How many programs want www access ..

[granddad]

I have Zone alarm and regularly check what programs have / want/ allowed internet access , seems its just the 519 ! even the Graphics controller ?

Note , Ok some are multiple entries ...

 

[alec_t]

Nearly all apps these days seem to want to go online frequently to update themselves. That may or may not be a good thing, on the basis of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Often an app will have the option to disable automatic updates.

 

[Grossel]

Nearly all apps these days seem to want to go online frequently to update themselves. That may or may not be a good thing, on the basis of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Often an app will have the option to disable automatic updates.

Seemingly more often than not, apps does update themself from a - from the user perspective - non-faulty state into a state of completely uselessnes. A very popular OS these days have left many stories on various forums around where users have experienced just that.

For mobile apps (have a low number myself) I have yet to experience that such an app turns itself useless after upgrade. Then again, I assume that is the better choice if the opposite make apps useless because of aging and no support for new OS.

 

[unclejed613]

that's why some people use operating systems that don't have such bad habits.

 

[large_ghostman]

Most programs look for updates over the net ect, check your windows host file in the win32 folder, it should have a list of them. I normally point many of them to local machine.... some want license checking which is also found in the host file. So guess what gets blocked by bad people with skull and cross bone flags

 

[large_ghostman]

You can block access with even windoze firewall. loads of free programs will check your open ports and what opens them and when. Tablets and phones are even worse! most apps want your contact list and guess what goes streaming out when you connect :

 

[unclejed613]

you can find a hosts file (hosts.txt for windows) that blocks a lot of sites that contain malware available here: https://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm
this file redirects any internet requests to known malicious web pages to 127.0.0.1, which is an internal address on your computer (basically it's a "dummy" address, although there are programs that use that address for transferring data internally to other programs or to internet proxy or VPN pipes). on *nix and apple systems, it's called "localhost" or by whatever name you have assigned to your system. in windows, the name of the system is assigned when you install windows, "Joes_PC" would be an example. be aware that putting in a large hosts.txt file on a windows machine will slow down the loading times for websites, because windows scans the hosts.txt file before sending out a DNS request for a web page. however, the extended loading time is probably a good trade-off compared to the problems caused by malware. if you have children in your family, it might be a good idea to use the hosts.txt file, because there are a lot of pr0n websites blocked by the hosts.txt available from winhelp2002 (there are also a lot of in-browser games that attract children that have malicious javascripts and other executable code embedded in them).