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It's been a while since I used Windows with any kind of seriousness (and the last version I did was 7), so I wasn't aware that this kind of thing is offloaded to separate, shared processes like that. > Not to mention, there isn't a whole lot of software left that doesn't need at least some networking for its 'primary' functionality. Case in point, Microsoft Office has no good reason to be aware of the existence of the internet. Its job is to open, view, edit, and save local files. No one I know uses any of the cloud crap they added in the latest versions. The only use case when networking might be needed in Word/Excel/Powerpoint — and even then, it's most probably handled by a system service — is printing to a networked printer. (when working with a file stored on a remote server, shared over SMB or something similar, that's definitely handled by the system and appears as a local file to applications, albeit on a very slow disk) |
shrug I think the same, but it's a fact that new versions of Word heavily integrate with Sharepoint and Teams. I don't use that functionality (at least not a lot), but for some businesses it's the primary use case, and it's how Word can manage to stay relevant even when competing with Google Docs. The concept of 'files' is going away slowly anyway, like it or not. (I don't, but again, nobody ever asked me). There's more - like, when you install a new spell checking language pack, something accesses the internet. It's most likely the installer/automatic updater 'service' that does this, but then you're again in the 'what's this process for anyway' territory.
My point - I think your view on how software 'should' behave is the same as mine, but the reality is that our view is outdated. It's just not how software works in 2023.
It's actually timely for me, as I just started using Glasswire with a clean ruleset. As I'm typing this, freakin' explorer.exe asked for network access to an outside IP address. It's hard to disallow explorer.exe network access as I won't be able to access SMB shares without it, but I have no idea why it would go outside my network.
I did just block Word from accessing the network at all. I guess I'll find out over the next few days in what ways it will break.
(that's another thing - most software nowadays doesn't even handle not having network access gracefully any more, if at all. Sometimes you just get blank parts of a window (presumably when embedded HTML views silently fail) and there is no way to 'reload' those parts of the UI. Or windows that don't open at all, so it just looks like a button doesn't do anything. And so on. It's disgraceful and like I said upthread, many of today's engineers just think it's normal, or are told to implement it that way against their own convictions. I mean I understand why things are they are, I just don't agree with the lack of effort in fighting back against the drivers of that outcome.)