Unit Structures Fred Stutzman’s thoughts about information, social networks and technology.

Productive Unit Structures: Introducing Freedom

A few years ago, I used to judge the quality of a coffeeshop by the speed of its wireless network. Now that I’m working on my dissertation, I find myself desperately searching out places where I can be network-free. In this college town, it is difficult to find a work or study place where you can avoid clouds of wireless internet.

In an attempt to resist the encroachment of network into the spaces of productivity, I’ve created Freedom. Freedom is a Mac application that disables your computer’s networking capabilities for a selected time interval. Some of you may turn off your network when you need to be productive; I’ve done that, but always found myself popping the network on at my next break (and losing 20 minutes to YouTube/Wikipedia/etc). Freedom takes this approach a step further, locking you out of your network for your selected time interval; Freedom enforces freedom.

To download freedom, visit the project’s page.   After you download, simply mount the disk, and drag Freedom.app to your application folder. To run Freedom, double-click the application, provide your password and time interval, and Freedom will do all the rest.

Once Freedom’s time interval completes, it will display a friendly message and enable your network interfaces. A reboot is the only circumvention of the time limits you choose. The hassle of rebooting means you’re less likely to cheat, and you’ll be more productive. Simply closing the application will not return your network interfaces. When first getting used to Freedom, I suggest using the software for short periods of time.

For those who may worry, Freedom is non-destructive. It uses simple POSIX functions for the management of network interfaces. Therefore, if you’re a sysadmin, you can circumvent Freedom. However, for the rest of us, Freedom is technical enough to enforce downtime. With Freedom, you can be network-free to write, code, design, arrange or just GTD.

NOTICE: For Freedom support, please go to Freedom’s new website, http://macfreedom.com

I would like to offer you nothing but praises and thanks — but why can’t I get out of my head that this has the same incentive pattern as Olestra? OK, I’ve just been offensively rude.

Let the eagle soar!

It’s like having a computer failure at your convenience.

I love this. Totally great for a grad student avoiding temptation with a mountain of papers to grade! However, when I tried it, “applet” kept asking me for my password. I’d type it in and then it would ask me again 5 minutes later. Kind of annoying. Any tips?

Katie – Make sure you’ve downloaded the latest version:

http://www.ibiblio.org/fred/freedom/images/Freedom_02a.dmg.zip

Remove the old app and install this. Let me know if it doesn’t work.

Windows please!

Just a note, great app, I’m testing it out. But yesterday I set it to three hours and left the computer alone overnight. This morning there was no prompt from Freedom telling me the time was done, and I could not activate Airport without doing a reboot. I don’t know if that counts as a bug or not.

cool idea… if anyone wants this for windows, send me a message. if i got enough interested people, i can do it.
maybe you should not reply here because this is about the mac version…

Anon, do you know if your computer fell asleep? It doesnt seem like that should cause an abnormal termination, but perhaps it does. I will give it a try on my test machines.

Yes, Fred, the computer went to sleep, sorry I didn’t include that info. I will see if I can recreate the situation, thanks so much.

Found a bug. Ran Freedom once but cancelled without putting in my password. After doing so I could not connect to wireless networks which didn’t broadcast their SSIDs until I ran Freedom for 1 minute (even rebooting didn’t help).

I’ve got the same problem Katie has. The program asks for the administrator password every five minutes. I’m still running Tiger and have a restricted rights user-account. And, yes, I use the new version.

@Greg – Make sure you’re using the most recent version of Freedom. Download from http://ibiblio.org/fred/freedom

@rhubarb – If you’re on restricted-rights, Freedom won’t work for you. There’s no workaround or hack, Freedom’s permissions model is enforced at the kernel level.

Awesome application, but would you consider an option to only disable network traffic outside of the local subnet? I find myself needing to access files on local servers. Keep up the great work!

Same problem with repeated requests for the admin pw here. Admin account on Leopard 10.5.2 using the _02a.zip version.

Thanks for the report – I’ll take a look and see if I can figure whats up.

I have run some tests on my version of freedom (2a) and I can’t replicate the error. If possible, can you completely remove Freedom.app, download a fresh version, and see if you can get the problem to happen again? I’d like to figure this out!

Simply Brilliant! Stopped me surfing youtube for many hours this weekend and as a result loads done!

also +1 from me on the windy’s version.

I got the “applet asking for password” thing every few minutes as-well, quit the app, rebooted and started again and hasnt done it since.

Tiger, version 0.2 (as it says when it asks for hte pw) here

Great application, but I have one big issue. When I run it, if I right click on the dock icon, it tells me that Freedom is not responding and I get the option to force quit. If I do that, I’m able to get my network back.

