Please make a red flashlight and a warning tone if an Android app tries to connect to an Internet server blocked by firewall

Feature Requests
#1

Please introduce a red flashlight on screen and a warning tone if an Android app or an internet webpage tries to connect to a server forbidden/blocked by firewall (outgoing) and with a different color and tone if an internet server tries to connect to the phone (incoming) on a port blocked by firewall or if an Android app tries to access data on the phone in a nasty way.

This would warn the user and also clear the situation in a quick way if an Android app doesn’t work or also a homepage doesn’t work or tries to do evil.

1 Like
#2

This would generate many support requests, “Why is my mobile phone flashing red and beeping? What am I supposed to do about it?”.
Furthermore, from other discussions we know well, that some users want to use such apps: They would have to endure these warnings regularly.

If you want to inspect such apps, read the firewall logs (and learn how to set the log level), use tcpdump or any other of the many tools available for this purpose. Maybe this already shows in the systemd journal after adjusting the log level.

Baseline:

  • This would be horrible usability for most: Being warned about things they do not know about, do not understand and have no ability to react to appropriately.
  • If you want know that, just do it: The tooling is there.

My suggestion still is to only use Android apps from F-Droid, they are checked for privacy and it is clearly denoted in their description if they connect to some external service.

7 Likes
#3

Yes @olf from a commercial point of view you’re surely right. I’ll follow your suggestions and will research what you wrote.

1 Like
#4

It could make for an interesting app, something like the GoogerTeller. I’ve wanted that as an appliance (RaspberryP with speakers, acting as WiFi access point) for some time, but a phone in hotspot mode would also be nice…

1 Like
#5

You called? :smiley:

https://build.sailfishos.org/project/show/home:nephros:devel:experiments:googerteller

An experimental build for GoogerTeller for SFOS (not Android!).
It does work and is interesting to run on SFOS alone.

The way AAS networking works is still a mystery to me, so it’s likely that GoogerTeller does not trigger when something is contacted on the Android side.

After installing, run, as user NOT root, systemctl --user start googerteller.service.
You will get annoyed after a while, so obviously systemctl --user stop googerteller.service to restore sanity.

This service uses the simple approach of running ‘tcpdump | teller’. Inquisitive minds may find a way to use the ipset approach to capture network events triggered from AAS and have them beep as well.

7 Likes