| No answer is forthcoming from the VS Code team, because they know you won't like the answer. Microsoft trawls their[1] endpoints mercilessly for every bit of telemetry that they possibly can, and they go out of their way to prevent customers from disabling this. Windows 10 or 11 with Office requires something like 200+ individual forms of Microsoft telemetry to be disabled! Notably: - They keep changing the name of the environment variables[2] that disable telemetry. For unspecified "reasons". - They've been caught using "typosquatting" domains like microsft.com for telemetry, because security-conscious admins block microsoft.com wholesale. - Telemetry is implemented by each product group, which means each individual team has to learn the same lessons over and over, such as: GDPR compliance, asynchronous collection, size limiting, do not retry in a tight loop forever on network failure, etc... - Customers often experience dramatic speedups by disabling telemetry, which ought not be possible, but that's the reality. Turning off telemetry was "the" trick to making PowerShell Core fast in VS Code, because it literally sent telemetry (synchronously!) from all of: Dotnet Core, PowerShell, the Az/AAD modules, and Visual Studio Code! Opening a new tab would take seconds while this was collected, zipped, and sent. Windows Terminal does the same thing, by the way, so opening a shell can result in like half a dozen network requests to god-knows-where. [1] You thought, wait... that it's your computer!? It's Microsoft's ad-platform now. [2] Notice the plural? It's one company! Why can't there be a single globally-obeyed policy setting for this? Oh... oh... because they don't want you to have this setting. That's right... I forgot. Windows: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/configure-... PowerShell: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof... DotNet Core: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/telemetr... Windows Terminal: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/5331 Az module: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.azure... Etc... |
This seems interesting. Do you have any references for this? I would assume that the main use of such typo-squatting domains is a simple redirect, a la [0][1].
[0]: https://gogle.com [1]: https://gooogle.com