6 ms·

Simplewall Has Been Discontinued

54 points by akyuu 2y ago

ementally 2y ago
FOSS alternative is Fort https://github.com/tnodir/fort https://github.com/tnodir/fort But unfortunately you have to disable core isolation for the time being https://github.com/tnodir/fort/discussions/108 https://github.com/tnodir/fort/discussions/108
- baal80spam 2y ago
  Thanks for mentioning Fort. I've never heard of it but I'm an avid user of Simplewall. Looks like I will need to take a close look now. Thank God it's not another crapp written in Electron.
- BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
  Used https://tinywall.pados.hu/ https://tinywall.pados.hu/ when I was on Windows (at least a decade ago).
- aucisson_masque 2y ago
  I would recommend Fort, back when i ran windows i tried all the available firewall and simplewall ended up being buggy after some times. Fort worked perfectly, it had more settings and once you took the time to set it up you could just save the rules, the configuration and export it to another computer.
no_wizard 2y ago
Creators / maintainers owe us nothing, but I am always slightly bummed when I don't see a reason for the discontinuation. Can speculate all day of course, and any reason is a good one. Again, I know they don't owe us anything, even an explanation, but curiosity always gets the best of me.
- teddyh 2y ago
  > Creators / maintainers owe us nothing I would argue that they do, in fact, owe us something. All people who make public announcements are in effect holding a conversation with the public, until such time as they publicly announce its end. A person in a conversation is socially obligated to make reasonable attempts to speak and respond to other people’s questions, comments, and concerns. If they don’t, or suddenly stop, they have abandoned the social etiquette of a conversation. This is not the public “being entitled” (as some like to claim), but is instead the quite reasonable expectations of the public who was led into a conversation with somebody who did not, or ceased to, respect the social rules. (I should not need to say this, but in addition to being a user of many software projects, I am myself a maintainer of software publicly available – in official Linux distributions, even. I do not think that I ask my fellow maintainers for much – only a smidgen of respect for their users.) (Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38301710#38304918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38301710#38304918>, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22073908#22074287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22073908#22074287>)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - baq 2y ago
    The tax you’re describing is exactly why maintainers burn out and why open source projects die, or worse - they’re never born. The only way to win is not to play.
    - belorn 2y ago
      It is very similar to club activities and volunteer work. People burn out fast when they stop finding value in the work. It is exceptional common with instructors where say parents pay to a club for their children membership, where the parents might not be fully aware that the cost of operation would be significant higher if the people involved were paid employees rather than people volunteering their time. One has to regularly remind people about the social aspects that are the foundation of such activity, and that the activity can only exist when enough people join in and help. When that fails you get very high burnout rates which quickly can cause a death spiral of the whole activity. Normally such activity comes with one year commitments. Leaving in the middle of things unannounced and without warning would be breaking the social etiquette. No one is forced to work but there are social expectations and obligations in social activities. How much open source project is similar to such activity, and how much social expectation there are will depend on the context. For example, if you are volunteering as treasurer to a large open source project, the expectations are going to be very similar to that of a club, as will the burn out if the person doing the work don't get value from it.
- mmaunder 2y ago
  Agreed. Sometimes it’s personal challenges or tragedy. So perhaps best to let it lie if it’s not volunteered.
- hinkley 2y ago
  I think a lot of open source maintainers start before they have found their favorite languages. And now you have a problem if you see that the language you wrote your library in creates a bunch of make-work problems that you can solve by switching languages. How do you retire without it sounding like an insult to the ecosystem and the people who helped you make the product good? If he keeps pushing commits, I won’t place bets but would say don’t be surprised if they’re in a new language.
  - fra 2y ago
    I think this is the reason in fewer 0.01% of cases. Languages are not in the top 10 things that make being an open source maintainer difficult.
  - teddyh 2y ago
    > How do you retire without it sounding like an insult to the ecosystem and the people who helped you make the product good? I would think it’s fairly simple. Announce your retirement from the project, and assign the project leadership and commit rights (or whatever GitHub uses) to whoever you feel would be a good fit, or the most frequent contributor, or simply to the most recent one. But most anything would be better than locking the repository and vanishing without a word.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      Okay but… it looks like he made 9 times as many commits as the second most frequent committer and 6 times as many as the top two combined. Who do you suppose he should hand it off to? This smells like a “nobody appreciates how much I’ve been carrying this project” situation. That complicates things.
      - teddyh 2y ago
