11 ms·
I remember before Little Snitch there was ZoneAlarm for Windows[0] (here is a good screenshot[1]). No clue if the current version of ZoneAlarm does anything lik
by alhazrod 6mo ago
I remember before Little Snitch there was ZoneAlarm for Windows[0] (here is a good screenshot[1]). No clue if the current version of ZoneAlarm does anything like that (have not used it in 2 decades). I always found it weird that Linux never really had anything like it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZoneAlarm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZoneAlarm
[1]: https://d2nwkt1g6n1fev.cloudfront.net/helpmax/wp-content/uploads/sub/alertcommander/en/source/zone-alarm-free-1.png https://d2nwkt1g6n1fev.cloudfront.net/helpmax/wp-content/upl...
- poglet 6mo ago[flagged]
- weird-eye-issue 6mo agoThat website redirected my browser to a very sketchy website after a couple seconds. Don't open it. @dang
- laweijfmvo 6mo agoisn’t this essentially built into Windows these days? although it seems to come with a lot of programs pre-approved.
- BoredPositron 6mo agoMost of the windows firewalls tools are just front ends for the integrated one with more sensible defaults.
- wolrah 6mo agoNo, the Windows firewall in its default configuration does not restrict outbound connections in any way. Any application can make any outbound connection it wants. If an application attempts to listen for incoming connections from external sources and there is not an existing policy, Windows will pop up a dialog asking the user if they want to allow this and if so whether it should be allowed to listen on all networks, only networks marked as "private", or for domain-bound corporate computers only networks where the domain controller is reachable. It can be manually configured with very detailed policies, but you have to know where to go to find those controls. It's been a while since I used ZoneAlarm or Little Snitch, but the last time I used either one the default behavior was instead that any connection attempt or attempt to listen for which there was not a policy would result in a dialog showing all the details about what application is looking to connect to or receive connections from what as well as a variety of options for creating a policy or even not creating a policy and just deciding whether that one connection would be allowed. Also back when I used ZoneAlarm I had dialup so the taskbar addon they had which showed realtime bandwidth usage and what applications had active connections was really useful. It also had a big red "Stop" button that would immediately disable all connections, which thinking about it in retrospect really makes me miss the more innocent days of the internet.
- lofaszvanitt 6mo agoYou gonna commit seppuku if you try to add rules with the built in one.
- Neikius 6mo agoIirc the firewall was already in XP. Maybe earlier but sp2 for sure. Default allows everything though but you could even set outbound blocking rules. Cumbersome UI and no really good visibility though.
- brandon272 6mo agoCompletely forgot about ZoneAlarm. I remember using it in the early 2000s!
- loeber 6mo agoSame!
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- nurettin 6mo agoSuch nostalgia! I probably forgot about it after switching over to Linux 25 years ago.
- Foobar8568 6mo agoSame... Totally forgot about ZA.
- leokennis 6mo agoI read ZoneAlarm and it was like suddenly a part of my brain that went unvisited for 25 years lit up...
- jerukmangga 6mo agoIt's interesting hw lng it took for linux to get a user friendly application firewall like OpenSnitch
- M95D 6mo agoIt's because there's no way to make universal kernel modules/drivers, like it is on Windows.
- akdev1l 6mo agoThe way to make kernel modules is to submit them to the kernel. Not really sure what a “universal kernel module” really is. Also that seems irrelevant because it seems this was implemented in eBPF so no kernel modules are required.
- M95D 6mo ago> The way to make kernel modules is to submit them to the kernel. Then it would need to be published as GPL, but with no guarantee that it will ever be accepted. > Not really sure what a “universal kernel module” really is. A .ko that can be loaded in a wide range of kernel versions. > Also that seems irrelevant because it seems this was implemented in eBPF so no kernel modules are required. And it has serious limitations. There's a chapter of them in the readme.
