Thanks! I’ll give that a shot. I didn’t do much troubleshooting because other devices could access those sites just fine using 9.9.9.9, so I figured it was something weird in Apple’s system.

I’ve never been able to chase it down, but Apple devices on my network always seem to have issues accessing some sites when using quad 9 for DNS. No problems with cloudflare, though. 🤷‍♂️

Thank you! I will give this a try.

I haven’t figured out how do make a script that can delete a directory that needs admin rights. Instead, I created a script that pings the directory once per minute and tosses up a notification if it exists. Then I just go and delete it. It’s good enough for me, since it only happens 2x-3x per week.

Fun story from my win11 work machine. I’ve de-copiloted it to the best of my ability. Even so, ‘ai.exe’ was always running, consuming more RAM than I was comfortable with, and if I killed it, it would respawn.

I found i can delete the folder it resides in with no ill effect. But a few times a week, a process would recreate it.

System owned the parent folder but for some reason I was unable to revoke its write permissions. So instead, I created a junction so that anything written to the ai folder would instead write to a folder that I had sole ownership of.

This worked, except it ended up causing kernel failures and bootloader issues. Big yikes.

Can confirm. My router log showed that a neighbor’s iot device was repeatedly trying to connect to my WiFi every 10 seconds or so. It was by far the most dominant event in the log.

The only way to stop it was to block its MAC address.