        > Who do you suppose he should hand it off to? Like I said, anyone would be better than nobody.
        2y ago
- gwerbret 2y ago
  There's an important discussion in the sub-thread by @teddyh that has unfortunately been voted dead, so I thought I would comment on it here instead. I suspect teddyh is being criticized for use of the word "obligation", so maybe I can clarify. People can create and operate channels on YouTube for free. Yet we frequently see reports of Google acting unreasonably towards people who come to depend on YouTube, often for their livelihood. We expect Google to act morally by providing the bare minimum of human oversight when a person's channel has been banned by an AI mistake. But there is no legal or ethical obligation, because YouTube is "free", and Google just doesn't care enough about morals. We also see lots of examples of FOSS authors getting burned out when their sense of morality is used and abused by users. That's also not okay. But perhaps we can aim for a happy medium where the "norm" assumes people can be reasonable, mature adults. No one wins when we optimize for the outliers.
  - shagie 2y ago
    > ... in the sub-thread by @teddyh that has unfortunately been voted dead ... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html > Dead posts aren't displayed by default, but you can see them all by turning on 'showdead' in your profile. > If you see a [dead] post that shouldn't be dead, you can vouch for it. Click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'vouch' at the top. When enough users do this, the post is restored. There's a small karma threshold before vouch links appear. I'm not sure if your karma is sufficient for that action, but it's not a dead comment anymore.
    - gwerbret 2y ago
      Yes I see that now, thanks!
  - nijave 2y ago
    Youtube the relationship is largely bidirectional where both sides are profiting FOSS often times consumers are profiting and maintainers are not (and many times maintainers are investing/spending instead)
  - teddyh 2y ago
UltraSane 2y ago
What is wrong with the Standard Windows Firewall? It is quite powerful.
- Cartoxy 2y ago
  the UI is garbage. Talk about unintuitive. Where it's simple it to simple and when it's advanced it's not intuitive and the relvant info is scatterd to the point of disfunction.
- neuroelectron 2y ago
  I'm guessing it has a lot of undocumented features and doesn't behave as expected.
- uncletammy 2y ago
  You can't block Windows/Microsoft traffic
  - UltraSane 2y ago
    You can block any traffic by IP or process
- atmanactive 2y ago
  It is not a personal firewall. The purpose of a personal firewall is to inform and enable a user to see and approve each and every connection attempt. Standard Windows Firewall alerts users only on LISTEN, which makes it useless for this role. For a server though, Standard Windows Firewall is fully adequate.
9cb14c1ec0 2y ago
Windows Filtering Platform (what Simplewall is based on) is simultaneously one of the most powerful network access management APIs that exist, and also the most frustrating to use. The way it works in practice doesn't always match the documentation.
- greggsy 2y ago
  I wonder if there is change afoot in the way those APIs are designed and interacted with? MS did indicate during the CrowdStrike DOS that they would work towards opening up or at least documenting those APIs and some other aspects of the kernel to help improve the situation for vendors. I believe there might have also been antitrust concerns about the way they deliver Defender as part of the OS, but simultaneously offer premium cloud platforms? Don’t recall the full story.
baal80spam 2y ago
Is the archiving of its repo the only "proof" of it being discontinued?
- baq 2y ago
  Do you need more? Is the hardest proof you can get
  - snailmailstare 2y ago
    It might be the hardest proof to expect, but there is an unarchive button and people archive for reasons like moving rather than stopping a project permanently.
Sarky 2y ago
Love this litle app. Author did this once before. I hope he changes his mind. I would hate to need to look for a replacement.
- immibis 2y ago
  Since it's open source, the replacement is to keep this software up-to-date yourself.
andro_dev 2y ago
I recommend https://github.com/pylorak/TinyWall https://github.com/pylorak/TinyWall as a simpler firewall management alternative.
qingcharles 2y ago
What's the simplest/best tool to just nix all the Windows/MS telemetry crap? I'm already running Tiny11 + Win11Debloat, which removes some of it.
- ClickedUp 2y ago
  Blackbird V6 https://getblackbird.net/ https://getblackbird.net/
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    Perfect, thank you.
- Sarky 2y ago
  Sophia script[0] is amazing for debloating windows. You need to take a bit of time to configure what you want it to do, then run it on every computer you configure. [0] https://github.com/farag2/Sophia-Script-for-Windows https://github.com/farag2/Sophia-Script-for-Windows
- cadamsdotcom 2y ago
  If you’re fighting the fundamental nature of your tools, I think it behooves you to at least consider swapping them for others. Not saying you should switch. That’s a personal decision. But it might be time to take a look at what else is out there.
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    I've been running Unix and Mac desktops too for decades. I have to fight them too, but in different ways :)
- ementally 2y ago
  Use Windows education or Enterprise editions and follow this guide https://www.privacyguides.org/en/os/windows/ https://www.privacyguides.org/en/os/windows/ But windows will always introduce more telemetry tracking and Recall. If you want to have privacy and not be surveilled by Microsoft/Windows, use Linux.
wolfgx 2y ago
Been a simplewall user for 6 years.. Now I've been using FortFirewall as a replacement. It's simple, runs with a system driver and is frequently updated.

