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LocalControl locks Mac and iPhone to plain-English rules

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TL;DR

  • LocalControl, by Eugene Vinitsky, lets users set plain-English rules on Mac and iPhone that cannot be undone until they expire, up to 12 hours.
  • On Mac it runs Ollama with Gemma 3 4B, judging the frontmost app, window titles and browser URLs every 1.5 seconds; iPhone uses Qwen 1.7B via MLX.
  • The system fails closed: if Ollama is unavailable during an active rule, anything not previously approved is blocked.

"For the next hour, I can only use this laptop to read papers or search for papers or technical material." That is the kind of rule you type into LocalControl, a Mac and iPhone project from Eugene Vinitsky, and once you set it, the README states, "a rule can't be stopped, replaced or quit out of until it expires." Default is 60 minutes. Maximum is 12 hours.

On Mac, Ollama running Gemma 3 4B judges the frontmost app, window titles and browser tab URLs every 1.5 seconds against your rule. Non-compliant tabs route to a block page with an appeal box. Non-compliant apps hide. The iPhone side translates the same text into Screen Time restrictions using a smaller Qwen 1.7B model via MLX, around 1 GB on disk. Rules sync via iCloud, and an optional accountability partner can be set to receive tamper alerts over iMessage.

Vinitsky is explicit about what this is not. The design, he writes, is "strong friction, not real security." It also fails closed: if Ollama goes down while a rule is active, anything the model has not previously approved is blocked. Two of the researchers we track shared the repo in the days around its publication.

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Originally reported by github.com

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Original headline: GitHub - eugenevinitsky/LocalControl: Plain-English, locked-in usage rules for your Mac and iPhone, enforced by a local LLM