<story><title>Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021)</title><url>https://helgeklein.com/blog/windows-os-services-apps-network-connection-target-hosts/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>norman784</author><text>I read a lot of comments here wanting to block the connections, but wouldn’t be easier&amp;#x2F;better to switch to an OS that doesn’t spy you? The answers possibly is no, because they might use X or Y that requires them to use Windows, so a better question is, what holds you back to switch to Linux? (macOS also talks to a lot of servers and collect telemetry as Windows, maybe in a different scale, so isn’t an alternative if you are worried about your data being collected).&lt;p&gt;I personally prefer Linux, but what’s holding me are the streaming services (netflix, amazon, etc), I can only watch SD content if I’m on Linux, so my second opinion is macOS, I can watch at least in a decent resolution and also their notebooks are the best ones out there (the air is amazing between price, performance and battery life) for my use case, that’s also work.</text></comment>
<story><title>Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021)</title><url>https://helgeklein.com/blog/windows-os-services-apps-network-connection-target-hosts/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mananaysiempre</author><text>There seems to be some degree of overcounting in the reported figures: the number of “hosts” is the number of unique hostnames in the table, but the number of “IPs” is a straightforward sum of IP address counts that the table segregates by service, and I refuse to believe that (&lt;i&gt;e.g.&lt;/i&gt;) the IP address of login.live.com as resolved by OneDrive is always different from same as resolved by Skype.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  $ curl -fsSL &amp;#x27;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;helgeklein.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;windows-os-services-apps-network-connection-target-hosts&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x27; | pup &amp;#x27;td:nth-child(5)&amp;#x27; text{} | sed &amp;#x27;s&amp;#x2F;:.*$&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x27; | sort -u | wc -l
  291
  $ curl -fsSL &amp;#x27;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;helgeklein.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;windows-os-services-apps-network-connection-target-hosts&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x27; | pup &amp;#x27;td:nth-child(4)&amp;#x27; text{} | awk &amp;#x27;{ s += $1 } END { print s }&amp;#x27;
  2764
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
There’s also a fair amount of infrastructural stuff such as DigiCert’s OCSP service, and every shard(?) in the Windows Update, OneDrive, etc. CDNs is counted as a separate hostname.&lt;p&gt;Not that I’m happy about of any of these connections, but the report looks much less interesting than the totals alone suggest.</text></comment>