> Your machine runs a little slower, your bandwidth gets a little thinner, and someone halfway around the world is routing traffic through your home IP.

I wish in 2026 the default on new computers (Windows + Mac) was not only "inbound firewall on by default" but also outbound and users having to manually select what is allowed.

I know it is possible, it's just not the default and more of a "power user" thing at the moment. You have to know about it basically.

I use LuLu (https://objective-see.org/products/lulu.html) to block outgoing connections and manually select which connections/apps are allowed. It's free and works just fine.

I do this outbound filtering but I don't use a computer running Windows or MacOS to do it

It doesn't make sense to expect the companies promoting Windows or MacOS to allow the user to potentially interfere with their "services" and surveillance business model

Windows and MacOS both "phone home" (unfiltered outgoing connections). If computer owners running these corporate OS were given an easy way to stop this, then it stands to reason that owners would stop the connections back to the mothership. That means loss of surveillance potential and lost revenue

As of 2006, still nothing stops anyone from setting the gateway of their computer running a corporate OS to point to a computer running a non-corporate OS that can do the outbound filtering

As a power user I agree, but how do you avoid it being like the Vista UAC popups? Everyone expects software to auto update these days and it's easy enough to social engineer someone into accepting.

Even if it was a default there is so many services reaching out the non-technical user would get assaulted with requests from services which they have no idea about. Eventually people will just click ok with out reading anything which puts you back at square one with annoying friction.

Fort Firewall for the win.

https://github.com/tnodir/fort