So, I heard about the leak, grabbed a torrent, and installed it in a VM. And the entire time, one thing was on my mind: SimpleWall. It’s the only way I feel safe using Windows, but with this new OS, they might’ve changed something deep in the kernel to prevent it and other solutions from working.

Good news, it at least still partially works. As far as I can tell, it works completely, but I still have yet to do my router monitoring test.

Bad news, it seems to have even more bloat. The only applications I’ve used are SimpleWall itself, the file manager to install SimpleWall from a mounted ISO, and the settings menu to fix a messed up resolution. I’ll share the list of crap SimpleWall detected.

apphostregistrationverifier.exe devicecensus.exe (this popped up right after I typed the last sentence of this post) lsass.exe mousocoreworker.exe msedgewebview2.exe onedrive.exe svchost.exe (automatically added before detection) System (automatically added before detection) systemsettings.exe taskhostw.exe wermgr.exe

The damned thing is so bloated that things are popping up as I write this post. Note that this is highly abnormal for me especially since when I do use Windows, I use an enterprise long term support version, which removes a bunch of crap.

Seems the road won’t get any easier, hope you lads find this interesting.

EDIT: Just for clarification, my opinion is that these system features really don’t need to be phoning home. In my eyes, any connection should be at least partially manually activated by the user, not some automatic phone home (or phone ANYWHERE) on boot, to the point where I physically remove my WiFi card when internet access is not needed (eg. to play with friends). I’m not sure if this outlook is overly paranoid or not. Whenever I do use Windows, I use an external firewall to vet all the connections Windows tries to make, but right now it is physically out on loan to my brother. This was more of a morbid curiosity than anything else.