Spybot Anti-Beacon for Windows 10

[Speccy86]

Hi all,

On some Windows systems, an unexpected side-effect of applying the Optional 'Telemetry Hosts (extensive list)' protection may be the network connection tray icon showing up the yellow triangle and the related "No internet access" warning message, although you have network connectivity.

On affected systems, the reason for that happening is because Spybot Anti-Beacon is blocking traffic to Microsoft's online resources used as the operating system standard test to verify network connectivity (which consists of reading the 'ncsi.txt' text file, confirming its contents are the "Microsoft NCSI" string and confirming that the DNS name resolution for 'dns.msftncsi.com' returns the IP address 131.107.255.255).

Everything goes back to normal once you remove or comment out these two entries:

#0.0.0.0 msftncsi.com
#0.0.0.0 www.msftncsi.com

(out of curiosity, iOS devices perform a similar check to https://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html)

Please note that the only reason I'm posting this (hoping that may help others facing the same issue) is because I'm unaware of those particular online resources being used by Microsoft to any other purpose than simply performing the above described "network connectivity check" test. Unlike the other available protections (such as the main Telemetry Hosts feature and the other optional entries) this doesn't really seem to fit as a privacy annoyance (collecting user data).

Source:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/...8WS.10%29.aspx

[confuddled]

Hi all,

On some Windows systems, an unexpected side-effect of applying the Optional 'Telemetry Hosts (extensive list)' protection may be the network connection tray icon showing up the yellow triangle and the related "No internet access" warning message, although you have network connectivity.

On affected systems, the reason for that happening is because Spybot Anti-Beacon is blocking traffic to Microsoft's online resources used as the operating system standard test to verify network connectivity (which consists of reading the 'ncsi.txt' text file, confirming its contents are the "Microsoft NCSI" string and confirming that the DNS name resolution for 'dns.msftncsi.com' returns the IP address 131.107.255.255).

Everything goes back to normal once you remove or comment out these two entries:

#0.0.0.0 msftncsi.com
#0.0.0.0 www.msftncsi.com

(out of curiosity, iOS devices perform a similar check to https://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html)

Please note that the only reason I'm posting this (hoping that may help others facing the same issue) is because I'm unaware of those particular online resources being used by Microsoft to any other purpose than simply performing the above described "network connectivity check" test. Unlike the other available protections (such as the main Telemetry Hosts feature and the other optional entries) this doesn't really seem to fit as a privacy annoyance (collecting user data).

Source:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/...8WS.10%29.aspx

I installed this program last night and today as above, no internet access symbol although my modem was locked on and showing an IP address. I also couldn't get webpages to load or mail programs to work. What bothers me is that I've been unable to switch off the "optional" blocks, two of them will not undo. In despair I've uninstalled the program hoping it will have taken off the blocks. So far everything seems to be working again. I really dislike programs that you cannot undo what they do. Why are your optional blocks not actually optional once applied?