aToad #33: OneClickFirewall & simplewall

More free firewalls, one being open-source

I’ll be brief because I haven’t tested them (yet), as I’m still on Comodo Firewall.

I was starting my computer and noticed, as usual, a notification from my firewall asking what to do about freaking NVDisplay.Container.exe that keeps trying to connect. But this time I figured I tried to look a bit more into it – not really hoping much but rather a bit curious about what other people say/do about it. One of my first results was this forum (yay) post on Techpowerup (yay again, forums are not all dead, and memories from this site that I used to visit a lot more in the past).

There wasn’t much to see though, just basically a confirmation of what I suspected: NVDisplay.Container.exe tries to connect to update stuff like its DLSS libraries and can’t be prevented from doing so because NVIDIA. The more interesting part of this thread though, was a couple of people went on talking about their own current firewalls. So I figured, the thread is recent (less than 2 months ago) and involves people who care about properly blocking telemetry crap, so let’s pocket the list of those firewalls for future use. So the 3 nominees are:

• Comodo Firewall, which I already mentioned
• OneClickFirewall, which seems to have been last updated in 2016, but is also reportedly still working
• simplewall, which is FLOSS / free software, was first released in 2016 (a few months after OneClickFirewall’s last update), and seems to be really actively maintained

I don’t have time to mess around with my firewall now, and Comodo works fine and is all set up, but next time I set up a computer I’ll be sure to give simplewall a try first. Beside being free and open source, it’s incredibly lightweight (<1 MB), has a portable mode, blocks everything by default and more generally seems quite targeted at power users who don’t want obscure shenanigans on their network.

Update (2024-10-22): Fort Firewall

I was about to make a new post for it, then I realized that my latest “aToad” to date was already a firewall. So I recently found that “Fort Firewall” in a software discussion group, and I haven’t tried it either but it seems quite similar to the above-mentioned simplewall (which, on a side note, seems to have killed off its former website and decided to move exclusively on GitFreakingHub).

If I had to judge from the screenshots, I’d say Fort Firewall looks a little bit… simpler than simplewall, and by this I mean a positive simple, like easier to use/more intuitive UI. But they both look good enough to me.

Do note that they both seem to be a single-man project, with, for each, one main contributor who seems to have been doing absolutely all the programming, and a limited number of secondary contributors who seem to have committed only translation-related things. It doesn’t mean they’re bad, and I know how hard it is for open source projects to get contributors, but… you know how they say “it’s safe because anyone can read the code”? Well I haven’t read the code, and the contributor lists contain no proof suggesting anyone else has either.