TheIPW

Thank you for sharing

I would love the hear your thoughts, what are the most reliable, alternatives to GitHub for a project of this scale or just in general?

I’ve seen the same thing. You go to pay for something and suddenly half the internet wants to join the checkout process.

Most of it seems to be third-party scripts bundled in by payment providers, analytics, or “marketing” integrations the site owner probably didn’t even realise they enabled. It just accumulates.

The worrying bit is how normal it’s become. If you didn’t have uMatrix, you’d never even know it was happening.

You open one app to check a weather report or football results, and suddenly your phone is trying to talk to half the internet! It really highlights why "passive" devices are never actually passive.

There’s a big difference between running a closed-source app to play games and trusting a closed-source app to protect your whole system.

I write these things because transparency is kind of the point of the platform. Most people don't have the time or the interest to open up a disassemble every time they want to try a new tool, they just want to know if it fits the FOSS ethos they moved to Linux for.

Pointing out that a "privacy" tool has a closed-source brain isn't an attack on the dev, it's just a heads-up for people who care about that sort of thing.

NetGuard is a solid tool for Android, but managing a whole home lab is a different beast. I've got dozens of VMs and containers tucked away in Proxmox; if I tried to micro-manage per-app permissions for every single one of them, I’d never get anything else done.

I prefer to take the hit on those rare site-breaking edge cases if it means I have a single, transparent "source of truth" at the DNS level. It's definitely a trade-off, but I'd rather spend my time building things than perpetually tweaking firewall rules for every new service I spin up.