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Comment by miles | Hacker News Reader

Beautiful UI! Just curious: why not block connection attempts from new programs automatically? By the time a user has noticed and blocked future connections, it may well be too late.

On a related note, I recently tested a number of firewalls for Windows using Comodo's HIPS and Firewall Leak Test Suite[1]; the only one I found that passed all tests with virtually no setup or changes was SpyShelter Firewall[2]. Not an endorsement by any means, just an observation.

[1] http://personalfirewall.comodo.com/cltinfo.html [2] http://www.spyshelter.com/spyshelter-firewall/

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I use Little Snitch on my Mac. I found myself just "allow"ing everything all the time anyway. I think most users just get used to pressing "OK" and stop even paying attention to what they are agreeing to. I know I get lazy and do that myself. Instead I wanted to briefly alert the user and let them make their own decision, then we also added in some malicious host monitoring and other features to help. Users can use our "network time machine" feature to go back and time and see exactly what happened in the past. I haven't seen another product that does that.

I've stopped using Little snitch a while back because it felt useless as I would indeed allow everything out of habits. Good decision.

Have you tried using Little Snitch along with Privoxy?

I find the combination works very well. You get two ways to block things (Little Snitch rules and Privoxy rules) and because Privoxy is so easy to restart you can make "Deny" your default behavior since if the site doesn't show properly, just restart privoxy and hit refresh.

Great looking app btw. Haven't had to work on a windows box in a long time but if I do I'm definitely going to try this out.

I believe the point is not being a firewall, but rather let the user know what's going on. Firewalls may cause all sort of problems for the common user by blocking by default, and still don't reveal privacy violations (e.g., whitelisted applications generating traffic at unexpected moments).

Do you have it written down perhaps? What firewalls you tested and how they managed? I'd be interested.

I'm sorry, I don't, but there are detailed tests and comparisons at: http://www.matousec.com/projects/proactive-security-challeng... . One well-respected app that does not appear in those results is Online Armor, apparently due to some sort of falling out: http://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/privatefirewall-awful...

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