this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
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pihole recently started blocking ecs.office.com. Any idea what's triggering it? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 5 months ago by pythia@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
20 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

As the title says. I'm just curious what's triggering it. There is no MS Office installed. Happens as soon i start a windows10 pc and it's "packed" into svchost. Any idea?

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[–] invisiblegorilla@sh.itjust.works 35 points 5 months ago (1 children)

"Enhanced Configuration Service (ECS) ECS provides Microsoft the ability to reconfigure Office installations without the need for you to redeploy Office. It's used to control the gradual rollout of features or updates, while the impact of the rollout is monitored from diagnostic data being collected."

Given how office/ai is being baked into the OS, its probably something to do with windows updates. Within updates there are advanced options and one of the tickboxes is for other Microsoft products. My guess would be that

[–] pythia@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

That's how far i got too, maybe it's the ms-defender?? thingy since i recently uninstalled mwb-antivirus. What bothers me is the svchost. Updates are paused and every checkbox is off, this machine goes online very rarely.

[–] Boozilla@lemmy.world 23 points 5 months ago (3 children)

With MS you never know. They are pretty arrogant and aggressive about assuming you want things running in the background. Something you can try: Install ShutUp10 and look for things like Office Telemetry being turned on. You can switch these things off (permanently or temporarily, your choice) and see if that stops the traffic.

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

(There are other ways to do the same thing but I've been using ShutUp10 for years and love it)

[–] KillerTofu@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Thanks for sharing this. I’ve been trying to explore Linux distros after the windows snapshot announcement but the sheer variety and the hardware troubleshooting has really kept be from making the switch.

[–] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Get Win10 LTSC. It gets updates 2x/year, has very minimal bloat.

Then get O&O Shutup to reduce bloat even more.

And you can permanently license it using Microsoft's own scripts.

Scripts on Gituub.

[–] Whitebrow@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

O&O is good, can also look into privacy.sexy to generate a script with all the stuff you want to rid yourself of. They also have several levels of preconfigured scripts (all open source) that give you a good starting point which you can review and adjust as per your preferences

[–] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 0 points 5 months ago

Nice, thanks for the alternative!

I like the option for scripting it.

[–] KillerTofu@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Thank you! Do you know if the LTSC version is impacted by the October 2025 sundown date?

[–] pythia@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 months ago

"Windows 10 GAC (General Availability Channel) (i.e. Home, Pro) will reach end of support on October 14, 2025. So, if your hardware doesn't support Windows 11 then you might wanna use Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 since its supported until Jan 13, 2032" from https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links

[–] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 0 points 5 months ago

No idea.

I've never cared about such things for home systems - I never use MS support, and I think updates are over emphasized for stability and security, as that ignores the other layers that are required.

If a system runs, does what I need it to do, I'm uninterested in making changes that run the risk of causing issues (for example, I have containers for things like Syncthing that don't get auto updates - I need to know that it works the same all the time, as it keeps mobile devices syncing their data to home, which gets backed up). I check updates 2x/year, and manually update if I feel it's useful (sometimes updates aren't available for all systems, which can break things).

All my systems are properly secured, behind multiple layers of security (physical firewall, isolated vlans, VPN, with encryption enabled wherever it's available, etc), I run in limited user accounts, my admin accounts aren't obvious, with proper complex passwords, everything is encrypted, properly replicated and backed up.

My next phase is adding 2FA even for my home servers.

[–] pythia@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 months ago

No it's Win that makes debugging and keeping a system clean a pain. Linux is peace of mind compared to MS. Just go with Kubuntu for a desktop-pc (imo).

[–] Boozilla@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Glad you found it useful! Love your username.

[–] KillerTofu@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

👍 thanks!

[–] Zerush@lemmy.ml 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

O&O soft is nice, but even better this one to tame Windows

https://github.com/hellzerg/optimizer

From O&O Soft I use sometimes O&O FileDirect, that is a really cool app.

[–] pythia@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

installed OO for years here too and everything switched to green except disable app access to file system, smart-screen and mic...

[–] Boozilla@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

I'm pretty aggressive about switching things off, too. I will never use OneDrive, for example.

[–] Scolding0513@sh.itjust.works 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

you're running a closed source OS designed for spying and data collection.

[–] archy@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Not sure about "designed", maybe evolved to be that way but not designed

[–] Scolding0513@sh.itjust.works 0 points 5 months ago

😂😂😂😂