--- title: "Netfox 0.23.0 — the devices that never speak" author: "Giovambattista Fazioli" published: "2026-09-17T13:09:11.212Z" updated: "2026-09-17T13:09:11.212Z" url: "https://zyvop.com/netfox-0-23-0-the-devices-that-never-speak-c749m" canonical: "https://zyvop.com/netfox-0-23-0-the-devices-that-never-speak-c749m" tags: ["network","tooling","security","macos"] --- # Netfox 0.23.0 — the devices that never speak Netfox used to find devices by listening. Now it can ask — and the range you ask about doubles as a way to narrow what you are looking at. ![Cover image]() There is a particular kind of thing on your network that Netfox could never show you, and it was not a gap in the feature list. It was structural. Netfox found devices by **listening**. Some things announce themselves; others give themselves away by exchanging a packet with something. Between the two, most of a home network turns up. But a device that is switched on, quiet, and has never had a reason to talk to your Mac produces neither signal — so it was not merely hard to find, it was unreachable by construction. A printer asleep. A camera that only ever phones its own cloud. Something you set up months ago and stopped thinking about. ## Now it can ask Give Netfox a range of addresses and it sends one small question to each. Whatever answers turns up as an ordinary device — its identity, its history, its alerts, all of it — because the sweep does not create a parallel list, it feeds the one you already have. ![The Devices list with Demo Mode on. The new range control sits in the toolbar, right of the Online/Offline filter; a sweep adds to this list rather than opening one of its own.]() It stays inside your own subnet, needs no password and installs nothing. A range that reaches outside is refused rather than trimmed to fit, because a trimmed range asks about a different set of addresses than the one you typed, and nothing on screen would tell you. ## The range is also a filter, and that is the important half Set it to two addresses and the list shows those two devices. Nothing else. This started as a way to bound how long a sweep takes and turned out to be the thing that makes the feature trustworthy: **you can see what it found.** Set a narrow range, look, and know. While a range is active the control that set it says so and offers to clear it, and the footer carries both numbers — _2 in range · 33 on the network_ — because a filter you have forgotten looks exactly like a network that has lost thirty devices, and nothing else on screen would disagree with it. ## Who is holding that port on your own Mac Open the Ports tab for your own machine and each row now names what holds the port: the process, the user it runs as, its ID. A click deeper says how it is managed, and whether closing it can be undone. That last one is worth dwelling on, because it is the difference between a decision and a one-way door. Netfox asks your Mac rather than guessing, and the honest answer is usually no: most services, once you stop them, stay stopped until something asks for them again. On the machine this was measured on, **only 2 of 36 running services were set to restart themselves.** A tool that told you "it'll come back" would have been wrong about the other 34. ## Smaller things you will notice Inspecting a port that has closed since the last scan no longer keeps you waiting. A refusal is an answer, and it arrives in about a millisecond — it was being read as a silence, so every inspection sat out its full timeout behind a spinner, on something you had just clicked. And two things on the Overview stopped moving about: the summary cards now reach the right edge of the window instead of leaving an empty column beside them, and the line under the Wi-Fi figures keeps one height whether the rate is holding, has just renegotiated, or has not been measured twice yet. A fast radio drifting between 864 Mb/s and 1.4 Gb/s was resizing the whole card every couple of seconds. * * * Netfox is free, a universal binary (Apple Silicon + Intel), runs on macOS 15.6+, and is signed and notarized. Netfox for macOS — Website: [https://netfox.app]() · Download: [https://netfox.app/download]()