So I’ve long known Windows 10 likes to phone home to Microsoft. Well last night I pulled a command prompt up and executed the command netstat -an

From that I looked up all the active addresses – most were legitimate though I’m really considering blocking Yahoo.com next.

But just for your consideration here’s a snippet of the firewall log in which I blocked a Microsoft address.

2016-02-07 12:12:11 RV110W kern.warning ACL-Deny-L2W:IN=VLAN1 OUT=WAN SRC=192.168.1.100 DST=65.52.108.210 LEN=157 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=127 ID=13934 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=49447 DPT=443 WINDOW=61 RES=0x00 ACK PSH URGP=0
2016-02-07 12:12:12 RV110W kern.warning ACL-Deny-L2W:IN=VLAN1 OUT=WAN SRC=192.168.1.100 DST=65.52.108.210 LEN=157 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=127 ID=13935 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=49447 DPT=443 WINDOW=61 RES=0x00 ACK PSH URGP=0
2016-02-07 12:12:12 RV110W kern.warning ACL-Deny-L2W:IN=VLAN1 OUT=WAN SRC=192.168.1.100 DST=65.52.108.210 LEN=157 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=127 ID=13936 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=49447 DPT=443 WINDOW=61 RES=0x00 ACK PSH URGP=0

So on average it tries to phone home every 30-60 seconds. To hell with Microsoft. If I blocked something important, like say a software authentication server or an update server I’ll see Windows bitch in the logs. But so far, nothing.