have a working browser...

Make sure to manually download the Windows patches every Tuesday, since Windows Update won't work by itself.

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