I’m on 10.5.2.

Thanks for the bug reports – I think I’ve managed to track down the Password bug. Please update your versions, and let me know if you’re still experiencing difficulty.

Great idea but not usable in practice since I need access to the local network for most anything productive.

A version that allowed you to access the local subnet while turning off Internet access would do the trick.

@Daniel I think what you mean is that it’s a good application, just not usable in practice for Daniel Aborg, because Daniel Aborg needs acces to the local subnet. I encourage you to develop your own version of Freedom, I wrote mine in about 2 hours.

Actually, mine is the third comment on this page suggesting that would be a useful feature.

I would write my own version, but I think I’m going to do some surfing first.

IMHO you shouldn’t tell people how they can circumvent it. Otherwise circumventing it becomes more of a temptation. I’d say encode the way to circumvent it at the bottom of the readme in ROT-13 with white on white text, with a reference to it somewhere near the top. Or you could invent your own cipher in case someone had an automatic ROT-13 decoder.

Just a thought!

I got more work done my first day with Freedom on my dissertation then any other day this summer…great app. Just what I was looking for.

Any chance you might consider adding a countdown function? So, for example, you could set Freedom to shut off your network connection in 20 minutes? That way I could start my day saying, “I’m going to check e-mail/read blogs for 30 minutes this morning, and then get to work” and Freedom would actually hold me to that goal by shutting the network down in 30 minutes…A two minute warning would be good for that, so you could logout of anything…

Just a thought! Love the app!!

Like your App! Thanks for it!!!
One nice to have features:
- a timer which tells you when the offline times end.

And bug (?) report:
Freedom doesn’t count the time if i close my macbook (sleep). So i was a bit disappointed when i opend my macbook after the configured time and the network was still down.

Thanks again for your work!!!

Fantastic application. However, when I use it on my emac, my machine stays disconnected even after the time has elapsed, and I have to reboot. Can I do anything about that?

I love the idea, and I hate nitpicking on a completely free app, but Freedom doesn’t really work for me.

If I let it run in the background, I get periodically asked for my system password, which is kind of a pain.

If I quit it (using “Force Quit,” since Freedom always stops responding after I enter the number of minutes I want to be offline), I can log on again very easily without rebooting, just by turning Airport off and on again.

I’ve tried t on a Mac Pro and a Macbook, both running the latest update of OSX, and have had the same issues on both computers.

I have the same problem that Jacob describes.

My regular user does not have admin rights. I put in my regular password. After that, Freedom asks me for my admin account and password. After that, my network goes down. So far, so good.

After that, about every 5 Minutes, I get the “Please enter admin login” dialog forever, and the network does not come up again until I reboot my computer.

I get the password prompt every few minutes and I never get the network back after the allocated time… I have to reboot.

Love the idea!

I’d actually pay for a Windows/PC version.

I am hoping someone ports Freedom – I don’t own a PC so I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

Great app.

Just one small feature I’d love to see:
Can you add the ability to get some idea of how much longer Freedom is in lock down mode?
i.e right clicking on the icon would give a popup telling you how much longer until WiFi is enabled.

Please
Please
Please
make this happen for my Dell…

Omigosh, I’ve always wanted something like this! Thank you! Now I just need a Mac…

Love it. But I have the same problem as described above, if the computer goes to sleep, Freedom appears to lock up. This has happened everytime the Mac (running Leopard) goes to sleep. So I have to do a reboot. If it’s just halting the countdown until the machine is awake, a countdown timer would be super useful. I’ve told several friends about Freedom and they like it, too. Thanks!

Nice app and very useful. Thankyou for your work on it.

Features I’d like to see:
- have the freedom icon in the menu bar instead of the dock
- growl notification of when time is finished
- possibly clicking on the menu bar, brings up (in a growl notification bar maybe) the time left.
- a ‘bell’ sound when time is finished.
- customize between hours and minutes
- possibly a schedule creator, eg. set up freedom to run automatically everyday for a certain time.

Many thanks again, great app.

I agree with a lot of the comments above – this is an awesome app. One feature I think would just make this even better would be the ability to schedule network timeouts, e.g. no internet access between 7-9 am. As per Ben above I also think a menu icon could be a good way to access the app. Anyway, thanks for a great app.

fantastic work, except that sometimes i lack the discipline to turn it on! is there any way to include a scheduler?

nice, but *nix only :(

As someone said before, I would pay for a PC version.

Love the app. Could you please do something about “Please enter admin login” dialog that I get forever?

i really love the idea of the app, but it really need local network support, not only that i want to accsess other computers, you have to start it on every computer you got to get full protection(freedom).

