POV) You use Windows 11 and set up Pihole for the first time.
POV) You use Windows 11 and set up Pihole for the first time.
This is AFTER debloating all the MS bs as much as I can.
The amount of MS telemetry is just mindboggling.
While telemetry is bad the problem here is probably that this windows service pings the server but doesn't get a response because it got stuck in your pihole. So it tries to pings again and again and again and again...
The best solution would be to disable telemetry to the capacity you are capable or is possible without breaking something and block pings as backup to when it's enabled again with updates and repeat.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking..
Exponential backoff is baked in most libraries. So probably not.
Sure but if they're trying to send new requests while the others are still retrying, then it will result in the same thing
Is there a service whit which you can automatially send fake answers to certain events?
Teams no linger does that. It just goes to an error page if it fails to load twice
As someone who has designed and used telemetry systems, I’ll never quite understand the strong aversion some people have to them. Telemetry is what lets me tell my boss “yes people really do use our software this way and we can’t break it” or “90% of crashes happen right after the player uses a grenade”. And despite what some conspiracy theorists would have you believe, telemetry data for software from reputable companies does not get sold or used for marketing purposes. Our lawyers make sure of it, and also make us go through privacy reviews to make sure that data isn’t leaking PII.
To me, telemetry would be like a sofa company wanting to put some cameras in your home to see if you're using the sofa the way they thought you would. It just feels... off.
“90% of crashes happen right after the player uses a grenade”.
Imo, a simple opt-in crash report gets the job done. Technically it is telemetry, but a crash report is more justified than a "where have you clicked" report.
telemetry data for software from reputable companies does not get sold
There's just no trust in companies to not sell my data. I cannot trust Microsoft nor Google nor any other company to not sell my data, having seen the shenanigans every single company is willing to pull off to get a cent more a year.
In general I agree, but users should be able to make that decision themselves. I do not understand why you can't turn off telemetry, when it would be trivial to offer that option and so few users would bother to use it.
users should be able to make that decision themselves.
Agreed
I do not understand why you can't turn off telemetry,
It should be opt-in, not opt-out.
I agree, it should be opt in. Where I disagree is with how strongly people react against it.
If you buy a car and it only comes with Bluetooth do you have a meltdown? Do you kick, scream, and cry that Big Car is going to steal your data? No that's fucking ridiculous. But grown ass man children on Lemmy act that way when Microsoft wants to know how many gigs of ram they have.
As a programmer: "your data is boring. I am not interested in leveraging this for anything besides getting the service you are using to work as well as possible"
Also me as a programmer: "yo, you don't need that data, stop asking for it. Ohh, your app is broken because it can't access permissions? Yeet."
As a programmer: “your data is boring. I am not interested in leveraging this for anything besides getting the service you are using to work as well as possible”
Also me as a programmer: “yo, you don’t need that data, stop asking for it. Ohh, your app is broken because it can’t access permissions? Yeet.”
It's not about the programmers. It's about the company and the ability to make money off of data they get from you. You should be the one who gets money for your data. Not Microsoft, not Google etc.
Is Microsoft making money off of this particular telemetry data? Maybe not. It should always be opt-in
Me, after spending an entire day making sure we don't set any cookies until we get consent and actually need them, while fighting off managers who want to install a spyware X, Y and Z just to track the amount of sales, visiting random ass page that could've been entirely replaced by just an image, seeing half-page banner saying "we have already set cookies, serviceworker and all of the trackers because the internet does not work without them" be like: Fuck you, Artemiy, my site works fine even without javascript and no cookie header at all. It's only yours that shits itself at any mention of privacy.
I don't want you to know anything about me or my device. Simple as
How about shit breaking because everyone at some point is a bad programmer? Even Apple Music doesn’t work when I walk into the elevator until halfway through presumably because hitting play sets of a bunch of useless blocking network calls for music I have saved locally.
What those calls are, I can’t say for sure. Downloading artwork, license checks or telemetry. I’d venture to guess it’s the latter since music will play with placeholder artwork on a slow connection and license checks aren’t required if the subscription was recently validated (works offline for days).
But who really knows. I never bothered to inspect the traffic. The point is, if a company like Apple is creating such a crummy experience for a function so absurdly basic, you can imagine how easy and prevalent telemetry based user degradation is. Go browse the web with a tracker blocker and tell me it isn’t snappier.
PS: I’m also a programmer and collect error reports. So many developers will forego using connection pools, much less collect data with async api’s.
And let’s not even get into how telemetry is a shit tool that is misused 99.99% of the time and only used to surface popular features that aren’t necessarily good features only because we attach causation to every metric (x feature is highly used, therefore it must be good).
