Some folks have been noticing that over the years, various apps appear to "phone home" from time to time.

For example, Firefox seems to contact a variety of locations -- they do provide some info about this and often how to disable:

  http://kb.mozillazine.org/Connections_established_on_startup_-_Firefox
  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections
  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/755147
  https://superuser.com/questions/832608/what-is-being-send-to-received-from-safebrowsing-google-com-when-i-open-firefo
  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1076594

but there does not appear to be a single preference one can select to disable all such behavior (or alternatively, turn stuff off temporarily and restore later).  Also it turns out in some cases it's a plug-in (e.g. IIUC, NoScript may talk to secure.informaction.com -- please point out if this is incorrect).

I also noticed that at some point one of the tracking related settings had gotten enabled here :(  In general, I'm not too happy about settings changing behind my back...

So this leads to an idea...

A policy-checking / reporting plug-in or app -- perhaps at first for FF, but may be also for other apps.  A rough idea of it is to be able to specify a policy (e.g. no non-user initiated connections) and then get a report on whether it's followed and perhaps to warn when the policy appears to be violated.  Being able to load / save various policies might be nice too.

I realize that doing this in detail is likely to be a fair bit of work -- was just thinking something simple might be possible to gain a fair bit of benefit.  Perhaps something that just checks a certain set of settings -- not actually try to monitor app behavior.

May be such a thing exists already, but if not... :)

Is it possible to have an arrangement where it's possible to make new content available soon and gradually add in older content?

So...how's it going? :)