Hello! I stumbled on a post a while back about privacy tools. I can’t seem to find it again. I had bookmarked a few sites it linked to and finally got around to looking at them

One of those websites was Safing. I hadn’t heard of it before. The website says that it’s a firewall tool, but I can’t seem to figure out why it’s better than the Windows default firewall. Does anyone here use it? What does it provide that Windows doesn’t have built in? Is there an avantage to using it if I have a PiHole on my network/use a VPN? Is it meant to be a single-machine firewall or a whole-network firewall?

  • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    Safing is two different things:

    Portmaster a nice graphical firewall to control each program, rules based access and network permissions.

    SPN: a onion network like Tor, but pay for use.

    Portmaster and SPN integrate together nicely and let you say things like:

    Skype should route to Italy.

    Chrome should route to Texas

    Edge should have no internet access

    Steam games should have direct raw internet.

    So it’s a very interesting and novel approach. Faster than tor, because the onion nodes are high performance. They accept monero as payment so semianonymous, harder to identify then a traditional VPN because each program can have a different exit.

    It’s all open source, it’s interesting, worth playing with.

      • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        SPN is its own onion network. Similar to tor. So you can’t use a different VPN and get the same benefits. With SPN you can control the endpoint of each flow, each program gets its own flow, similar to Tor.

        Their website has a guide on how to set it up in Linux.

  • YuumiEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    I wont re-explain since someone already gave a detailed explanation but if you’re interested in having more control over your apps and their access to internet but don’t want to pay for safing’s subscription you can also use SimpleWall from Henry++, has a nice zero-trust by default and you get used to it eventually.