FAQ and Support
FAQ
Q: How do I find out about new versions of Freedom?
A: To find out only about major releases, subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed. If you’d like more frequent updates, such as minor builds, subscribe to the freedom-announce mailing list.
Q: How do I find out about new versions of Freedom?
A: To find out only about major releases, subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed. If you’d like more frequent updates, such as minor builds, subscribe to the freedom-announce mailing list.
Q: I love Freedom, but I need to access email/Google Scholar/etc. for work.
A: Freedom’s design philosophy centers around the “total block,” but if you need access to a specific set of resources, Freedom can be customized to your needs.
Q: How does Freedom count down time?
A: Freedom only counts down “active minutes.” That is, if you set Freedom for 20 minutes, put your computer to sleep 10 minutes into Freedom, you’ll have 10 minutes of Freedom left when you come back. This design is necessitated by Apple’s permissions escalation limits, which are described in-depth at Apple’s developer site. If Freedom did not count down “active minutes” users would have to enter their password to re-enable network adapters. I am currently experimenting with workarounds that are sensible and most importantly, safe.
Q: Freedom doesn’t work! I can get on the internet during Freedom!
A: Freedom isn’t working because you’ve got Apple’s firewall turned on (ironic, I know). Freedom won’t work while the firewall is on. To make freedom work would require a circumvention of the firewall, and it is Freedom’s policy to not make changes to your system.
If you want to make Freedom work, temporarily disable your Firewall while you are running Freedom. During this period, your computer will be essentially firewalled, so there is no risk in temporarily disabling the firewall.
Q: Freedom hung my computer when I came back from sleep!
A: Freedom didn’t hang your computer. OS X is ungracefully handling coming back from sleep and not finding the network. This is a PRIORITY ISSUE and I am working on a fix.
Q: I’m having problems with Microsoft Office.
A: From TheXLab.com:
Certain Microsoft® applications, such as those in Office, employ an anti-piracy approach whereby, before quitting, the application uses the Internet to “phone home” and validate its software registration. If you are connected to the Internet and have the Mac OS X firewall enabled, the default firewall settings block this outbound transmission. In such cases, the SBBOD will go on for up to two minutes before the application abandons its attempt to “phone home.”
Q: My desktop froze with Freedom.
A: I’ve seen this happen a few times. Your desktop is run by Finder, the program that enables the graphical browsing of folders. I believe that Finder places a network-specific lock on files and sometimes ungracefully handles loss of network. To fix this problem you can open Terminal.app (in Application/Utilities) and execute the command “killall Finder”. You can also open Activity Monitor and kill the finder graphically.
Q: How does Freedom work, is it safe?
A: Freedom operates using POSIX built-in commands. I built the program in this manner to make it extremely safe, as it functionally only employs systems internals. An external company, Softpedia, has also certified the program as safe.
SUPPORT
First, read the comments on the archived support page.
Leave a comment on this thread for support. Read comments before submitting your request. You can also contact me directly with questions, but it may take me some time to respond.
I downloaded Freedom on April 2, and tried it for the first time today. I use a PowerBook G4 laptop with OSX 10.4. I opened a Word document, cut and pasted into a new Word document, and tried to save the Word document. The cursor went into infinite spin, and when I tried to force quit the dock froze. I had to reboot. After that, for the rest of the day, even though I wasn’t using Freedom anymore and the time I’d set had expired, my laptop crashed anytime it went to sleep. I think that Freedom must’ve set something that hasn’t gotten unset. Finally, I just ran Freedom for 5 minutes (the shortest time) to let it run start to finish. Meanwhile, I played a bridge game, but that hung in midstream. As soon as the 5 minutes were up, though, and Freedom popped up a message that it was done, my bridge program unfroze too. And I tested putting my mac to sleep, and it’s fine now.
So I don’t trust Freedom.
Is it possible to start freedom from a script, or schedule freedom somehow?
Shari,
There is a bug in Word, that occurs when a computer is offline and requests access to a network printer. If you have a network printer, please disable it and see if you can run freedom again.
