The GUI gave me the impression that I had to press "Check for updates" before it would "dial home", apparently I was wrong.
I thought that too. All the better to ruin your privacy with I suppose.
DEFAULT_FETCH_INTERVAL = 30*MINUTE
I didn't see the comment where they admit its logged.
Use the verbose=True option to add OS, subOS, and a few "random" bytes that help reject duplicate queries.
How would they know if the requests are duplicate if they weren't logging them?