Interdict.

Throttle your Vices.

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TL;DR

Interdict is a revolution in effective screentime management. Completely invisible to the user, Interdict will intelligently and subtly convince your brain to slow your doomscroll and interact with addictive apps & websites in a healthy manner. Interdict is bespoke, effective aversive conditioning tool for your Reels addiction.

Why? Would you be ashamed to show your screentime statistics to your family? Have you tried everything under the sun short of throwing your phone in a river to reduce that number? We sure have. The issue with conventional time-management approaches is that accountability isn't as cheap as you think it is. Why bother with a time-lock if you can just keep desperately pressing "5 more minutes" as you zombily stumble across the lawn of apartment fire vlogs on Instagram Reels?

What if a tool just made you actually want to stop the scroll instead? What if you didn't even know the tool is making you want to stop?

What? One glaring flaw in conventional screen time limiters is consent. The user consents to install or use this application that clearly tells you when it is in use by entirely blocking the opening of an app or website. The user can revoke this consent at any time, rendering the entire operation pointless. If a user does not know when they are being limited, they will not remove the feature.

Thus, the crucial hypothesis of Interdict is that frustration and friction are the antithesis of addictive apps, while silently and subtly throttling your connection will not alert the user to the actions being taken by Interdict. Causing this frustration won't tell you to stop scrolling, it will make you want to.

A single silent change to your proxy settings is all it takes to use Interdict on any device!

How? Interdict leverages the psychological technique of aversive conditioning to associate unwanted behaviour (doomscrolling, binging) with negative emotions (frustration) by algorithmically throttling your connection to problematic websites and unwanted services. Over time, you, the user, will slowly begin associating your bottomless feed with laggy video, high ping, or dropped packets that get ramped up the longer you use the service.

In short:

  • Set your device or app's proxy settings to use Interdict
  • Add services you need to use less to the blocklist
  • Use those services
  • Get frustrated
  • Reduce your consumption

Interdict is a fully transparent SOCKS5 protocol proxy server that intercepts TCP/IP traffic, written in Python. When a client uses Interdict, the proxy routes most traffic directly, unless the destination server is on a user-supplied blocked domain/address list. If it's on the list, the proxy will track the pattern of the client's usage over time, and then throttle packets gradually and randomly based on how long the client has been using the app.

By using a SOCKS5 server and looking exclusively at the destination of packets, the proxy is able to avoid looking at the content of traffic and respect TLS encryption. This entirely preserves privacy as no logs are stored of the content of the traffic, only the destination.

The nature of the throttling is highly configurable, allowing the user to modify the length of the grace period before throttling starts, rate at which the slowdown increases (agressiveness), how long of a time activity is tracked over, and more!

Each packet stream is throttled by some amount of time determined by the following formula: $$ \left( \frac{m}{1+e^{u-ax}} - \frac{m}{1+e^{u}} \right)\cdot \left( \frac{m}{m-\frac{m}{1+e^{u}}} \right) $$ Where m is the maximum throttle delay a is the aggressiveness factor x is the amount of time (in minutes) an application has been used over the past window of time. u is a horizontal shift to the throttle curve (Hardcoded Constant)

Although easiest to set up as a local proxy server, Interdict can be run as a service on an external server! This allows you to connect to Interdict on sandboxed platforms with limited ability to run your own code such as IOS devices — very relevant for cases when you doomscroll on your bed or couch far away from your computer. You simply need some method of connecting to a SOCKS5 proxy server, which can be provided by software such as Potatso in the case of IOS.

Challenges

  • We originally intended to make a HTTP/S proxy, but ran into issues with maintaining the two-way connections that HTTPS required. Additionally, HTTP/S requests were relatively few and far between, and continued use could be sustained over a single long TCP/IP stream. The solution was to use a TCP proxy instead in the form of the SOCKS5 protocol.
  • Running the proxy server on iOS mobile devices locally due to sandboxing constraints caused many headaches and would have gone beyond the scope of the project. We hosted the proxy on an external server and came up with a solution of using the proxy as a service for mobile devices.
  • Learning the architecture of an entire SOCKS5 proxy was hard, not to mention the actual features we added.
  • One of the group members had to work around spontaneous homelessness due to an apartment fire.

Beyond the ILC

  • With AI/ML-driven data analysis, we would be able to determine patterns of intensive usage vs. inactivity without hand-tailoring analysis to specific services. This would open the door for much more accurate and unpredictable throttling that accounts for the natural bandwith usage of different apps, increasing the invisibility of Interdict alongside its effectiveness.
  • Fine tuning of our throttling algorithm with additional metrics like packet pressure would increase the effectiveness of everything.
  • Adding authentication so one user can exist across multiple devices could reduce the ability to avoid Interdict's throttling
  • Simulating different types of slowdowns can make the throttling more believable.
  • Implementing this at a router-level or as a public proxy or VPN could turn this into a more robust, sellable product.
  • Autostarting the proxy on boot would turn this from a POC into an omnipresent corrective force on your life.
  • Automatically detecting secondary domains and IPs used by websites (e.g. redd.it for reddit.com) could make our throttling more consistent and harder to bypass.

Additional Credits

  • Alex Kotsinyan for the logo design
  • CodeWithImm for SOCKS5 Proxy resources and sample code

Built With

  • flask
  • proxies
  • python
  • sockets
  • socks5
  • tailwindcss
  • tcp/ip
  • threading
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