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This is very very old 'news' and been mentioned lord how many times in the past.
As mentioned earlier it was for the Minerlink service. The early s7's used to have a page on the Bitmain GUI to set it, was removed after maybe batch-10 or so.
Like ANY remote monitor program/service (Awesome Miner comes to mind) the miners must periodically be polled to see how they are doing. Only difference here is it was a cloud service and ran by Bitmain.
As posted earlier: If ya don't like it just re-direct the query to localhost. 'Problem' solved.
Yes for whatever reason, the code still remains and YES Bitmain should remove it since it serves no purpose and is a needless 'possible feature'.
And antbleed.com needs to modify their statements about what miners have it. I will verify tomorrow but am POSITIVE my few remaining batch-1, 3, and 5 s7's have the MinerLink option in the GUI.
This issue is unrelated to minerlink even though it uses the same domain. It is not a user configurable option, there is nothing in any user interface (be that GUI or command line) to enable or disable this phone home and remote kill. The URL and port are entirely hard coded into the software, and the loop that does the phone home will always run. This is not Minerlink where you had the option to use it. This phone home will occur regardless of whether you use minerlink or not.