How Windows decide whether your computer has limited or full Internet access

Re:How Windows decide whether your computer has limited or f... by Eleison23 on Saturday November 19, 2022 @06:09PM (#33675918)

What is "full" Internet access?

I mean really, what does it mean to you, or to Windows, that I have "full" access to the Internet?

For me personally, I only visit a few walled gardens, so as long as I had my Google, my Wikipedia, and my work-related sites, I wouldn't miss 99.99% of the Internet anyway.

But what if your ISP blocks a whole bunch of ports? What if Adware has taken over 33% of your DNS space? What if you're behind a Great Firewall of <Dictatorship>? What if there's some sort of Balkanization or segmentation of your side of the 'net and you can't reach a lot of stuff? What if Cloudflare's down again?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Windows decide whether your computer has limited or f... by Mogzol on Saturday November 19, 2022 @09:18PM (#33677435)

Yes, "full" internet access is a hard to define term and this simple test doesn't cover all possible cases. But it will work in probably 99.99% of cases and honestly I think that's good enough. If it doesn't work you end up with a little "no internet connection" icon in your taskbar and that's about it. You can still use the connection, so I don't think it's a big deal that this test isn't 100% accurate. It's still more useful to the majority of users to have a slightly inaccurate test than to have no test at all.

[ Parent | on HN ]