Privacy

32173 readers

214 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Ethernet port being used while PC is turned off? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

42 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Greetings! So recently, i spent a few hours coding software. After i was done and i shut off my pc, i noticed both of the ethernet lights were on and blinking. Does this mean that Microsoft is sending data to their servers before the PC fully shuts off? I am scared that this might be the thing it does. How can i get rid of this issue? I have no idea if it's related to Windows or the PC itself.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Except neither of those things are true.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I don't know enough about ethernet switches to know if this is common. Though, reading their comment again, I don't really think I'm right about their statement. It's definitely a light that is frequently designed to be on when packets are still being accepted for waking the computer.

I don't have a background in CE, but I've seen people claim this is sometimes a design used in the past. I think it makes sense that a circuit that is controlled by the computer can be hard wired to turn on both a light and a ethernet port. Though, I don't know how common this design is in reality.

edit: After searching some, it looks like some port lights can be controlled by a driver. I still think it probably depends on the hardware design though, and this won't be consistent between ports.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

sure it depends on the design, but no standards-compliant non-PoE Ethernet design is going to light up an LED, it barely uses 1 volt.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think driver examples from the Linux kernel are very convincing evidence that the lights can be controlled entirely by software, but I'm interested to see any possible specific port designs where that isn't true.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

I was not refuting that, yes drivers can control the LED since forever. The original comment was "the link light is powered by the switch", which I'm saying is not possible. An ethernet switch (assuming it's not PoE) cannot directly power an LED on a network adapter in your PC let alone the rest of it, that's all I'm saying.