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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'.