Further, if you have any sort of active desktop, or mount remote directories to your computer using NFS or any network filesstem, Freedom will interrupt this, which may cause problems. I am going to look into adding support for network drives in a future version of Freedom.
Finally, I have not used this program on an older Mac. I’m sorry that you had trouble!
Matt,
Yes – someone figured this out. Please see the comment thread on this post:
http://fstutzman.com/2008/04/18/productive-unit-structures-introducing-freedom/
I wonder if you could also script Freedom with Automator. I havent played around with Automator but it sounds possible.
I have been having the same problems as Shari. If I try to save an utitled document with Freedom on, I get the spinning wheel and it never goes away. The same is true of other actions that don’t require accessing a network. In fact, I find my computer usually getting stuck when Freedom is on. Any suggestions?
Thanks!
Noam, I’d like to figure this out. What OS Version/Type of mac are you using? Do you have any network drives? Can you give me an example of another application besides Word that gets stuck? And finally, do you have network printers in Word?
I love the idea! But on my first test something worrisome happened which I haven’t found reference to here.
Immediately before running Freedom for the first time (for 60 minutes), I trashed a file. It showed up in the Trash.
Immediately after my Freedom hour ended, I trashed a file. It showed up in the Trash.
But while Freedom was running, I trashed several files and… they completely disappeared. They’re not in the Trash, they didn’t show up in the Trash after Freedom ended, and Find does not find them.
Where did they go? The timing correlates perfectly with Freedom, which is concerning. I’ll do some further testing and comment later if I figure something out. Meanwhile, I’ll mention I’m using a PowerBook G4 running 10.5.6. And I very much enjoyed my free hour, and look forward to many more such.
To test this problem, you’ll need to replicate it. If you can get it to happen again, let me know.
Followup: After a reboot, my Trash contained several “Recovered Files” folders as well as other files that “went missing” upon deletion. Everything was accounted for. And subsequent testing has not replicated the problem: files deleted while Freedom is running now show up in the Trash as they are supposed to. No way to tell what happened the first time, but since I haven’t gotten it to happen again, perhaps everything is fine. If it ever does happen again, I’ll let you know.
Hi, I installed Freedom today. I have a weird problem. When I start up Freedom and select either local or normal mode, I still have internet access. As a matter of fact, I’m doing all of this while Freedom is running.
Running Tiger 10.4.11, running on a macbook pro. I have a networked printer. Internet connected to a router, distributed wirelessly.
Any thoughts?
Stan (and everyone else),
Please upgrade to Freedom .5 and let me know if you’re still having issues. I think I’ve addressed most of the issues in this new release.
I love the idea of this program. But I cannot get it to work. I’m running 10.4.11 on a MacBook with a wireless connection. I’m typing this comment as Freedom .5 is running.
Michael,
Please email me privately (fred @ fredstutzman.com) and we’ll see if we can get this fixed.
How does Freedom reckon the time elapsed? I put my computer to sleep for the night and when I woke up it still wouldn’t let me on the internet though much more time had elapsed than I set for. And this seems to have happened again today. Does it have to be awake to count down the time or can it simply compare clock times? I would have thought the latter, but it seems to do the former, which seems like a serious flaw. Please let me know if this is right and what I can do about it if anything.
thanks,
eric
Q: How does Freedom count down time?
A: Freedom only counts down “active minutes.” That is, if you set Freedom for 20 minutes, put your computer to sleep 10 minutes into Freedom, you’ll have 10 minutes of Freedom left when you come back. This design is necessitated by Apple’s permissions escalation limits, which are described in-depth at Apple’s developer site. If Freedom did not count down “active minutes” users would have to enter their password to re-enable network adapters. I am currently experimenting with workarounds that are sensible and most importantly, safe.
hi – powerbook g4, running 10.4.11. running freedom, but internet is not blocked. tried 0.5 and 0.51.. any thoughts?
Dominic, Freedom isn’t working because you’ve got Apple’s firewall turned on. Freedom won’t work while the firewall is on. To make freedom work would require a circumvention of the firewall, and it is Freedom’s policy to not make changes to your system.