Great app idea, but when I run it, it will work fine but then it will bring up a “applet needs an admin login” dialog every 10 minutes or so and I have to enter password again and again (I’m running Mac OS X v10.4.11)

The app does what it’s supposed to, but it becomes unresponsive. If I’d originally set the timer for an hour, all I have to do is force quit it and set the timer again for five minutes.

I’ve decided the 5 minute thing can qualify as a feature, not a bug. It eliminates impulsive internet surfing. I’m more likely to use Freedom if I know I can get back online in five minutes if I absolutely have to.

can you make something that gives me the possibility to give myself first some free surfing time, and than working time.?

Alright, that’s it. I’ve procrastinated long enough. I’m going to download this and give it a shot. Thanks for making this available!

I had a hard drive failure and had to rebuild, and for reasons I won’t go into here, I rolled back to Tiger (OS X 10.4.11). Now, when I run Freedom 0.4.1, I can’t save files in BBEdit or MS Word — I just get a beachball, and I have to force quit the app without saving.

I do love Freedom and would like to keep using it, even on Tiger!

Freedom is Tiger compatible, and I can guarantee what you’re seeing is a coincidence (probably due to the fact you drastically changed your OS). On an operating system like OS X, Freedom is not allowed to interact with processes of other programs. You may want to delete Freedom and install a fresh version, however, just to be sure.

Thanks for your reply, fred. I deleted Freedom and installed a fresh version, but had exactly the same problem. If I’m running Freedom and MS Word or BBEdit, then I can’t save documents — I just get a beach ball. If I’m not running Freedom, then I can save documents normally. I shut down all other apps to make as sure as possible that it wasn’t some conflict. I repaired permissions & that didn’t help.

It might well be something unique to my system, though, maybe something to do with my restored app preferences. Thanks for trying.

I think I already know the answer to this, but thought I should ask: Is it possible to give admin access to Freedom permanently? Through the keychain, maybe? I would really like to create a scheduler for this, so it kicks in automatically during work hours, but as far as I can tell, OS X won’t let me give any program permanent administrator privs. Is that correct?

Matt – I don’t know all the intricacies of Keychain, but in logic an app like Freedom, if given root perms, could be run on a cron. That said, Freedom’s current logic doesn’t support that..sorry!

Amanda – totally bizarre. Perhaps your documents are on a network drive or something like that. But honestly I’m stumped.

Fred – Your download link “download the dmg (zipped) directly” is broken.

Thanks! I’ve updated this for the most recent version.

This is a great application. But I’ve just downloaded the latest version and it doesn’t block my internet connection at all (tho’ it seems to “think” it has). I’m on an Intel Macbook, OS X.4.11.

Fred — just FYI, nope, my docs are not on a network drive. Plain old Documents folder on the hard drive. But I do still love Freedom, and when I get some time, I’ll mess around with the problem some more. Cheers!

fred – can you please oh please make this for my crappy little work pc? would love you forever and promise to sign my emails “from cj but with help from fred”
would love you forever.

Please make it for windows, too!

You, sir, are a genius, and my thesis thanks you from the bottom of its LaTeX.

Fred — from one doc student to another, thanks — you have just saved my academic career! :-) I saw the report in the Chronicle and downloaded your great app immediately. Only one surprise so far. Freedom doesn’t seem to stop incoming chat requests from iChat agent. Right now I’ll just have to remember to turn it off too (and turn it back on at the end). And I’d love a button to press at the end that allows you to repeat Freedom for another X minutes. Thank you for your monumental contribution to mankind!

Just the best. You have helped me be so productive – I’ve gotten two books and numerous magazine articles done, thanks to you.

Any way to make it even more stern? I’d like to wake up to a computer with Freedom already running (so I can get a running start – have the program activate itself, say, at 7:30 AM, so when I arrive at 8, everything is quiet on the distraction front…)

- dan

Answering my own question:

If you’re willing to invest in some software, then you can do the whole thing scheduled and unattended. I own – and haven’t used in a long while – a copy of iKey, the macro utility for OSX. It just sort of outlived its usefulness for me (though it was very useful) as I came to rely on Automator and AppleScripts and other utilities for a lot of what it did. But I just wrote a very simply seven-line routine that:

- Launches Freedom at a specific time of day.
- Fills out the number of minutes of radio silence.
- Hits return through to the asking for admin password screen.
- Types in the admin password (using the program’s “type from clipboard” feature, which is not the same as a “paste”, which you can’t do in a password request field)
- Hits return again and starts Freedom.

