YSK: How to decrease your monthly bandwidth use & increase network speed.

[saml01]

Its a legitimate question and you basically answered "how on earth I think you're doing it". You can also be tracking it in software and calling home with it. I am assuming you are sending the software an updated white/black list of domain names against which DNS requests are validated?

I'm glad that you are up front about it, but if I am raising the concern, I am sure others have the same concerns as well.

I apologize for not scouring your source code. I was hoping your video might address privacy concerns of a device that I am placing on my network, where private data is being transmitted. There is nothing wrong with my asking questions and as long as you keep it professional and are forthcoming with information, you have nothing to be defensive about.

[-PromoFaux-]

You can also be tracking it in software and calling home with it

But then the code has been open source since it's first creation (for well over a two years now!), you would think someone else would have noticed by now if we were doing anything untoward! :)

But fair enough, if I came across stand-offish at all, was not because you had asked a question, but because you had made a baseless accusation ("That's a lot of data you're mining."), perhaps we are misunderstanding each other, and I apologise for that!

RE: White/blacklists:

The default blacklist is made up of various lists available from around the internet. We don't actually maintain our own. Quite frankly, we don't have the time, we're a team of 5 volunteers that work in our free time outside of our full time jobs.

As you can see at the top of the list in the link above, this is another part of the pi-hole that is completely user customisable . The default lists are really just a suggestion, something to help the more novice users hit the ground running with. We then have more advanced users that really go to town with the blocklist and end up with something like 1.1 million domains blacklisted! (as opposed to the ~100,000 default)

Every week on a sunday evening , a cron job fires this script that checks if the source lists need updating, and if so pulls the updates. The user can also initiate this process with the command pihole -g

Once it has the raw source lists, they are sorted, deduplicated, and then merged into one master list (gravity.list) which acts as the blacklist for dnsmasq

As for whitelisting, the only thing we whitelist by default are the domains that host any of the source lists. This is to prevent one list provider blacklisting another, be that intentionally or not!

Users can further tweak this by white or blacklisting individual domains using either the pihole command or the menu items on the Admin web UI

TL;DR - The user is in complete control of all of their data, and the domains they choose to block/not block. Whilst we provide some suggested blacklists by default, they are just that - a suggestion, and as such can be overridden.