54 points by akyuu 2y ago

FOSS alternative is Fort https://github.com/tnodir/fort https://github.com/tnodir/fort But unfortunately you have to disable core isolation for the time being https://github.com/tnodir/fort/discussions/108 https://github.com/tnodir/fort/discussions/108

baal80spam 2y ago
Thanks for mentioning Fort. I've never heard of it but I'm an avid user of Simplewall. Looks like I will need to take a close look now. Thank God it's not another crapp written in Electron.
BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
Used https://tinywall.pados.hu/ https://tinywall.pados.hu/ when I was on Windows (at least a decade ago).
aucisson_masque 2y ago
I would recommend Fort, back when i ran windows i tried all the available firewall and simplewall ended up being buggy after some times. Fort worked perfectly, it had more settings and once you took the time to set it up you could just save the rules, the configuration and export it to another computer.

no_wizard 2y ago

Creators / maintainers owe us nothing, but I am always slightly bummed when I don't see a reason for the discontinuation. Can speculate all day of course, and any reason is a good one. Again, I know they don't owe us anything, even an explanation, but curiosity always gets the best of me.

teddyh 2y ago
> Creators / maintainers owe us nothing I would argue that they do, in fact, owe us something. All people who make public announcements are in effect holding a conversation with the public, until such time as they publicly announce its end. A person in a conversation is socially obligated to make reasonable attempts to speak and respond to other people’s questions, comments, and concerns. If they don’t, or suddenly stop, they have abandoned the social etiquette of a conversation. This is not the public “being entitled” (as some like to claim), but is instead the quite reasonable expectations of the public who was led into a conversation with somebody who did not, or ceased to, respect the social rules. (I should not need to say this, but in addition to being a user of many software projects, I am myself a maintainer of software publicly available – in official Linux distributions, even. I do not think that I ask my fellow maintainers for much – only a smidgen of respect for their users.) (Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38301710#38304918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38301710#38304918>, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22073908#22074287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22073908#22074287>)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- baq 2y ago
  The tax you’re describing is exactly why maintainers burn out and why open source projects die, or worse - they’re never born. The only way to win is not to play.
  - belorn 2y ago
    It is very similar to club activities and volunteer work. People burn out fast when they stop finding value in the work. It is exceptional common with instructors where say parents pay to a club for their children membership, where the parents might not be fully aware that the cost of operation would be significant higher if the people involved were paid employees rather than people volunteering their time. One has to regularly remind people about the social aspects that are the foundation of such activity, and that the activity can only exist when enough people join in and help. When that fails you get very high burnout rates which quickly can cause a death spiral of the whole activity. Normally such activity comes with one year commitments. Leaving in the middle of things unannounced and without warning would be breaking the social etiquette. No one is forced to work but there are social expectations and obligations in social activities. How much open source project is similar to such activity, and how much social expectation there are will depend on the context. For example, if you are volunteering as treasurer to a large open source project, the expectations are going to be very similar to that of a club, as will the burn out if the person doing the work don't get value from it.
mmaunder 2y ago
Agreed. Sometimes it’s personal challenges or tragedy. So perhaps best to let it lie if it’s not volunteered.
hinkley 2y ago
I think a lot of open source maintainers start before they have found their favorite languages. And now you have a problem if you see that the language you wrote your library in creates a bunch of make-work problems that you can solve by switching languages. How do you retire without it sounding like an insult to the ecosystem and the people who helped you make the product good? If he keeps pushing commits, I won’t place bets but would say don’t be surprised if they’re in a new language.
- fra 2y ago
  I think this is the reason in fewer 0.01% of cases. Languages are not in the top 10 things that make being an open source maintainer difficult.
- teddyh 2y ago
  > How do you retire without it sounding like an insult to the ecosystem and the people who helped you make the product good? I would think it’s fairly simple. Announce your retirement from the project, and assign the project leadership and commit rights (or whatever GitHub uses) to whoever you feel would be a good fit, or the most frequent contributor, or simply to the most recent one. But most anything would be better than locking the repository and vanishing without a word.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    Okay but… it looks like he made 9 times as many commits as the second most frequent committer and 6 times as many as the top two combined. Who do you suppose he should hand it off to? This smells like a “nobody appreciates how much I’ve been carrying this project” situation. That complicates things.
    - teddyh 2y ago
      > Who do you suppose he should hand it off to? Like I said, anyone would be better than nobody.
      - 2y ago
gwerbret 2y ago
There's an important discussion in the sub-thread by @teddyh that has unfortunately been voted dead, so I thought I would comment on it here instead. I suspect teddyh is being criticized for use of the word "obligation", so maybe I can clarify. People can create and operate channels on YouTube for free. Yet we frequently see reports of Google acting unreasonably towards people who come to depend on YouTube, often for their livelihood. We expect Google to act morally by providing the bare minimum of human oversight when a person's channel has been banned by an AI mistake. But there is no legal or ethical obligation, because YouTube is "free", and Google just doesn't care enough about morals. We also see lots of examples of FOSS authors getting burned out when their sense of morality is used and abused by users. That's also not okay. But perhaps we can aim for a happy medium where the "norm" assumes people can be reasonable, mature adults. No one wins when we optimize for the outliers.
- shagie 2y ago
  > ... in the sub-thread by @teddyh that has unfortunately been voted dead ... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html > Dead posts aren't displayed by default, but you can see them all by turning on 'showdead' in your profile. > If you see a [dead] post that shouldn't be dead, you can vouch for it. Click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'vouch' at the top. When enough users do this, the post is restored. There's a small karma threshold before vouch links appear. I'm not sure if your karma is sufficient for that action, but it's not a dead comment anymore.
  - gwerbret 2y ago
    Yes I see that now, thanks!
- nijave 2y ago
  Youtube the relationship is largely bidirectional where both sides are profiting FOSS often times consumers are profiting and maintainers are not (and many times maintainers are investing/spending instead)
- teddyh 2y ago