You can copy the routine with multiple silent times; you can also make it look for and select which type of access – full turn-off or local network on (in that Freedom dialogue) and, using iKey’s various activation routines, you can run any of these variations from a timer, hot key, or palate.

Pretty nice!

If anyone is interested, you can email me at:

soulbarn2@gmail.com and I will tell you how I set up the iKey routines.

iKey is $30, btw, so – IMHO – I think you should donate some $$$ to Fred if you decide to spend the money to get his software working this way. I already owned iKey, but I ponied up to Fred anyhow.

That is good to hear. I will think about some ways to do this. Because of the permissions model of OS X this is technically challenging, but I could create some sort of daemonized Freedom. Speaking of books…I’ve got two I have to get done as well!

Dan, Awesome! I will point people to your excellent comment – automated Freedom is something asked for regularly.

This is something I would like to be able to implement as a launchd process using Lingon. So that, basically you could have it set to turn off your internet access at a certain time and then have it turn back on again at the required time.

Regarding the iKey process: there are a few very minor limitations that can easily be worked around. iKey likes to do things in the foreground, not the background – so the routines work best unattended, or if you just let them do their thing. You need to add a few pauses (a second or two between steps) to make them “stick.” (Total execution time is no more than five seconds, though.) Also, iKey doesn’t really like to do two Freedom routines consecutively with the user first quitting the completed Freedom app first.

But all this is minor. I’ve got the whole thing set up beautifully. My machine does a back up every night, shuts down automatically, restarts at 6:30 AM, runs Freedom at 6:45 (240 minutes of quiet.) I get there between 7:00 and 7:15 and everything is ready…

Again, email me at the address above for questions – the routines are easily exported, so I can provide mine to anyone who cares to check it out with the iKey demo.

oops, I meant:

“Also, iKey doesn’t really like to do two Freedom routines consecutively WITHOUT the user first quitting the completed Freedom app first.

you are my heroes ;_____;
thank you from the bottom of my internet addicted heart

I love the program, so I donated $10. But every time I use it, it still asks for a donation. Since I already gave $10, can’t you turn off that annoying request?
Thanks, Geoff

I’ve got a good solution – you could just keep donating ten dollars every time the request pops up ;) That’s a fair feature request, I’ll think about integrating it into a future version.

okay im on a mac, have admin priv and im the only user on this computer. freedom doesnt work for me and ive downloaded the latest version. im on OS 10.4.11 so what’s the deal? have checked and met all the conditions listed on the readme file and yet im online while freedom is on right now too. i have wifi and airport extreme base stn. help!!

I would make one suggestion for improving Freedom. Provide an option where you can disable certain periods of the day for an week at a time. So I could disable 9:00 to Noon, then 1:00 to 4:00 M-F. It would train me into productive slots.

I was using an older (couple versions older) version and it usually worked fine (although sometimes I got the bug where it kept asking for your password every five minutes), but the most recent version invariably makes every program on my computer freeze up requiring a restart (four times now, it’s not a coincidence). I’m running 10.4.11. Any chance I could download the older version again from somewhere?

Also, I would love a timer that shows how much longer Freedom will be running. And some kind of timer that would automatically activate Freedom after x minutes online. And a puppy. :-)

Yes, Windows please! I’ve just spent silly time searching for something like this. (Oh, the irony.) I’ll go considerably above $10, too. But features: what I’d really like is to pre-set it to a pattern – say, no access between 11 p.m. and lunchtime. (It’s 23.33 ad I *am* going to switch off now.)

Hi Greg !

A thousand thanks for this app, it saved me hours and hours of unconcious procrastination.

Here’s a feature request if I may :
I’m in law school and have a couple websites I still need to access when working, for example legal databases. Would it be possible to create a green-list of accessible websites in Freedom, while blocking the rest ?

Thanks for your great work !
Cheers, Axel.

Running a fresh install of 10.4.11 (on an 867 MHz PowerPc G4 with 1.12 GB DDR SDRAM) and while it didn’t cause any program freezes, it also didn’t work, at all.

‘Force Quit Applications’ was also able to quit the program without rebooting.

Sorry… Greg slipped in instead of Fred ;-)

So I noticed… If I put my Mac to sleep, Freedom’s timer doesn’t keep running, it just starts again once I wake my Mac up. I wonder if there could be a setting to give users the choice between two methods: a set # of minutes of Freedom, vs. a set TIME to end Freedom. Just a thought/suggestion…

Yes, please develop a Windows version. On Saturday night I just had an extended conversation with another young freelance working father revolving around the need to use our time well, but not having quite enough discipline (almost, but not quite). This app could be the key to swinging the balance in favor of greater productivity.

