I’m a long time fan of Little Snitch, which is a nifty application from Objective Development that lets you monitor and restrict which applications and processes can access the internet. This gives maximum protection from spyware and other malicious software which “phones home” for any reason.

On the Mac, Little Snitch has been without competition for quite a while. But it looks like things are heating up.

GlowWorm FW Lite is a new freeware utility which does much the same thing. Like Little Snitch, you can create fairly complex rules (such as allow an application access to only certain destination hosts, or allow a program access over a single port to any host or various other combinations). I haven’t tested it in detail, but it appears to work quite well, and the price is hard to beat.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I’m running OpenWRT firmware on my Linksys router. This enables the router to do more than just act as a firewall/router, so that it can do things that you’d normally need some pretty expensive kit to run. (e.g. A Linux box dedicated to the task or some pricey Cisco hardware.)

It works great, I’m happy to say. Package management is smooth and easy, and the basics of routing and firewalling are all taken care of. But there’s a few snags…

Firstly, the firewall. It all works off of iptables for netfilter, which is to say that I need to write some fairly hairy firewall rules. Added to this, I want to use video chat, which requires about sixteen thousand ports to be open in order to work. (Okay, 22 ports, but come ON!)

I’ve been a loyal Comcast cable internet customer since they first came to my town (some time around ‘99, I think). During that time, I’ve endured a few rate hikes, and have generally been pleased with the improvements to service (especially once AT&T sold out to Comcast and I suddenly had an internet connection that was up more often than down).

Unfortunately, I now live in a new neighborhood, populated with young folks like me and my wife. These people like their internet connections, and they either are major bittorrent users or their kids are gobbling up bandwidth on MySpace. End result: My actual connection to the internet is about 1.5Mbit, when I’m paying for a supposed six meg connection!

My adventures on the internet have led me to learn many things about myself. I’m not a girl and I do not exist on the internet. I do not play games and do not know how to turn on my computer. I did not build my own PC, nor did I buy a video game. I do not own a headset and do not play first person shooters and MMOGs. My life on the internet is an intricate, well planned lie.

From The Escapist: OMG Girlz Don’t Exist on teh Intarweb!!!!1

It really surprises me that as the internet has become massively popular, it is still a surprise for young boys to find a girl online. That a girl would even be afraid to talk in online chats, for fear of being harassed, is doubly shocking.

I was glad to see Digg take on more than just technology-related news. I’m swimming in RSS feeds, despite the help of Newsgator and NetNewsWire. Now I can get my news filtered by the great unwashed masses before it reaches my doorstep.

First, Digg’s going to have to attract more than male geeks to their readership or else it’ll just be a giant echo chamber. So get out there and digg some news, y’all!