UltraSane 2y ago

What is wrong with the Standard Windows Firewall? It is quite powerful.

Cartoxy 2y ago
the UI is garbage. Talk about unintuitive. Where it's simple it to simple and when it's advanced it's not intuitive and the relvant info is scatterd to the point of disfunction.
neuroelectron 2y ago
I'm guessing it has a lot of undocumented features and doesn't behave as expected.
uncletammy 2y ago
You can't block Windows/Microsoft traffic
- UltraSane 2y ago
  You can block any traffic by IP or process
atmanactive 2y ago
It is not a personal firewall. The purpose of a personal firewall is to inform and enable a user to see and approve each and every connection attempt. Standard Windows Firewall alerts users only on LISTEN, which makes it useless for this role. For a server though, Standard Windows Firewall is fully adequate.

9cb14c1ec0 2y ago

Windows Filtering Platform (what Simplewall is based on) is simultaneously one of the most powerful network access management APIs that exist, and also the most frustrating to use. The way it works in practice doesn't always match the documentation.

greggsy 2y ago
I wonder if there is change afoot in the way those APIs are designed and interacted with? MS did indicate during the CrowdStrike DOS that they would work towards opening up or at least documenting those APIs and some other aspects of the kernel to help improve the situation for vendors. I believe there might have also been antitrust concerns about the way they deliver Defender as part of the OS, but simultaneously offer premium cloud platforms? Don’t recall the full story.

baal80spam 2y ago

Is the archiving of its repo the only "proof" of it being discontinued?

baq 2y ago
Do you need more? Is the hardest proof you can get
- snailmailstare 2y ago
  It might be the hardest proof to expect, but there is an unarchive button and people archive for reasons like moving rather than stopping a project permanently.

Sarky 2y ago

Love this litle app. Author did this once before. I hope he changes his mind. I would hate to need to look for a replacement.

immibis 2y ago
Since it's open source, the replacement is to keep this software up-to-date yourself.

andro_dev 2y ago

I recommend https://github.com/pylorak/TinyWall https://github.com/pylorak/TinyWall as a simpler firewall management alternative.

qingcharles 2y ago

What's the simplest/best tool to just nix all the Windows/MS telemetry crap? I'm already running Tiny11 + Win11Debloat, which removes some of it.

ClickedUp 2y ago
Blackbird V6 https://getblackbird.net/ https://getblackbird.net/
- qingcharles 2y ago
  Perfect, thank you.
Sarky 2y ago
Sophia script[0] is amazing for debloating windows. You need to take a bit of time to configure what you want it to do, then run it on every computer you configure. [0] https://github.com/farag2/Sophia-Script-for-Windows https://github.com/farag2/Sophia-Script-for-Windows
cadamsdotcom 2y ago
If you’re fighting the fundamental nature of your tools, I think it behooves you to at least consider swapping them for others. Not saying you should switch. That’s a personal decision. But it might be time to take a look at what else is out there.
- qingcharles 2y ago
  I've been running Unix and Mac desktops too for decades. I have to fight them too, but in different ways :)
ementally 2y ago
Use Windows education or Enterprise editions and follow this guide https://www.privacyguides.org/en/os/windows/ https://www.privacyguides.org/en/os/windows/ But windows will always introduce more telemetry tracking and Recall. If you want to have privacy and not be surveilled by Microsoft/Windows, use Linux.

wolfgx 2y ago

Been a simplewall user for 6 years.. Now I've been using FortFirewall as a replacement. It's simple, runs with a system driver and is frequently updated.