So why not ask, "hey you want to share some telemetry to help us improve the product" then?
It's what all reputable companies or projects, I am aware of, do.
Do you consider Microsoft a "reputable company?"
Yes, but maybe “reputable” isn’t the right word. Realistically, it’s anyone who would potentially face billions in a class-action lawsuit and could actually afford to pay up without going bankrupt. It’s just not worth the risk to getting a few extra $million to pull in telemetry data to the already expansive list of marketing data they collect and monetize.
For example, I would doubt that Hearthstone (Blizzard, revenue $8.7B) sells their app telemetry data. But I could definitely believe that Hill Climb Racer (Fingersoft, revenue $30M) does, or at least integrates it with ad targeting products.
Microsoft has more to lose than almost any other tech company. They also have more process, legal enforcement, and bureaucracy than most other tech companies.
There's no fear of a lone engineer moving fast and breaking things at Microsoft. If someone at Microsoft had an idea for how they'd use your data they'd have to pass it through 5 chains of command, 2 tech orgs, and Legal just to begin the process.
I mean, it does have a reputation...
A few things (and I enable it usually, for the record):
- Not really the user's job to help you with anything especially related to your boss
- "from reputable companies does not get sold or used for marketing purposes. Our lawyers make sure of it," fuck man, this made me laugh. Good one
Policies get updated, companies are bought and sold, laws change, and most crucially of all, data gets leaked. It doesn't matter how airtight your asshole is puckered up or how many isolated networks are involved. It gets leaked. Leave the decision up to users about it and in particular maybe let them have full control of their networks.
Oh thank God, someone reasonable.
Before, I was lost.
That would be good, considered the user could actually have a choose to opt out the telemetry. Windows don't ask you about gathering data for telemetry or "other" reasons.
Don't get fooled by the insane amount of hits, when it's not reachable it will try over and over
Yup. You need more like a logger to get the actual measure of the data.
Which could in turn make their pc run worse because it'll constantly be retrying telemetry calls
Except this isn't 1982 and that computer is running Windows 11, not Multix. The CPU probably has at least 8 cores and the NIC can do at least a gigabit. A network retry is not going to matter.
Depends, if you zoom in, most of the time it's like 3 calls a second or something similar.
Well blocking these calls obviously inflates the numbers due to retries.
I can concur. MS do not know the concept of retry limitation.
You can even know when I'm working from home just to the number of blocked MS tracking calls in my pihole log 🤣
Devil’s advocate: basically the only proper way to figure out how people are using your product and how you can tweak it to achieve its goal is by firing events and including relevant metadata such as how much time they spent on a screen or how far they scrolled. Telemetry is not necessarily “evil” by default.
The other side of that is that the telemetry data never gives you a "why" of something.
For example, users might spend a long time at a screen because they are thinking about what to do, or they are confused by the options and can't figure out which option they need.
This is why a QA team coupled with a large amount of beta testers is invaluable and necessary.
Telemetry, in the context of software development and UX design, is either a decision by the misinformed or just an excuse to save costs by axing the Windows QA department.
In reality it's likely the data is being sold off. But in either case, that's data Microsoft isn't entitled to (from a moral/privacy perspective).
For example, users might spend a long time at a screen because they are thinking about
... anything!
what am I gonna eat?
I should remember to feed the bicycle...
who stole my cat btw?
who am I to judge?
who am I?
what's the meaning of life?
what's the meaning of finding it?
what's the meaning of figuring out what the meaning is of finding it???
I replied elsewhere but YES! Telemetry is notorious for causing devs to hyperfocus on shit features due to their high usage. Just because a user is clicking X over Y doesn’t mean Y sucks and X is better. Maybe Y is in their periphery, or camouflaged by the background artwork or worded badly. But hey, since X gets a lot of clicks, it must be good, right?
Telemetry, in the context of software development and UX design, is either a decision by the misinformed or just an excuse to save costs by axing the Windows QA department.
That's very silly. That's actually such a ridiculous opinion I'm pretty sure you've left out some assumption that would make it make sense.
The other side of that is that the telemetry data never gives you a “why” of something.
Focus groups and customer surveys work really well for knowing the "why" of something
Also, Firefox, lemmys beloved browser, sends telemetry by default. You have to dig through menus you didn't know existed to even find out, and then disable.
Not only to Mozilla, but third parties as well.
Firefox is the lesser of two evils. It turned to shit the moment they took Google's poisoned money. The money also made the Mozilla org put on airs and think they're some world-changing UN body or some shit and lose focus on their core business of making web browsers.
