If you skip this step you’ll end up frustrated. There’s an important change you need to make before you continue. For the purposes of this tutorial, we’re going to block a portable copy of the Maxthon web browser-mostly because it will be easy to demonstrate to you that the browser is blocked. On the “Program” screen, select the “This program path” option, and then type (or browse for) the path to the program you want to block. To do so navigate to the Control Panel and select “Windows Firewall.” In the “Windows Firewall” window, click the “Advanced Settings” link on the left. To create a Window Firewall rule, you first need to open up the advanced Firewall interface, which is named, appropriately enough, Windows Firewall with Advanced Security. Creating a Windows Firewall RuleĪlthough we’ll be demonstrating this trick on Windows 10, the basic layout and premise has remained largely unchanged over the years and you can easily adapt this tutorial to earlier versions of Windows. Let’s take a look at how to block an application from accessing the local network and Internet now.

Regardless of why you want to drop the cone of network connectivity silence over a given application, a trip into the guts of the Windows Firewall is an easy way to do so. You might be using an application with really obnoxious ads that can be silenced by cutting off the application’s Internet access. You might have a video game that you’re comfortable with your child playing, but you’re not so comfortable with the online (and unsupervised) multiplayer elements.

You might have an application that insists on automatically updating itself, but find that those updates break some functionality and you want to stop them. Some simple and commonplace examples are as follows.

How to use lightshot to block out