With yesterdays
-release of Debian
-12 Bookworm, I am happy to know the
-the interactive
-application firewall OpenSnitch is available for a wider audience.
-I have been running it for a few weeks now, and have been surprised
-about some of the programs connecting to the Internet. Some programs
-are obviously calling out from my machine, like the NTP network based
-clock adjusting system and Tor to reach other Tor clients, but others
-were more dubious. For example, the KDE Window manager try to look up
-the host name in DNS, for no apparent reason, but if this lookup is
-blocked the KDE desktop get periodically stuck when I use it. Another
-surprise was how much Firefox call home directly to mozilla.com,
-mozilla.net and googleapis.com, to mention a few, when I visit other
-web pages. This direct connection happen even if I told Firefox to
-always use a proxy, and the proxy setting is ignored for this traffic.
-Other surprising connections come from audacity and dirmngr (I do not
-use Gnome). It took some trial and error to get a good default set of
-permissions. Without it, I would get popups asking for permissions at
-any time, also the most inconvenient ones where I am in the middle of
-a time sensitive gaming session.
-
-
I suspect some application developers should rethink when then need
-to use network connections or DNS lookups, and recommend testing
-OpenSnitch (only apt install opensnitch away in Debian
-Bookworm) to locate and report any surprising Internet connections on
-your desktop machine.
-
-
At the moment the upstream developer and Debian package maintainer
-is working on making the system more reliable in Debian, by enabling
-the eBPF kernel module to track processes and connections instead of
-depending in content in /proc/. This should enter unstable fairly
-soon.
-
-
As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
-activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
-15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.
-
-
Update 2023-06-12: I got a tip about
-a list of privacy
-issues in Free Software and the
-#debian-privacy IRC
-channel discussing these topics.
-
-
