The Great Firewall Swindle

"This is what the broad tech industry wants. Products that are useless for 99% of people. Because if the firewall works properly, the tech industry doesn't get its saleable data."

A good, communicative firewall at work. This is Opensnitch reporting Systemd Timesync's attempt to contact ubuntu.com in Bodhi Linux. This is one of the network connections made without user consent or knowledge in Ubuntu-derived Linux operating systems. You can argue that the connection is in this case harmless or useful, but it's nevertheless an instance of the computer making its own networking decisions, on the quiet. The user's awareness should never be bypassed in this way. Without a good firewall, who's in control?

It amazed me, about eighteen months back when I first began my shift from Windows into the world of Linux, that so many in the Linux community said firewalls were unnecessary. It amazed me that so many Linux distributions came with the firewall deactivated. It amazed me that the most common Linux default firewalls are uncooperative command-line routines. It wasn't, so it turned out, that there were no good options. It was that the package managers were choosing not to include one.

I've loved the improvements in quality of digital life that Linux has brought me. For the first time in many years I've felt that being 100% in control of my computers is within reach. But the firewall situation struck me as odd. Here was a breed of operating system that traded on improved privacy and delivered generally good transparency as compared with the ironically ever-opaque Windows. And yet Linux rarely came ready to run with the most basic privacy protector of all - a firewall that any home user could control. Was this a conspiracy?