Hacker News Reader

Those already exist, eg. littlesnitch on mac. As it relates to this problem though (ie. zoom), such program would get annoying pretty quick, because they'll be connecting to random IPs every time (different relay servers/peers), so you eventually get tired of the alerts and whitelist everything.

View on HN

I think the alerts would have to be at a higher level hierarchy than plain URLs or domains.

I'm imagining a categorized whitelist of domains based on purpose (essential, telemetry, ads) which the user would choose from at first run, and the program would just block the other domains without asking again and again.

I find huge value in using these as a blacklist - this won't protect against a zero-day or unknown malware, but it will absolutely protect against the known, repeat offenders. Having all Facebook and Google domains & IPs blacklisted will already do wonders for your privacy. You can whitelist the browser if you need to access such services while making sure trackers in other apps still can't talk to them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com