- alex0com 6mo agoThis reminded me of running Kerio Personal Firewall. When Kerio ended I switched to either ZA or Comodo firewall, one of them introduced a neat feature of running executables in containers. Made clicking random things so much easier. But the best part with all of these was restricting windows to where it could barely do anything. "RandomXYZ.DLL wants to execute random what and connect to random where? I dont think so MS." lol
- kasperset 6mo agoThere was also Tiny Firewall which got bought by Computer Associates around 2005. Probably the most complicated or fine grain control for me at that time in Windows XP.
- distances 6mo agoThis is what I used! At some point I managed to block DHCP lease renewals on my computer, and Internet would always stop working after a given timespan. Took a good while to figure out I caused the problem myself.
- vasvir 6mo agoand that's how you learn... Shooting yourself in the foot really helps to built intuition!
- Zobat 6mo agoSometimes called "high instructional value".
- BobaFloutist 6mo agoIt is probably easier these days when you have a phone to fall back on for if you break the internet on your computer. Playing with your router is still a pain though, especially if you don't have a device with an Ethernet port. You learn all sorts of fun things like "If you change your router's IP address you get logged out of its management at the old IP address" and "Oh, that's what subnet mask means, weird."
- distances 6mo ago> It is probably easier these days when you have a phone to fall back on Most definitely. The old lessons were hard learned, and they stayed with you. Going through everything, trying all the combinations, and reading obscure materials for any hints. I don't want to glorify the old hard way of spending perhaps days on problems that ended up being trivial, but it's obviously different now when one can get all the answers and helpful scripts directly from LLMs. Much less is retained.
- pachouli-please 6mo agoi loved zonealarm! and also pained myself with all the little rules and upkeep lol
- VerTiGo_Etrex 6mo agoWow. Insane throwback. I think I first learned about ZoneAlarm from some PC magazine my parents bought for me. Completely forgot about this great piece of freemium!
- whalesalad 6mo agoI learned about it from Leo and Patrick on The Screen Savers
- asimovDev 6mo agoif anyone else suddenly started wondering, PC magazines still exist in physical form. There are even still Linux magazines that come with installer CDs for distros. And all kinds of other magazines as well, like for Mac computers, for photo editors, for Raspberry Pi etc.
- Scrounger 6mo agoWho remembers BlackICE Defender tho? https://archive.org/details/BlackICE_Defender https://archive.org/details/BlackICE_Defender
- SV_BubbleTime 6mo agoI was there for SoftICE and BlackICE. Simpler times.
- ninjaoxygen 6mo agoI remember switching from Win95 to NT4.0 just to be able to use SoftICE properly under Windows without all the stability problems, it was an incredible time! SoftICE felt like absolute wizardry at the time.
- avazhi 6mo agoBack in the Halo 2 days ZoneAlarm and Cain and Abel were the go-to host bridging and bluescreen programs. A simpler time lol. Used to use Outpost Firewall Pro, too.
- Chaosvex 6mo agoGood old Halo 2 stand-bying. An absolute plague.
- JetSetIlly 6mo agoI wrote a program similar to this for AmigaOS many, many years ago. I would have been inspired by ZoneAlarm or a program like it. I've just found it and uploaded it to github. Looking at the code, I can see my horrible C style of the time. There's probably bugs galore. https://github.com/JetSetIlly/Direwall https://github.com/JetSetIlly/Direwall If I remember correctly, it runs as a commodity and patches the socket library. Interestingly, the socket library was not re-entrant (unusual for Amiga libraries) so I had to patch the Exec OpenLibrary() function to monitor the loading of new copies of the socket library. But it's been a long time so memories are hazy. It'll be interesting to see if it is still compiles and runs for modern AmigaOS, if any active Amiga programmers are around to see.
- DerSaidin 6mo agoFor me it was Sygate personal firewall back on windows xp
- orangesilk 6mo ago> [ZoneAlarm] I always found it weird that Linux never really had anything like it. There was simply no need for it. GNU provided most of the software, spyware was unknown. Only since comercial vendors package for linux and bring their spyware along, the desire to inspect network rose.
