The update checking mechanism can be enabled/disabled per your organization's internal policies. Keep in mind that all this update checking mechanism does is reach out to a publicly-available website to check for a new version. (OK, so it does a little more than that, but that's neither here, nor there.)
If a new version is available, splunkweb presents this information on the Splunk login page. You can disable it in web.conf.
Set "updateCheckerBaseURL" in web.conf to 0.
For more information, search for the term "updateCheckerBaseURL" on the web page linked above.
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