While the OP sounds a bit conspiratory, there is a spark of truth in there. Passkeys are much more limited in the way they move between devices (if at all).

Having a passkey on your PC also invalidates many of the “comfort” use cases of them, since you cannot easily use your PC to authenticate a service on a different device, say your smartphone or a laptop, at least you couldn’t when I last checked. If that’s possible nowadays please correct me.

It should be reasonably easy to spoof an outgoing phone number, your issue is with getting the reply. Imagine a parcel to send somewhere:
The sender address can be modified to be whatever you want it to be, however, the reply will then also go that address and not to your home address.

What you would need to do is manipulate the phone system to somehow associate your old phone number with any phone number you have access to. This is not only insanely difficult unless you already have a way into the phone system but also highly illegal.

If you have any option to sign up for a phone plan or prepaid SIM card with a desired phone number option that would be your easiest way. Maybe one of those services are helpful for you, but that was just the first hit on a quick search. No guarantee any of those will be useful.

Maybe this can help. Basically you’re looking to split your screen into virtual screens.

Don’t know if this will work on the fly though.

It is, not from a technical pov but from an investment pov. I very well understand the benefit as a person in IT, but what do you think is more important to investors? Spending (significant) resources on behind-the-scenes improvements that may keep some income flowing vs spending resources on the new AI hype tool to be sold to better paying enterprise customers?

I don’t endorse that mode of operation (team 🐧), but that seems to be what’s happening.

What financial incentive is there in user retention and code improvements? Windows licences likely don’t contribute a large share of MSFTs income (would have to look it up, but am currently sitting in a train with just a smartphone) and even with all the shit since Win11, Windows is still the largest OS by far.

MSFT is earning a lot of money with AI & cloud. Any increase in revenue there likely dwarf possible gains in Windows improvements.

You could try just using the ping or host commands, they will also try to resolve the domain.

Also can you access the services by using IP:Port?

I have several grocery stores of different chains in my vicinity, in a 3km radius I could probably choose between 10+ locations (I just checked after posting: There are at least 18 grocery stores within that range and some options like farmer markets not listed). I only go to the closest ones (~500m) by foot, for most things further away I take my bike.