- justsid 6mo agoThis is such a naive view on computer security. It’s not just about spyware, which is also not exclusive to commercial vendors.
- fsflover 6mo agoWhat else is this about? Debian repositories still contain no malware and if you install software exclusively from them, you'll be safe.
- M95D 6mo agoDoes it contain Firefox? How about Chrome? Quote from LittleSnitch: > Little Snitch for Linux is built for privacy, not security What's your definion of malware in this context?
- fsflover 6mo agoIt contains Firefox and Chromium. You are right that they may call home, but at least it's very limited and easily configurable. Could be too much for you but fine with me. Also Debian does change their config by default to minimize privacy issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32582260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32582260
- m132 6mo agoIt's far from easy in the case of Firefox [0], and the last time I tried, some .mozilla.com domains would still get pinged. Chromium doesn't even have an official guide. The only options I found to be reliable are source-level patches, i.e. ungoogled-chromium and LibreWolf. Note that LibreWolf still leaves some of the stuff on for you to manually disable (dom.push.connection.enabled, extension updates). [0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...
- latentpot 6mo agoIt was problematic, so we moved to blackice defender iirc
- tosti 6mo agoI ran ntop on a router in 2001. It had a highly insightful overview of traffic with nice looking diagrams and everything. There hasn't been anything like that since as far as I'm aware. ZoneAlarm otoh, was snakeoil. Programs that ran at the same privilege level (typically everything) could bypass it in various ways.
- philipstorry 6mo agoWhat I really liked about ZoneAlarm wasn't just that it was a very nice technology - and it was; but also that it got the user expectations and training right from a very early stage. It was quite insistent on the fact that it would be "noisy" at first as it queried all the programs you ran, but would then quieten down once it had been "trained". It got that across in clear, simple language. I think it was so successful because it got the soft side of its security job right as well as the hard part. It's certainly why I recommended it to anyone at the time...
- yndoendo 6mo agoWas working as an IT consultant. We got a call from an international manufacturer in the area for support. Local lead IT manager took down the firewall which infected their computer network around the world. All they wanted were bodies to help clean systems and apply OS updates. My personal computer had ZoneAlarm on it. It became ground zero for reporting about infected systems. They ignored systems they thought were save; CISCO phone system running on Windows server and other backend devices. The company then bought a few licenses to run their own laptops. It is such a same that Microsoft destroyed _ERD Commander_ and other quality tools which assisted in the clean up.
- WhyNotHugo 6mo ago> I always found it weird that Linux never really had anything like it. OpenSnitch must be like ten years old by now. I think also portmaster is somewhat similar too.
- blub 6mo agoZoneAlarm, assuming it still exists, would be at least 20 years old. Back then there was also a nice ~$15 program called Net Limiter which allowed one to cap network speeds individually per program.
- efreak 6mo agoI tried out portmaster recently. Coming from rethinkdns on Android, I was far from impressed; it looks featured, but it's much harder to use. Opensnitch looks better but doesn't have the nice features to drill down connections (get from app requesting a domain being resolved to an IP and connecting on a port, and filter this at any level including globally; if the request was already filtered, you can see why and get to that filter to either remove it or add an exception)
- ignoramous 6mo agorethinkdns dev here > I tried out portmaster recently. Coming from rethinkdns on Android, I was far from impressed; it looks featured, but it's much harder to use. Opensnitch looks better but doesn't have the nice features If 'far from impressed ... much harder to use' is about Rethink DNS + Firewall... Over the years, we've got numerous complaints about the UI over emails and on GitHub Issues, so we're acutely aware of the fact. In our defense, we have had no help from a designer, and couldn't come up with a good UX even if our life depended on it. We'll keep trying though.
- bluedino 6mo agoLinux users just browsed firewall logs. Back when people would try to winnuke others on IRC, the Linux guys would know who sent them the packet and call them out in the channel (and then usually ban them)