Not sure about this. When I installed Firefox, it asked me if I allowed it to collect data and run studies (I answered yes). Also, as far as I remember, I never changed the Marketing Data setting and it was off.
Devil’s advocate: basically the only proper way to figure out how people are using your product
Focus groups and customer surveys work really well.
Those events are used by all of these services:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/windows-11-endpoints-non-enterprise-editions
Literally everything, from Windows to Office to OneDrive to Cortana to diagnostics.
All of them(except for Cortana) I use, but barely. Hadn't had real issue so far so Imma just keep it.
I think it's horrible and has no place at all in a operating system.
Something is seriously wrong with your Windows 11 install. I have two Windows 11 devices on my network and a Surface Duo 2.
Yeah I figured. I can't(don't have the will power to) point out the reason for this extremely unusual behavior. I just let it be because no devices are visibly suffering from it though.
What did you use to debloat it?
It has become really nasty for sure...
But I can't really blame them. Who wouldn't want to know? And who doesn't do it? It's just always MS who gets shit on for doing it. Everything and everyone tracks our every movement and click. If ET had been an android-phone he had been long called home before the intro started.
Don't get me wrong, i effing abhor these things from the depths of my nerdy heart and do everything to block them all. But we just can't avoid it anymore. We can just hope to get it all blocked or that it at least only sends anonymous usage-data and nothing else.
And who doesn't do it?
OSS operating systems. The more proprietary software you run, the less and less you actually own your computer and the more it becomes a tool to advance the interests of megacorps.
Not all. Ubuntu does phone home too. But sure, most don't. But OSS is not for mainstream-users. I am protected (and just pissed), i was speaking more on behalf of the clueless mass and in general.
And btw. Your argument fails at phonee. Android and apple suck in regards to privacy. I could use privacy-os' on my pixel but they all lack boldly. So the moment i leave my perfect private pc, I'm screwed with mobiles again... I doubt there ever will be a viable linux-phone.
But to play devil's (angel's?) advocate for a minute, Microsoft can't fix vulnerabilities in Windows without telemetry data. There's a practically infinite combination of hardware components Windows runs on, and that makes it impossible for Microsoft to find and fix vulnerabilities and bugs in house. Older versions of Windows were so insecure in-part because Microsoft made telemetry reports opt-in, and we all know how likely the average user is to do so.
Now that's not to say that everything Microsoft collects is appropriate; I'm only saying there is a valid case for collecting some data from users.
we just can’t avoid it anymore
Speak for yourself. Besides, all-or-nothing privacy is a false dichotomy. Giving out less personal data is still better than giving out everything, and you don't need 100% privacy to be unprofitable to advertisers.
You misread. It IS unavoidable nowadays or most of the surface-web is non-functional if you block anything that isn't content. Besides the amount of work it takes to just not be tracked rises and rises.
Doesn't mean I don't do whatever i can do avoid it. To every techy it should be more than obvious that there is no binary approach. You can only do more or less to avoid more or less but never eliminate it.
So yeah, the less the better. And one might even partially reach a state where one is unprofitable to advertisers. Yet that can change tomorrow or on the next site or when you use some phone-app or or or...
That's what i meant with "unavoidable". You can't avoid a persistent ever-evolving problem.
If ET had been an android-phone he had been long called home before the intro started
That's a good one! But to be fair, Apple calls home just as much. They just don't sell that data (yet).
As does Android. I'm not sure why we would give MS a by for this. They're all as bad as each other and all deserve to be blocked as comprehensively as possible.
Totally. Wasn't an apple-fanboy-comment. Apple even suck more. At least i COULD (and may!) change my pixel's os to some privacy-focused one.
Desktop linux doesn't have any of this. And one day we'll get real linux on phones too (with full featured support).
It's always MS who has people on the internet defending them when they do it, to the point that it looks like MS social media presence is being carefully managed, like Apple. I saw it happen on Reddit too, and it happened less and less the more they got called out. The same "$70 a year for Office 365 is so worth it" is a talking point when I was on Reddit. Apparently, people here say the same thing.
It really is amazing to me that lemmy suddenly has an army of anti linux shills on it. Idk what the purpose of that even is.
I'm not defending them. I just dislike the silly MS-hate train. As if they were the only ones doing it. If apple does it, it's a feature. MS is evil. That's as boring and old like IE-jokes that are still around. I have more Linux-machines than win-machines in my home lab.
And every major crap has its fanboys and marketing-workforce defending their shit.
Join us.... become Linux nerd, never look back. Hate that the one or two software you use that has no viable equivalent is either super janky or doesn't work on wine even though tons of games outperform windows... with the windows build.
Or battle telemetry for several years until you get forced to subscribe to win 12.
