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
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…?