I have a company laptop which I travel around the world with, and wherever I am located the laptop updates to the local timezone. However, I do not understand how it is able to do this because I have everything that should allow the laptop to identify its own location disabled.
- I use a hardware VPN, a Firewalla, connected to a home network based in the US (CST). This is plugged into the laptop via ethernet, with the laptop’s Wi-Fi disabled. The VPN has DNS over VPN enabled; as far as I’m aware no requests should leak out of the VPN tunnel. As far as the laptop is concerned, it is plugged in via ethernet to a US domestic router.
- I have location services disabled (this is Windows 11).
- I have “allow apps to use my location” disabled.
- I have “automatically update my timezone” disabled (yes, the laptop seems to ignore this).
- The laptop does not have GPS, to my knowledge.
- I have two laptops which both do this, one uses time.windows.com for NTP updates, the other uses a US-based internal NTP server.
So, how on Earth is the laptop able to work out its physical location? I have travelled across Europe and Africa and it updates to the correct timezone in every country.
It may be relevant that I had a period of time back in the US where using a 5G connection kept causing my timezone to periodically update to Beijing local time (during this time I was not using the hardware VPN).
