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