Because of the uproar about Facebook and privacy lately, I had an idea to build a lightweight proxy tool that could help the situation. Less than twenty-four hours later, I give you Faceblock.
Faceblock runs in your menu bar and can be toggled on or off. Toggling it on causes all requests to facebook.com and www.facebook.com to be routed locally. This is most useful for when you are done browsing Facebook for now, but don't want to logout, and don't want to have Facebook-related code load when you are visiting other websites.
In short, use Faceblock if you want the benefits of Facebook without feeling like you are being followed around the web (because, in fact, you are).
Soon, I'd like to add an option to automatically default to blocking after a certain idle period of no Facebook requests.
Faceblock is ALPHA code right now. Please be careful, don't hold me accountable, yadda yadda. That said, I'd really like some testing help or just general feedback.
Caveats:
- You can't be running Web Sharing (i.e., Apache) on your Mac.
- It has only been tested with one user per Mac.
- It has only been tested on 10.6.
- It only works in your default browser.
- It probably affects app-related Facebook activity.
- Yes, it runs as root.
Download
Download the installer package below. It requires administrator privileges, but will not require you to logout or reboot.
How It Works
Faceblock runs a local HTTP server on port 80 and, when turned on, modifies your /etc/hosts file to direct facebook.com and www.facebook.com to it. When it is turned off, it removes these lines from your /etc/hosts file and requests go straight to Facebook like normal.
When Faceblock is working, going to a Facebook page or trying to load a Facebook resource will show a simple page instead. You can see this in action by trying to go to any Facebook page or by going to a page such as CNN that loads Facebook content on the front page.
You may either toggle Faceblock in the menu bar or click the link on the page to reload the page normally.
Removal
If you'd like to remove Faceblock, launch Applications > Utilities > Terminal and type the following commands, hitting enter after each one (script coming soon):
sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/net.codesorcery.faceblock.launchd.plist sudo rm -f /Library/LaunchDaemons/net.codesorcery.faceblock.launchd.plist sudo rm -rf /Applications/Faceblock.app
And, if you wish:
sudo rm -f /Users/Shared/Faceblock sudo rm -f /var/log/faceblock.log
Questions or Ideas?
For now, please get in touch here.
