Would like to see more of the captured data, because a simple "about" dialog, would also need to call some server to check, if it software is in the latest version. To display the "you have the latest version" label.
This is United Statians being the victims of their own crazy date writing style again. (-:
Michael Horowitz did this on 2021-10-22, and it returned the value 2021.1019.1.0.
Today, on 2025-06-07, it is publishing the value 2025.424.19.0. Which would be last April the 24th.
It's blazingly obvious that it's the last date that something downloadable got updated, with a version or sequence number of some kind. The zero in the final field is probably there because someone is using a 4-field version datatype. To publish a date.
I wouldn't be surprised if the final zero is actually intentional; it would allow incrementing it if you need to publish more than one version on the same date. It's not likely to be needed, but if something is on fire and you absolutely need to push out a quick fix, having to figure out what version to call it is probably the last thing you want to have to worry about.
Never attribute to some deeply sophisticated planned ahead engineering, that which can be satisfactorily explained by the fact that it's a lot easier to serialize and deserialize a System.Version in an HTTP body, in a universal fashion that will work for every computer in whatever locale, than it is a System.DateTime plus a separate sequence number. (-:
This is a reasonable reaction to this. I pause when accusations jump immediately to spying as other explanations can exist without adding to FUD and noise online. It's not always difficult to find the purpose of something either with a bit more digging.
I've seen something similar occur for some popular Youtube videos, too. A video author will fire up some arbitrary Windows setup, which can come bundled with third-party software and use Bing for various things including weather in the taskbar and queries in the search bar, then open Wireshark to scaremonger with DNS queries, accusing Microsoft of spying just for requests made by the services/programs/features they have enabled in their install.
When often cursory lookups of the domains in search engines show what their purpose is and are contrary to such videos' alleged (and worse, guessed) purpose.
It's a problem as there are legitimate concerns with certain aspects of Windows software with non-privacy respecting defaults but for an average user it gets muddled with irrelevant/incomplete info that doesn't lead to high quality actionable results.
That looks like a version number...
Would like to see more of the captured data, because a simple "about" dialog, would also need to call some server to check, if it software is in the latest version. To display the "you have the latest version" label.