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Make opening a settings page require multiple queries to Microsoft servers. That way you get lag with a bonus of variability and in the case of broken wifi, extreme lag as it waits for the connections to time out.

I'm not saying this is what happens. But it's scarily plausible and it really shouldn't be.




If it was happening, they could at least spy us asynchronously.


You can certainly test the theory pretty easily with Wireshark


I was lazy that day. But today! I just used procmon, filtered to include "systemsettings.exe", turned off all the other guff and just saw network packet meta data (no content).

And yes, as you browse around system settings there are TCP connections to MS servers. I don't know that they are "blocking" though and have run out of care factor.




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