I had also tried a different firewall/privacy tool from a company in Canada I think called ZeroKnowledge. That was a great product that also allowed you fine-grained access to and control of all connections to/from your Windows pc. They had a product available for a short time but shut down suddenly. I think I read that they were bought out by another firewall company but can't remember which one. They may have been rolled into the Blackberry software line.
Both of these were available in the 90's lead-up to the dot com bust if I remember right. Sygate became obsolete when support ended around the time WinXP faded. ZeroKnowledge disappeared much earlier. I may have old executables and installers somewhere on antique backups.
Portmaster has been filling this role for me for the last couple years.
Here's another one: F.O.S.I.
Thank you for the recommendation.
Edit: and glasswire although portmaster is my favorite
Such unadulterated greed, it was painful to watch as it unfolded.
It has no rules, like "Allow a file with THIS name on THAT path", the biggest complain of every simplewall user is its biggest flaw and annoyance: It asks you a million times to allow or deny the "same" app, after its checksum changed. So all the Windows apps that auto update always pop up again and again.
A coding agent autonomously compiling and testing an exe with network access is impossible. I have to turn off simplewall, because it would constantly block the executable after recompilation.
Even among simplewall users I bet the vast majority install OS updates regularly.
Like this guy pushed a button and everything just happened?
What does it matter if it's mostly coded by an LLM. If someone skilled guided an LLM to build an app that does something meaningful and useful why shouldn't they be able to sell it or accept donations?
It doesn’t take particularly sophisticated skill to load up your garbage and drive it to the landfill—and, frankly, it’s kind of fun every once in a while—but I certainly wouldn’t call municipal trash service worthless…
I’m reminded of that old saw about contemporary art: “That?! I could have done that!” / “Yeah, but you didn’t…”
It would be better if it suggested the consequences of stopping programs from phoning home, like will this program say the license check failed after 2 weeks, or will it keep working.
packethound can be managed via group policy
packethound has that air of AI slop sophistication
"Know which apps are calling home." "Every connection, your call"
Uh, no they don't. I haven't used a firewall in 20 years that hasn't had both inbound and outbound monitoring lol.