Unit Structures: Productive Unit Structures: Introducing Freedom

Productive Unit Structures: Introducing Freedom
Posted 4/18/2008 08:01:00 AM |

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, or download the dmg (zipped) directly. 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. You can give Freedom a time interval of "0" for a 15 second trial run. Screenshots and downloads here.

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.

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30 Comments: (Post a Comment)

At April 18, 2008 8:57 AM, Bertil Hatt said...: 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.
At April 18, 2008 9:00 AM, fred said...: Let the eagle soar!
At April 18, 2008 4:31 PM, Anonymous said...: It's like having a computer failure at your convenience.
At April 19, 2008 10:03 AM, Katie said...: 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?
At April 19, 2008 10:15 AM, fred said...: 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.
At April 21, 2008 10:03 AM, Craig said...: Windows please!
At April 21, 2008 11:58 AM, Anonymous said...: 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.
At April 21, 2008 12:00 PM, maf-soft said...: 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...
At April 21, 2008 12:02 PM, fred said...: 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.
At April 21, 2008 12:26 PM, Anonymous said...: 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.
At April 22, 2008 1:33 AM, Greg said...: 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).
At April 22, 2008 5:32 AM, Rhubarb said...: 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.
At April 22, 2008 8:48 PM, fred said...: @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.
At April 23, 2008 12:57 AM, Bryan Kyle said...: 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!
At April 25, 2008 9:08 AM, chris sainsbury said...: Same problem with repeated requests for the admin pw here. Admin account on Leopard 10.5.2 using the _02a.zip version.
At April 25, 2008 9:26 AM, fred said...: Thanks for the report - I'll take a look and see if I can figure whats up.
At April 25, 2008 10:52 AM, fred said...: 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!
At April 27, 2008 4:44 PM, adam said...: 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
At April 28, 2008 12:49 PM, gphebert said...: 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.
At April 29, 2008 11:25 AM, fred said...: 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.
At May 13, 2008 5:30 PM, Daniel Aborg said...: 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.
At May 13, 2008 7:20 PM, fred said...: @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.
At May 13, 2008 8:21 PM, Daniel Aborg said...: 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.
At June 28, 2008 4:33 PM, John said...: 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!
At July 09, 2008 10:12 AM, Terry said...: 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!!
At July 09, 2008 12:00 PM, Daniel said...: 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!!!
At July 13, 2008 12:04 AM, Andy said...: 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?
At July 21, 2008 3:54 PM, Jacob said...: 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.
At July 22, 2008 8:41 AM, Anonymous said...: 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.
At August 06, 2008 4:42 AM, stbo said...: Really really useful app for us weak-willed. But I could not reestablish internet connection afterwards - had to manually unplug ethernet-cable and plug in back again (Renewing DHCP-lease was not enough