mmlvxI'm running Windows 10. Saturday night / Sunday morning, I installed an update and restarted. Monday, I noticed that opening Office documents (Word in particular; I have not tried with Excel or PowerPoint) was taking longer than usual. Suspicious, I opened Task Manager and Resource Monitor, and I saw that WINWORD.EXE communicates with deploy.static.akamaitechnologies.com and various IP addresses like 52.96.164.82, 52.111.246.15, and 52.123.248.29 (and maybe others).
In total, when opening a .docx file locally (I do not use OneDrive and I have its nag screens turned off), about a dozen exchanges happen over 5 to 10 seconds while Word is launching, before the document shows up on my screen. If I am re-opening a document that I recently closed, it does not take as long, and there seem to be fewer TCP/IP exchanges marked WINWORD.EXE.
I am using the desktop version of Word, which I notice is now calling itself Microssoft 365. If I disconnect from wi-fi and Ethernet, I still can open and edit .docx files.
I don't know if this started with the recent update, or if only just now got bad enough for me to notice.
My suspicion is that Microsoft is scanning for virus, which I guess is good? I don't remember agreeing to that, but I suppose it's buried somewhere in their license agreement.
But I further suspect that they are also using my docs to train their AI; and I don't agree to that. I'd like to migrate to LibreOffice, but I have to exchange files with people who are locked into using Microsoft Office; and the minor formatting differences (particularly w/r/t pagination) get in the way. I've heard that using Linux, I can run MS Office in a VM, so I guess I'll be learning how to do that.
