SkyWall for PC
SkyWall is powerful, but does have some complexity. This page guides you through the features in order to get a better understanding of how to use it.
Features
LOCKING & UNLOCKING
Change every setting without needing an administrator, using the concept of a delay.
WHITELISTING
Whitelist websites, apps, and exempt ports from monitoring.
Blocking
Block specific websites, phrases, and even apps on your PC.
GPS-BASED UNLOCKING
Instantly unlock your PC and remove all restrictions when you enter trusted areas, such as an office.
Prefer a visual explanation? Watch a video instead
LOCKING, UNLOCKING, & DELAY
SkyWall starts with the concept of a delay: you can make any change at any time without asking permission, including uninstalling the software, but only after waiting for a delay of your choosing. This gives you some time to talk yourself out of whatever you were about to do, or to go do something else entirely (preferably away from your PC, outside!)
The main screen for controlling delay is shown here, with a dropdown list of delay values to choose from. A few extra functions are shown as well, to do with controlling the filter. If the delay is currently 0, the filter can be turned off completely.
Computer wizards or hackers who are able to do some spelunking and find the SkyWall configuration files can activate Strict Mode here as well, which strips Administrator permissions from all accounts on the PC except a special SkyWall account, which will have a randomized password when delay is greater than 0, and a preset value of “P@ssw0rd” when delay is 0. This ensures that the configuration files cannot be edited, except when delay is 0. It also prevents users from uninstalling SkyWall or making any administrative changes, except when delay is 0 and the SkyWall account is used.
It is however an extreme option which average users will not need, as even without Strict Mode enabled the software cannot be uninstalled unless delay is 0.
SkyWall also comes with the ability to unlock instantly based on your location. This feature uses Windows’ built-in location service: make sure you have it enabled.
Suppose you use your PC for work as well as personal use, and you have a work environment where you just don’t want to have to constantly be adding or tweaking configuration values in SkyWall: simply navigate to this screen, get your current location, and save it. Later on, when you return to the area you can open this screen and press “Unlock” to instantly have delay set to 0.
WHITELISTING
The whitelisting screen is the main screen in SkyWall, where you will make most of your changes. There are three sections here, which we will go over: Websites, Apps, and Ports.
Websites
It’s worth spending a minute to understand how the websites tab in particular works, as there is some depth to it.
Most websites today reference images and content from many different web hosts, which your browser fetches from behind the scenes when you navigate to a given site. SkyWall acts as a gate in front of your browser (in front of all applications on your PC, in fact) which checks all content coming in, to see if it matches a rule you have defined. When your browser receives HTML and JavaScript from a website, it runs that content which tells it what new content to request, as you interact with it and click around the website.
Let’s say you whitelist bestbuy.com; your intention when doing so is to have all images and videos on bestbuy.com show up without further effort on your part. However, SkyWall needs to figure out what additional sites will be referenced from bestbuy.com, and so it emulates the process of running the HTML and JavaScript of that site, in order to extract all the links. This is only an emulated process, as pausing to do the real thing would greatly slow down your browsing, and that means that sometimes SkyWall will not find all the links.
That is why the Websites tab is set up as a two-layer screen: on the left-hand side, you define a category or grouping, and on the right-hand side you then add all the domains you need to. For most sites, this will not need to be more than the address of the website itself, e.g. “bestbuy.com”, or similar.
However, some sites are more complicated, and you may need to add additional rules yourself, or you may not want to whitelist the entire site; the two-layer setup of this tab allows you to do just that. Shown on the right, the reference configuration for Google, which allows most Google services without allowing Google image and video search. Don’t worry, you don’t have to recreate this configuration yourself, SkyWall ships with it out of the box!
Some further tips on whitelisting: you should always omit the “http://” part of any URL you want to whitelist, and generally should use the root domain itself, as in the previous example: bestbuy.com, or amazon.com, or bankofamerica.com, etc.
Apps
Some non-browser programs on your PC will load content from various places around the internet, and it can be tricky to figure out what sites they’re going to. So instead of trying to define rules for them on the Whitelisting tab, simply whitelist the application itself on the Apps tab. Shown below, the reference configuration on the Apps tab, which supports most Steam, Origin, and Epic Games titles out-of-the-box.
In general, the Apps tab is simpler than the Websites tab, as all you do is simply copy the folder path to the application you are interested in whitelisting. Certain Microsoft Store apps are the only special cases here: some of them use advanced security sandbox features that obscure the drive location they are running from. For these, you will have to write a regex, that’s regular expression. There’s no way around it, regexes are complicated. It will be further complicated by the need to write the regex in escaped form: mostly only computer programmers will have experience with this. However, these types of apps are few and far between.