If you want to make Freedom work, temporarily disable your Firewall while you are running Freedom. During this period, your computer will be essentially firewalled, so there is no risk in temporarily disabling the firewall.
thanks.. that works.. did i miss it in the faq above, or did you just add?
(perhaps it would be ok, maybe safer, to circumvent the firewall, as long as everything is returned to normal when freedom stops, and a warning about the firewall is included in the administrator password dialogue?)
cheers
dominic
I do not understand how your answer to Eric about “How does Freedom count down time?” actually answers his problem, unless you meant in the answer “That is, if you set Freedom for 20 minutes, put your computer to sleep 10 minutes into Freedom, you’ll have *20* minutes of Freedom left when you come back.” rather than “10 minutes of Freedom”.
Can you confirm?
Hi,
Freedom does the trick. Nonetheless, when I ask to go local, I can’t reach the server anymore (wireless connection to fixed afp-address) nor the network printer. Is there a workaround to fix this?
H.
Hi,
This is an awesome app, but I’m wondering if there’s a way to see how much time is elapsed? I’m a little time-obsessed and fear I’d start to freak out if I wasn’t sure when my Internet was coming back. Maybe I missed something and this is easily viewable?
Thanks,
Katharine
howdy ~ i love this idea sooo much, but i rely on Microsoft Office (sad to say), esp Word, for my work.
should i just wait until Freedom figures out a workaround?
Hi, I’m in my second week of trial. Good stuff. I use Office X version of Word, as I think you do. But also Snow Leopard, which isn’t ideal for Word X. On a couple of occasions, while Freedom is in operation, Word has quit and the system partly reboots. Any other reports of this? This version of Word isn’t trying to phone home, I don’t believe.
Great idea! Love the fact that you can use it in local access mode. However, I’m having trouble with my local network. I have 2 computers connected and am using software called ipMIDI to send MDI information from one to the other. Once Freedom is activated, MIDI information is not received on the 2nd computer but I can still access that computer through the network. As soon as the timer on Freedom runs out, MIDI information flows again.
Help!
Hey!
I am a teenager with an iBook G4 Mac running Mac OS X 10.3.9. (Old, I know.)
I really love the idea of this program Freedom, and as a student, I desperately need it in order to accomplish my work and stop being so distracted by various networking and socializing sites.
Unfortunately, I keep getting an error saying:
“ipfw: error: only TCP and UDP protocols are valid with port specifications usage: ipfw [options] add [number] rule zero [number...] restlog [number...]”
and then much more that I don’t have time to write. Does this mean I cannot run the program? I stopped my firewall just in case and that had no effect.
I really want to use this program!! What can I do?
Great app, giving this a go at the moment. It definitely helps to keep you focused.
You are probably keeping features to a minimum but is there a way to see how long you have left before the session finishes? I was thinking the time left could be displayed over the freedom icon or in the title when you hovered over it (if in the dock).
I’m having trouble getting onb line after a Freedom Session. I have three forms of internet access at home: dsl via ethernet cable, airport card, and wifi from a neighbor’s router (used with his permission). I have the same problem with all three and need to retart after a Freedom session.
Love the idea of this programme, however, the internet’s working for me normally while freedom is running (actually it’s running right now).
Using MacBook, 10.6.2, firewall turned off.
I´ve problems with integrating freedom in spaces ! spaces won´t like to accept the app at all – can anyone confirm this ?
Thanks !
I’ve been using Freedom successfully for about a year; I don’t know what I’d do without it — that’s why this is such a problem.
On the advice of a friend (to solve a macmail problem) I installed VPN client today. Now Freedom no longer works, and that seems to be the case whether the VPN is on or off.
Any idea what I can do? I don’t know anything about this stuff, so I’m sorry if the solution is obvious.
Same here, Freedom not working on 10.6.2, please fix!!!
I’m on SL Server, Firewall Service not enabled…
No news? Any idea of when this might work for 10.6.2?
Thanks in advance.