Wait till you plug in your cell phone to charge they start calling home like crazy
All hail GrapheneOS
Get a device that is supported by degoogled android systems and get rid of all the garbage. My recommendation is always GrapheneOS on a pixel, just because you can reinstall google play services if you really need to and preserve usability, while massively boosting privacy and security.
I used blokada on my phone and it blocked around 10k calls per day. I've since moved to use Mullvad as an always on VPN and turned all of the blockers on. Haven't setup a pihole for my home yet because I didn't have access to the router.
My fire stick does double that lol
My "smart tv" too.
Looking at you Roku... they're at the top of my list for some reason. I have two TVs.
"bUt ThAt DaTa iS gOiNg tO mAkE ThE pRoDuCt BeTtEr"
Despite your sarcasm, it really is.
Yeah, I recently did it for a lab and it was... interesting.
My Ubuntu VM wasn't particularly great either but it was the one that my uni provided
Ubuntu lost me years ago. I still use the server version for.. servers. If you want something rawk sawlid for servers, go Ubuntu. Otherwise, go Pop. Or Elementary. Or Mint.
Don’t like your hand held? Fedora.
Hate yourself? Arch.
Draw your entire personality from knowing what a transistor is? Gentoo.
Like the concept of arch but only slightly hate useself manjaro.
Are paranoid about securiy use qubes
I have other ways of disabling those telemetry reports.
O&O shutup 10 and adguard for desktop allow the user to turn off a lot of bullshit.
I stopped using my Pihole because it kept eating SD cards. If that wasn't an issue would love to be using it still.
I can recommend
for that. It logs to RAM and only writes to the SD card once a day (or more/less, if you choose).
It's a must while using PiHole imo.
You formatted your links as images. Markdown uses  for images, [...](...) for links.
I appreciate the links to log2Ram. I'll try when I get a new pi.
I've recently read about how to fix corrupted SD-cards in Raspberry Pis. Corruption can happen when the Pi is unexpectedly losing power during a write to the SD card.
To avoid corruption, you can change the (boot partition of the) SD to read-only, requiring either USB storage (flash/HDD/SSD) or a writable secondary partition on the SD card) if you need to save anything locally. The system itself will run fine without write access. Only your files could be at risk if you lose power mid-write.
You can also configure your system to boot from USB storage instead of SD card. Keeping the system partition read-only is probably still a good idea, if possible in your setup.
Modern versions of raspi-config offer a similar read-only overlayFS functionality out of the box! sudo raspi-config, go to Advanced Options, then enable the Overlay FS: Enable/Disable read-only filesystem feature.
Source: Shane S. @ https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/7978/how-can-i-prevent-my-pis-sd-card-from-getting-corrupted-so-often
It wasn't ever an issue of power or corruption. It was hitting the rewrite limit of the SD card itself. I had it on a UPS with my other network equipment and maintained a 100% uptime other than intentional outages with clean reboots. Literally wrote so much log info the card would die. You could still read the card but writing would no longer function.
The suggestion to do a read-only setup would be optimal, I'd prefer it be ram based though as I wouldn't have such dire need of logs that losing them during a power cycle would cause me any grief.
I had that issue too. Had to switch to running it on my NAS.
I'm wondering what could have caused that. Uneven power supply maybe? My pihole has been chugging away for years without much more than the occasional update when I remember.
SD cards have a write limit. I don't know what to tell you other than I probably had more shit being written.
High endurance rated cards are good for that. Don't risk using the cheap SD cards
I recently switched my main desktop from windows to linux, and now my download speeds are much faster. I guess now I know why. 😬
Mind to tell which version and region?
Good try Microsoft
Just wanted to let you know, maybe there exist different configs for different regions to comply for
I use O&O ShutUp 10/11 for this , its super easy to use too
How much of that is Windows update processes?
Unless windows update needs to check for something every few seconds... It's not that. This is behaving more like real time streaming of events, constantly sending to Microsoft, to a domain called events.
Probably sends what the user is doing all the time.
Apparently self.events.data.microsoft.com has something to do with Office 365 apps; calendar, mail, etc.
Probably right around zero.
I've seen similar with Win 10. Just much less. Care to share what adlists you used? I'm also new to Pi-hole and always up for learning more.
Does Pihole use RPZ's? I don't have any experience with it. Been using Infoblox with RPZ's at home.
Mine is a docker container on a Linux server in the hall closet.
That's literally Office356. If you use outlook or any part of the office suite, you will have tons of traffic to there. If you drop it, it will stop working.
Hehe yeah it's fun to run pihole and see a windows machine gets turned on... Looots of attempted Spyware communication.
