This app is not a one man show! This app, with all it's license stuff, backdoors etc.. all ready to know a lot of all your network traffic going in and out, and you agree upon all this when you install it. Now YOU got hacked! Or do you think the app will also show in detail what data they store and share on their servers and third parties and more?
767 point and counting on HN, amazing...
Good luck!
Surprise HN; I'm trying to grasp why this is upvoted so high (1) This submission has a reddit style storified title but doesn't link to the story (2) Uses the word "app" , to catch the mobile crowd, which for Windows wasn't used traditionally (That also explain the top comment, which is about aesthetics) (3) seems to suggest the problem is solved the first time, despite the fact that there are dozens of similar apps, commercial, free or open source.
_edit_: I can see that your post is relevant with regards to (3) - "problem solved for the first time". They may have some features that no others have, such as alerts. There are many similar apps though. One example: Netlimiter http://www.netlimiter.com/
To give you an anecdotal idea of how compelling that can be, I booted my gaming Windows machine just to take a closer look at it.
What I want is a simple no-worry IDS/IPS I can install on easily on Win or OSX machines. Have it use the rules Snort uses. Make it dead simple to install. Now I don't have to spend hours digging through logs or graphs by apps like these. The IDS/IPS just stops hackers from entering. I'm a sysadmin and I run IDS and its a game-changer for us. Yet somehow in the home user space, its non-existant.
No idea on how bad the licensing on those Snort rules is, but a 1-click WinSnort that auto-updated itself would be a game changer. I find it amusing that everyone lives in fear of Cryptolocker when a simple rule can detect Cryptolocker traffic and deny it access to the mothership to generate a key. No key, no encryption.
I could see this evolving into a smart firewall type app on top of these static rules. It could say, "Hey why is guy downloading an unsigned exe from a computer on the botnet list? I'll block that." Or "why is this guy sending out suddenly smtp connections to thousands of servers. I'll just block that."
Personally I've been looking for a little snitch equivalent for Windows for a while now and this one seems like a good starting point.
I think that the problem you might have with IDS/IPS for end user machines is similar to the problems that end users would have with this kind of software. Namely when it blocks/alerts it's very hard to translate the reason for the block (a SNORT rule) into something that's meaningful for a non-technical user.
the alternative is just to silently block, but that leaves the user with a problem whenever there is a false positive (which is a fairly large problem with network IDS/IPS in my experience)
Do you have any evidence of malicious intent/execution from this software, or this just your presumption based on their marketing?