How does Windows 7 know that your network is limited

original author: Solidot

If your computer is running Windows7 operating system, you may notice that & ldquo; limited network & rdquo; warning, this is a very special limited: you You can access any domestic website, but access to international websites is limited.

The question is: How does Microsoft know your network connection?

Originally, whenever a user connected to the network, Windows 7 sent an access request to a domain name of Microsoft, and the result of the access was used as a Network Connectivity Status Indicator (NCSI). Vista took the lead in adopting this service.

NCSI first performs a DNS query on dns.msftncsi.com and then requests access to the file http://www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt, which is a plain text file that only includes the text < ;Microsoft NCSI”. Dns.msftncsi.com should resolve to 131.107.255.255, if the address does not match, then it will guess that the network connection is not working properly.

For this feature of NCSI, some users may be concerned about privacy issues, because Microsoft will record the IP address of each connection in the website log. If you don't want Microsoft to know your network connection, you can modify the registry to disable the NCSI service, or modify it to access your own server.