Puzzled about connection to Github

[luc0x61]

Since VSCodium should be free from telemetry, I found it curious that even after disabling everything that I can understand related to Copilot, the editor still has an active TCP connection to a GitHub server.
What am I missing?

[Edit]
I made sure that all extensions are disabled, but still on startup, it connects to the site above, plus an unknown 198.41.30.195 site, and reconnects again when closing the application.

[daiyam]

Look at the last 2 sections of https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/telemetry.md, it should help you.

[daiyam]

Are you connected to a GitHub account?

[daiyam]

What are your settings?

Here my test one:

{
    "extensions.autoCheckUpdates": false,
    "update.mode": "manual",
    "workbench.welcomePage.extraAnnouncements": false,
    // "extensions.autoUpdate": false,
    "update.showReleaseNotes": false,
    "workbench.remoteIndicator.showExtensionRecommendations": false,
    "extensions.excludeUnsafes": false,
}

[luc0x61]

Are you connected to a GitHub account?

Sorry: no, no GitHub account connected.

[luc0x61]

What are your settings?

My settings were a bit crowded, as I have many extensions too, even though now all are disabled.
Some new ones have been added by specifying disabled settings that I hadn't before.
I pruned it and came up with this:

{
    "workbench.welcomePage.extraAnnouncements": false,
    "editor.fontSize": 12,
    "editor.fontFamily": "'Dejavu Sans Mono','Cascadia Mono',Consolas, 'Courier New', monospace",
    "workbench.colorCustomizations": {
        "editor.background": "#202020",
    },
    "editor.tokenColorCustomizations": {
        "[*Dark*]": {
            "comments": "#9bc988",
        },
    },
    "editor.minimap.enabled": false,
    "workbench.settings.applyToAllProfiles": [
        "editor.inlineSuggest.suppressSuggestions"
    ],
    "editor.acceptSuggestionOnEnter": "off",
    "editor.rulers": [
        80
    ],
    "editor.unicodeHighlight.nonBasicASCII": false,
    "security.workspace.trust.untrustedFiles": "open",
    "editor.renderWhitespace": "all",
    "workbench.colorTheme": "Default Dark+",
    "chat.commandCenter.enabled": false,
    "telemetry.feedback.enabled": false,
    "chat.agent.enabled": false,
    "[c]": {
        "editor.defaultFormatter": "llvm-vs-code-extensions.vscode-clangd"
    },
    "editor.codeActionsOnSave": {},
    "workbench.preferredDarkColorTheme": "Default Dark+",
    "github-authentication.useElectronFetch": false,
    "github.branchProtection": false,
    "github.gitAuthentication": false,
    "github.showAvatar": false,
    "chat.disableAIFeatures": true,
    "extensions.autoCheckUpdates": false,
    "update.enableWindowsBackgroundUpdates": false,
    "extensions.autoUpdate": false,
}

[tvrinssen]

I used mitmproxy to check what VSCodium requested from GitHub and found the following:

• Unless you set update.mode to none or manual, VSCodium will load https://raw.githubusercontent.com/VSCodium/versions/refs/heads/master/stable/win32/x64/system/latest.json to check for updates.
• It fetches https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EclipseFdn/publish-extensions/refs/heads/master/extension-control/extensions.json every 5 minutes even if you disable extension updates completely. I guess this makes sense since the assumption is that you want to know about malicious extensions as soon as possible even if you don't want updates.
• If you open any .json file with a schema (i.e. package.json, .prettierrc), VSCodium will load the schema from https://json.schemastore.org which redirects to https://www.schemastore.org. That site is hosted on GitHub Pages and thus VSCodium opens a connection to GitHub.
• Of course, VSCodium will also connect to GitHub if you have a .json file with a $schema property that points to GitHub.

None of this is related to telemetry since all of these are static files but it explains why VSCodium has a persistent connection to GitHub. Since it sends a request to GitHub at least every 5 minutes, the connection is reused and kept open for the next request.