blog/archive/2023/06/06.rss

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   4                 <title>Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries from June 2023</title>
   5                 <description>Entries from June 2023</description>
   6                 <link>http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/</link>
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   9         <item>
  10                 <title>What did I learn from OpenSnitch this summer?</title>
  11                 <link>http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/What_did_I_learn_from_OpenSnitch_this_summer_.html</link>
  12                 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/What_did_I_learn_from_OpenSnitch_this_summer_.html</guid>
  13                 <pubDate>Sun, 11 Jun 2023 08:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
  14                 <description>&lt;p&gt;With yesterdays
  15 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/News/2023/20230610&quot;&gt;release of Debian
  16 12 Bookworm&lt;/a&gt;, I am happy to know the
  17 &lt;a href=&quot;https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/opensnitch&quot;&gt;the interactive
  18 application firewall OpenSnitch&lt;/a&gt; is available for a wider audience.
  19 I have been running it for a few weeks now, and have been surprised
  20 about some of the programs connecting to the Internet.  Some programs
  21 are obviously calling out from my machine, like the NTP network based
  22 clock adjusting system and Tor to reach other Tor clients, but others
  23 were more dubious.  For example, the KDE Window manager try to look up
  24 the host name in DNS, for no apparent reason, but if this lookup is
  25 blocked the KDE desktop get periodically stuck when I use it.  Another
  26 surprise was how much Firefox call home directly to mozilla.com,
  27 mozilla.net and googleapis.com, to mention a few, when I visit other
  28 web pages.  This direct connection happen even if I told Firefox to
  29 always use a proxy, and the proxy setting is ignored for this traffic.
  30 Other surprising connections come from audacity and dirmngr (I do not
  31 use Gnome).  It took some trial and error to get a good default set of
  32 permissions.  Without it, I would get popups asking for permissions at
  33 any time, also the most inconvenient ones where I am in the middle of
  34 a time sensitive gaming session.&lt;/p&gt;
  35
  36 &lt;p&gt;I suspect some application developers should rethink when then need
  37 to use network connections or DNS lookups, and recommend testing
  38 OpenSnitch (only &lt;tt&gt;apt install opensnitch&lt;/tt&gt; away in Debian
  39 Bookworm) to locate and report any surprising Internet connections on
  40 your desktop machine.&lt;/p&gt;
  41
  42 &lt;p&gt;At the moment the upstream developer and Debian package maintainer
  43 is working on making the system more reliable in Debian, by enabling
  44 the eBPF kernel module to track processes and connections instead of
  45 depending in content in /proc/.  This should enter unstable fairly
  46 soon.&lt;/p&gt;
  47
  48 &lt;p&gt;As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
  49 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
  50 &lt;b&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&quot;&gt;15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/b&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
  51
  52 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2023-06-12&lt;/strong&gt;: I got a tip about
  53 &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues&quot;&gt;a list of privacy
  54 issues in Free Software&lt;/a&gt; and the
  55 &lt;a href=&quot;irc://irc.debian.org/%23debian-privacy&quot;&gt;#debian-privacy IRC
  56 channel&lt;/a&gt; discussing these topics.&lt;/p&gt;
  57
  58 </description>
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