Accessing Internet after update and telemetry was disabled

Question

I just installed the VScode Windows zip version with vim extension on Windows 7. For privacy I disabled these options in the settings.json file:

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Answer 1

I ran the program with Wireshark on linux and I can confirm the background connections.

The first address is for marketplace.visualstudio.com, so it's probably used for extension update checks or similar? If you use extensions you might want to leave it as it is.

The last addresses are most likely related to telemetry. Visual Studio Code makes several DNS lookups even though the telemetry and updates are "disabled". You can try to add some of those DNS names to your hosts file in order to prevent the connections, but keep in mind that doing so might have side effects on your system functionality as Windows uses them for other (telemetry and such) purposes. Here are a few of the DNS lookups I was able to trigger with a small testing, there are likely many more:

0.0.0.0 dc.services.visualstudio.com
0.0.0.0 dc.trafficmanager.net
0.0.0.0 vortex.data.microsoft.com
0.0.0.0 weu-breeziest-in.cloudapp.net

I share your concerns. Having 20 years of experience with Microsoft I'm very frustrated and scared of using any of their products. The license for Visual Studio Code does not fill me up with confidence either. I'm not really surprised that "opting out" of telemetry does not even actually disable it.

I do like Visual Studio Code more than Atom and instead of downloading it from Microsoft, I cloned the original vscode repository (which is MIT licensed base product for the Visual Studio Code) and installed it instead. It doesn't seem to connect to Internet immediately when I start typing. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how I can easily update and install extensions to vscode, so I might have to return to Atom eventually. I wish someone with more interest and time on their hands would fork a telemetry free vscode with marketplace functionality and share the binaries for the rest of us.

Update:

I raised an issue (#16131) about this. Looking at the total amount of open issues (~3000) on vscode I don't expect it to be solved anytime soon. For the time being you should block at least vortex.data.microsoft.com and dc.services.visualstudio.com in your hosts file. Blocking those two won't affect the usage of marketplace or any other necessary functionality. Blocking them seems to cease most Internet traffic for Visual Studio Code 1.7.2 (which might change in future versions).

What also worries me is that even though the data sent to vortex is encrypted, Visual Studio Code actually sends details about your machine and OS unencrypted plain text (via HTTP POST) to dc.services.visualstudio.com. (Note that I didn't yet file an issue about that).

Update 2:

According to the official reply I got for the issue #16131, Visual Studio Code was sending the information to Microsoft that the user had opted out from telemetry. A bit odd choice to send telemetry about the user not wanting any telemetry, but they said that they will stop doing it in the future. I appreciate their honesty with this matter.

seanmcbreen:

We use our telemetry to help understand how to make the product better – in fact a good example of this right now is some work we are doing to improve performance. So, we appreciate it when users opt to send us telemetry.

That said there are times when people don’t want to do that and you bring up a good point – today we continue to send events stating that a user has opted out and nothing else i.e. no usage data is sent. Here is the test to ensure that is all we send... https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/blob/master/src/vs/platform/telemetry/common/telemetryService.ts#L103

But we don’t need to do that and I don’t think it’s what you expect as a user – so we will stop sending anything i.e. even the opt out event