Include me in with the group that would pay for a PC version.

I *love* the idea of Freedom! I will be one of the first to download and pay for a Windows version.

Thank you for all your time and effort to help others, Fred.

*Please* – a PC version. We would all pay/donate/whatever.

Please, please create a PC version. I would gladly donate/pay. A PC version would be a lifesaver for me! I don’t own a Mac, and my office is all PCs too… :(

Dear Fred,

Yes, please, please, please, PLEASE create a PC version, and save me from myself! I will definitely donate for this, put a link to it on my blog and email and recommend it to everyone I know and tell them to donate!!!!!

Thank you!

Is there a version (or another program) that works for windows??

We the people demand a Windows-version!

… seriously that is one shareware-program I would buy!

Dude,

We need this for WINDOZE!!! Pleeeezzze! I need help!

Is it in progress?

TIA

I’m going to add my voice to the chorus of pleas for a Window’s version. As a student with poor impulse control and no time to spare it’s a necessity!!

Nice idea, that Freedom.app. I’ve got one and a half improvement ideas, though:

* Sometimes you’re in a corporate or university network that gives global IPv4 addresses to every client. If you need access to data inside that network, but not to external destinations, Freedom.app won’t work. You should consider checking the local IP address(es) and allow the netranges they are in when using “Local Mode”.

* The same goes for IPv6, where you virtually always have a global address. Additionally, IPv6 unique local addresses (in the fc00::/7 subnet) should always be allowed.

The application itself supports blocking IPv6 traffic, because the ipfw shipping with Mac OS X does.

I’ve been having the same problem as Melissa mentioned above: my computer freezes when I (try to) use Freedom.

This caused my Microsoft Word to either a)not open or b)after I rebooted so I could open Microsoft Word before opening Freedom, when I went to save my work, Microsoft Word froze up and I couldn’t force quit and I had to reboot again, losing about a half an hour’s worth of work. I have no trouble using Microsoft Word and saving my work when not running Freedom. There must be some sort of bug when using Freedom with Office? I’m using version 12.1.15 of Office and OS X 10.4.11

Freezing issues: Please make sure that is not just Freedom that is “frozen”, but all applications. Click on your dock and see if you can open other programs. Freedom appears unresponsive on purpose.

Another note. If you are mounting any sort of network drives to your computer, Freedom will block this. This may cause freezing issues. If you mount network drives, Freedom is not the right choice for you.

I’m also having some freezing problems. Twice I’ve tried to delete songs from itunes while using Freedom and each time iTunes froze and then slowly other things froze as well. Anyone know how to do anything about this?

(That being said, thanks Fred! This is fantastic.)

I dunno. If iTunes is trying to do something over the net, then it might run into problems. Don’t know why itunes is accessing the net when you delete a file, tho.

Oh, I do hope that you will be able to introduce this for PCs. I certainly need it. Any plans to do so? Best wishes to you—

This program is brilliant, but has anyone else had a problem with everything running slowly while Freedom is operating? I’ve got a 250gig hard drive that is only 1/4 full, and 2gigs of RAM, but I often find myself dealing with slow programs, caught in the ’spinning ball.’ I do tend to have multiple programs up while working (Word, Excel, Dreamweaver, etc.). Any suggestions? Anyone else experiencing this? Overall, a great program!

Actually, the phenomenon (stuck with the spinning ball) is most prominent when the computer sleeps. That is, if I stop working long enough for the screen to sleep, when I return and hit a button to wake it up, all I get is stuck with the spinning ball–the screen is still black and the little ball spins. Ultimately, I have to reboot to get out…

It is likely that applications are trying to access the network and not handling that failure gracefully. There’s not a lot that can be done about that. And if you’ve got any network drives mounted, this may also cause problems.

I have a theory that Office 2008 is using the internet a lot. That’s a program I’ve heard a lot of bug reports about. I use Office X and Freedom works perfectly for me. I’m not sure there’s a lot I can do about Office issues.

With regards to slow programs, Freedom’s memory and processor footprint is about as small as any program could be.

Can you please, please, PLEASE develop a version of this for PCs?

Hi.

Great program!

I would like to follow up on a request made earlier, but that I can not see any replies to from you, Fred.

The request is to make it possible to time schedule periods where internet is of. It could maybe also be a good idea to be able to make different profiles as well, so on could choose one for each day or week.

Fred,

Thanks for your suggestions and for the great idea for a program. I’m running Office 2004, so I don’t think the Office 2008 is the problem with the crash/freeze. Maybe I’ll try disabling the sleep/energy saving feature when using Freedom…?