HTTPS-Everywhere - connections to main page

I was going to title the thread "phoning home?", but don't want to start FUD if it ends up being unfounded, and damage the credibility of this great addon if what I'm saying is an over-reaction. But I notice activity.

I keep an eye on my firewall logs for patterns when I browse the web. One address range I kept finding was: 69.50.1.1 - 69.50.255.255 I ended up finding out that this range was used by Firefox addon HTTPS-Everywhere. Upon blocking it I realized I could no longer connect to it's main site:

https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

Go ahead and check for yourself.

The addon seems to work just fine without it being able to connect back to this site. So it seems unnecessary, so I just block the range.

Is this phoning home? Either way, can you think of any practical purpose for why it'd have to do this? Maybe even it should be allowed for some reason?

Just wanted to draw people's attention to it, and to see if perhaps I was overlooking something, or even flat out oblivious to it, and it has not only a completely viable reason why it does it, but is perhaps even essential, or at least useful.

Thanks

 

SSL Observatory ?

 

Probably update check, especially since it's not in addons.mozilla.org so Firefox can't notify you.

 

I have the SSL Observatory and automatic updating both disabled, for the record.

 

Hmmmm that's weird. Everything phones home these day's even app's that don't need it. For example Eraser phones home, god knows why but it does.

Maybe they the EFF are collecting usage statistics

 

That netblk (69.50.1.1 - 69.50.255.255) seems too large. I would capture the DNS queries and see which hostname was looked up. Quickly peeking at the source:

Update hostname: [noparse]www.eff.org[/noparse]
Observatory host: observatory.eff.org
Proxy test host: check.torproject.org

There may be others I didn't spot. Enabling more verbose console output can sometimes be useful, so while I'm here...

Preference: extensions.https_everywhere.LogLevel
Default: 5
Lower to see more output...

VERB=1;
DBUG=2;
INFO=3;
NOTE=4;
WARN=5;