The white-listing is generally available as part of the parental control of most internet security software. It's generally considered the "kids" mode, where only pre-approved sites are let through.
you can adjust up/down your list by sender , by key words, by subject until your receive just what you want to receive and then you can review the black list posts and white list the one you want with just one click. http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/products/index.php
http://www.squid-cache.org/ Squid is a proxy, not a firewall. In fact, it is the best proxy available. You can certainly black list and white list domains, control access by time of day and lots more.
I looked at parental control stuff, it's always about the browser. I don't use the browser that much for my work computer...
there is lots of stuff available for commercial level deployment, I'm looking for something that runs on my laptop
Peer Guardian looks like it's more suited for easier deployment, I found it last night when searching on "ip blocking". It's for people that want to do peer to peer file sharing without getting busted or viruses or something.. it has the capability to accept a custom blocking list and custom allow list, probably it will be the thing that is easy to use, you never know.. http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/
no, i didn't mention peer to peer.. I did mention that I want to take my laptop places and TRADE though, I thought that little hint would help guide the discussion... I've had this discussion about whitelisting and did searches on it quite a bit off and on in the past and it always went into these blind alleys about shit that works with the browser and blocks email addresses and stuff where some list is maintained on somebody's server and your software downloads that list... Peer Guardian does that but it can be configured to work entirely from a list that the end user can generate... The whole black listing industry is corrupt really.. are they going to alert you that their stuff doesn't work? I had Panda software, Zone Alarm in fact, running once and discovered that two notorious hacking sites were connected to my computer at the same time... maybe they stay in business in this Homeland Security/Hacker infested atmosphere with a little wink-wink nod-nod to the spooks and mobsters that their software doesn't really work? those hackers gave me a wake up call, then I discovered white listing and subsequently found that I could not do that with software.. so I revived the quest once again and voila!!... Somebody seems to have something I can use, too cool.. Security software has to be open source to be trustworthy, if I was going to do white listing in hardware I indeed would run some open source software on it's own computer and I'd go over that software with a fine toothed comb in my spare time too... I had hotbricks, two of them, they both died on me eventually and once we had a power glitch and the frigging hotbrick went from whitelisted to wide open!! Fortunately for all of us they went out of business... if all the US companies that make/sell cheap shit that doesn't work would go out of business at once the US would cease to exist maybe.. I get my software from Europe only, they understand that things have to work and they cooperate with the customers in that regard.. I get my food from a Swiss gal nowadays too, organic ingredients, not too much excitement for the taste buds but I feel well... my next car will be a German one, I screwed around with a GM Camaro for so many years, constantly rebuilding things.. it was such a badly engineered piece of shit...
Here's a link to a sourceforge.net project found with a "whitelisting firewall" search: http://sourceforge.net/projects/firewallpapi/ ###