On 10/17/2022 9:07 AM, philo wrote:
I friend had an old Win7 machine that I replaced with a five year old Win10 machine and used his old wireless adapter. Windows automatically installed it and I tested it by doing all the Windows updates.
Seemed fine but it would not connect to most websites.
I never saw such a thing.
When I had a look at his Won7 machine I noticed the wireless was working fine with the factory provided drivers whose interface took over for Windows drivers.
Just curious as to what kind of odd security the factory drivers contained. Rather then mess around with it, I just used another wireless adapter since I had a box full of them.
My first guess, would be some sort of certificate problem for https.
Was there an AV on the machine ? An AV known to use a MITM attack
method for providing https "Security" ? The software in that case,
substitutes its own certificates in place of whatever the rest
of the computer wanted to use.
But none of that really lines up with your symptoms.
I'm not a wireless expert (having no wireless setup here helps).
There used to be some sort of wireless zero config, which likely
require adherence to standards so that a "Microsoft method" could
work for everything.
Microsoft, in fact, does not always allow factory drivers. I use
factory drivers for their improved control panel interface,
making detailed setups possible. But I think Microsoft has
had words with these companies, and there are rules about
which subsystems you can provide drivers for.
An example is Intel. Intel pretends to be installing a USB driver
with an INF. However, if you look inside the USB INF file, you
find #include usbport.inf which is a Microsoft USB driver INF. The
Intel "driver" in that case, just calls the Microsoft driver. This
gets around the Microsoft rule that Microsoft provides that driver,
yet allows Intel to pretend they did it :-) Other companies
are not as big as Intel... and not that cheeky.
If you were to use Wireshark on this connection, first problem
is which "capture" interface does Wifi, and would it work. I use
Wireshark on wired connections, to debug things. The second problem,
is it's https, and I don't know how to debug a running (encrypted)
https session. I understand there is some way to do that. You
might find there are challenges, if attempting debug, but maybe
it's necessary to learn how, if you want to understand the details.
You got certificates, firewalls, flaky hardware as explanations.
A firewall might knock out all traffic. With LetsEncrypt certificate
on hundreds of thousands of smaller web sites, a single fault with
one of those can knock out quite a percentage of the Internet. WinXP
users discovered this, when the LetsEncrypt had something above it
expire. The thing is, when that happens, it's practically impossible
to download the required certificate... unless you have working https.
A kind of Catch22. The last site I could find, which would allow
a WinXP users to bootstrap out of LetsEncrypt (curl.se) has itself
changed from http: access to https: , closing the last door to finding
help obtaining a download tool.
This... is the law of unintended consequences. Mark it well. Sure,
it's secure, so secure it turns WinXP into an island unable to reach
the web. The intention was to prevent three letter agencies from
snooping, but too much of this easily turns a computer into
an Internet-free box.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS_Everywhere
Browsers which carry their own certificate store (Firefox, Chrome?),
may be immune to island syndrome. However, modern Firefox and
Chrome don't run on WinXP. I don't think modern Seamonkey does
any more, either.
*******
I think you did the right thing,
by just changing adapters, and moving on :-)
Paul
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