This all happens the moment you plug that HDMI (or DisplayPort for people who purchased an LG computer monitor) right into an internet-enabled laptop through a protocol called EDID, also known as “Extended Display Identification Data,” which by itself is totally harmless!
It simply tells your operating system what kind of monitor is connected, what its capabilities are, it’s serial number. That’s it!
Inside Windows, when you go to Device Manager, it might not seem like much. Just a generic PnP device attached as a monitor.
Dive a little more into Device Manager, and we see where EDID does its magic; we found that this particular Microsoft Box is hooked up to some kind of Samsung monitor. Now, Samsung might have some kind of driver that would help take advantage of my monitor. But this Samsung is so old they simply do not care.
Yeah, it’s installing drivers on WINDOWS.
So, caveat two is don’t connect these things to an internet-connected WINDOWS machine.
Good point.
But, as others have said, if you do successfully air gap one of these things, it might stop working because a hard drive is full, or more directly because it can’t phone home and is designed to lock you out in that case.