Portmaster: Poohs assessment

Portmaster: Pooh’s assessment

First off I installed and uninstalled Portmaster using Revo. It 
uninstalled cleanly leaving just one item in Prefetch.

The download is only for the free version. Apart from some upgrade 
buttons it was standard Feature-Limited ware.

The interface comes in two colours black and black. Horrid. Like peering 
into Hades. Evidently many people are like cats and prefer a lighter 
interface but despite complaints the developers have ruled that out. Go 
figure.

The freeware version offers three main things

DNS over HTTPS or TLS at the system level
Filtering by lists at the system level
Intelligent network view with time limited logging

So, DNS over HTTPS or TLS, with Windows 11 it’s built in, ask AI, it’s 
in Settings not Network Properties. You can get system tray utilities to 
do it as well. Cloudflare is my choice. They are a massive internet 
backbone and infrastructure company. They protect millions of websites 
from cyberattacks and speed up global web traffic. They also block dodgy 
websites by blocking your queries backed by real time threat 
intelligence systems. Serious stuff. I know that the greybeards will 
start hopping around but frankly if you look closely at Cloudflare they 
have skin in the game of network security. These guys know their shit. 
It's fast as well.

Basically, you don’t need Portmaster for DNS over HTTPS or TLS.

Filtering by lists, my feeling about this is I don’t want this at the 
system level. I have uBlock Origin installed in Firefox but not Chrome. 
If a website borks, I check, does it work in Chrome. It’s simple, it 
works for me and most stuff is blocked where it matters, bye bye dodgy 
websites, and further backed up by Cloudflare DNS filtering of course. 
That does leave email filtering, but my advice is use a provider who 
filters out spam and malware. I use a paid for German company who don’t 
read your email and have massive multi-tier anti-spam and anti-malware 
systems. Layered real time protection. You can get the same with less 
privacy for free. Your choice. Ignore the greybeards or don’t. I don’t care.

So, again, there’s other options. You don’t need Portmaster for 
Filtering by lists.

Finally, Intelligent network view, it’s pretty and you can spot 
applications checking for updates and sending telemetry, and you get to 
jump up and down but if you did due diligence, it’s likely ‘legit’ 
traffic as in, it’s not really going to hurt you, but crucially, if you 
spot a rogue process here it’s already too late. So, enjoy playing with 
it, but my view is letting the AV handle rogue processes is really the 
better low maintenance option that might just save your arse because 
this most probably won’t.

Lots of love. Pooh


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