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Windows 11 pinging Steam on a newly purchased, clean laptop? WHY?
17 points by killyourfm on Feb 13, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 21 comments
If anyone from Valve is here, in a position to answer: Why on earth is Windows 11 pinging Steam servers immediately after the FIRST boot, on a CLEAN, newly purchased laptop, with nothing installed, and without user consent?

What data is being shared?

What's the nature of that specific relationship between Microsoft and Valve?

CONTEXT (Source): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT4vDfA_4NI

Additional coverage: https://www.techspot.com/news/97535-windows-11-spyware-machine-out-users-control.html

I really hope we can get an official statement, so the open source community can (hopefully) continue appreciating what Valve does for Linux and gaming.




> CLEAN, newly purchased laptop

There is no such thing as a clean Windows installation when you buy a laptop. They are always filled with crapware. Always reinstall Windows youself if you buy hardware with preinstalled Windows.


Clean means different things to different people, and I think "clean from the store" is a valid definition. Why is expecting it to also be clean from spyware considered a pipe dream?

While a computer literate user might do what you recommend my grandmother will not, and she is absolutely not going to use Steam. Putting the blame on the users doesn't make sense, they should be able to trust the companies they pay to have their interests in mind.

I don't even boot into Windows before replacing it with Debian, but I can't convince my friends to do the same.


I don't think observing there is no clean laptop from the store is blaming users. Instead it's blaming the manufacturer. In OP it's unlikely that Microsoft is actually sending data to valve, and far more likely that the manufacturer has preinstalled steam or something. 


  > Why is expecting it to also be clean from spyware considered a pipe dream?
Experience?


Even in the case of my grandmother using a big chunk of her small pension to pay just to get spied on? Really? She doesn't even know she has a choice in the matter, or what implications that choice has. My opinion is that she and others like her shouldn't have to be educated.

A lot of people in tech should step out of their bubble for a second and consider the real world. It's not technically impossible to have a better ecosystem, it's the industry creating the problems.


I agree, but the sad reality is that the reason the tech industry is as heavy handed on spying as it is, is because the people who work in tech want it that way. Despite their protestations, there is a lot of god complex in the industry so don't expect the tech industry to take a moral or principled stand. It will never happen.


Because Windows Machine bought in normal computer store is filled with crap trial ware. It is like that because that's how the shop / computer manufacture is making money. The first thing you should do when buying a windows computer is to nuke the installation by clean installing windows from USB using a media downloaded directly from Microsoft.


When I see a security-focused channel talking about a "Clean laptop" with "nothing installed," I assume they have wiped it and installed Windows 11 with an ISO. I mean, otherwise these results would seem perfectly ordinary and wouldn't be raising an alarm.


They have not wiped it. 15 seconds into the video they say "What happens when you buy a new laptop and open it for the first time". Not many seconds later they show that the computer makes request to google and has McAfee installed. I am sorry, but the first thing a clean windows devices does is not to make requests to google and it will not have 3rd party anti virus installed.


I mean c'mon now, McAfee? It's pre-loaded crapware. If anything was freshly installed it's going to be a fresh copy of Dell Windows Recovery Media.

> Many third-party services were present as well, as Windows 11 had seemingly important things to say to the likes of Steam, McAfee, and Comscore ScorecardResearch.com, which is a market research effort that "studies and reports on Internet trends and behavior."


Much better: format the disk and instal OS that actually respects your provacy and digital freedom and is open source: install GNU/Linux


Why is this getting downvoted? Sounds correct.


....so did you bought a gaming laptop with Steam pre-installed on it ?


Hmm, did everyone forget a clean install of windoze 10 comes with a giant pervasive ad for candy crush? Of course the youngins missed the advent of aol on the desktop of windoze 95. Like most things, you are their saleable product now. Why I use linux.


It is experiences like this that have lead me to stop using Windows 15 years ago. I do all my development work on a desktop system I built running Debian. Use an old ChromeBook for when I need portability, e.g. in meetings, when traveling, etc.


Latency and user experience. One of the last cohorts of die hard pc users are gamers. Their user experience counts and therefor latency to steam counts. Is the only possible and ridiculous reason I can think of really.


"Last cohorts of pc users" besides the entire business world.


Hence the "One of " you cut out of my sentence.....


Are you sure that's a Steam (as in Valve's product) server? The full DNS query is for "steamcloud-london.storage.googleapis.com".

Edit: nvm, looks like it is.


Was Steam preinstalled on the laptop?


What do you mean by pinging? A literal icmp ping? I am also not a fan of installing any software ie. Wireshark on the machine you are probing... takes away the credibility by talking about a clean machine.




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