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Little Snitch 6 Released for macOS Sonoma With DNS Encryption, Integrated Blocklists, New Traffic Chart, and More

Seems they released the previous version about 3 and a half years ago. And version 4 almost 7 years ago.

Seems a reasonable upgrade cycle to me. And beats paying monthly for no development - as in subscriptions.

kjvmartin said:
I am not sure I get the appeal of this app. If you are this interested in network security, you'll probably already have a robust firewall for your entire network and this would be mostly redundant.
Click to expand...
True from a security perspective - but even without being a LittleSnitch user and just judging from screenshots, I doubt that robust network-wide firewall appliances come anywhere near it in terms of usability (or „slickness‘) of the GUI to the average (non-network administrator) computer user.

…and installability (to the PiHole comment above).
 
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pi6xjdskfa said:
is this mainly used to block software from contacting registration servers? what is the main reason to have it?
Click to expand...
No, it’s for everything, to complete Apples half-baked approach to security. You’ll be amazed at the incredible amount of contact the software you use every day tries to make to servers around the world. Even (especially) mail & safari. This app tells & shows you, “this message that’s trying to load wants to open a connection to Russia/Nigeria/Somalia, Approve or Deny?” Safari is a harder beast to tame bc of the sheer mass of garbage that comes built in to every webpage now, so loading a single url can often mean clicking “Deny” on half a dozen other background urls trying to scour your data to track & sell you. Safari usually takes a while to block effectively as you learn which recurring background services you need for sites to work. You can block all googles invasive tracking BS, for instance, but if you block the google api urls, you’ll quickly realize most of the web runs on those api’s. This upgrade makes that easier with ready-made blocklists, pretty nice. Sometimes you’ll just bite the bullet and choose allow all until quit, so you can just jump on to a site & back off again quick. But this places all the awareness & control in your hands, instead of just hiding it from you & leaving the barn door hanging wide open like Mac OS does by default.

Having a super wonderful firewall on your network is really great as long as you never leave your house.
 
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On iOS you can see what serves an app connected to. Some of them the moment you open the app, they contact a hundred serves which probably want to put cookies there to learn about your app usage and profile etc…
Can this block them all by default , apart from the servers strictly for the app functions intself?

I know this is for Mac, but my point stands. Not just apps, but many websites on Mac do the same thing.
 
NagasakiGG said:
Why do they always charge users for upgrade...ugh. Companies like them and Parallels are the reason why people pirate.
Click to expand...
Because free does NOT buy competence. To inspire people work to the best of their ability, they deserve to get paid.

This is especially so for security software. If you're really ok with using a pirated version, then you really don't need this software. You've probably already been hacked.
 
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purplerainpurplerain said:
Does not block the crime org meta from installing cookies in your browser even when you don’t visit their sites.
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There are a number of sites that Apple does not allow LittleSnitch to block. Or in other words, sites that Apple's OS goes around the normal network stack. This is a contra indication that Apple has superior security, because we do not know exactly what Apple allows to bypass LittleSnitch. This is not LittleSnitch's fault, but more Apple nanny'isms

LittleSnitch has commented on this in the past. So yes, as commented upstream a separate firewall is better as you can completely control it. But when traveling, LittleSnitch is much better than carrying an additional firewall device to protect you from Apple's poor software.
 
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ninethirty said:
This will sound crazy, so bear with me, but when people spend time working on something, generally they like to be paid for doing that.

I will never understand why people today think that because they paid the $60 for a video game, or $20 for some small piece of software, that it doesn't come with free updates for life, including newer versions with newly designed features/content.

The people who spent time to design and build that thing you bought.. they continued to have rent/mortgage, bills, and you know, trying to live life, etc. If you enjoy the work that they do, compensate them for it.

Good grief.
Click to expand...
Took the words right out of my mouth. I have family members that rant and rave about wanting lifetime updates to anything they purchase. The best comparison I can give them is if they buy music from their favorite artist. You don't get the next album for free. The electrician doesn't come and replace the wiring in your home when they make an improved wire. It's like the world "upgrade" has somehow escaped people that it takes time, effort, and even money to write software. Your $19.99 doesn't pay the billed of the developer indefinitely.
 
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wanha said:
Excuse me for a second while I dream of Little Snitch 7 that incorporates AI to help fix (read: access) sites that my LS blocklists have broken.

I abhor doing the manual detective work to figure out which particular connection I've denied on a particular site that broke it, as it's painfully slow, arduous work and I'd rather not just allow every connection for the site.

That said, I'm a big fan of LS - but I am also a man with dreams :)
Click to expand...
Several releases ago they use to offer the ability to reset their logfile. This made it easy to determine what blocked connection affected a website or program. For some reason, they removed this capability.
 
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nt5672 said:
There are a number of sites that Apple does not allow LittleSnitch to block. Or in other words, sites that Apple's OS goes around the normal network stack. This is a contra indication that Apple has superior security, because we do not known exactly what Apple allows to bypass LittleSnitch. This is not LittleSnitch's fault, but more Apple nanny'isms

LittleSnitch has commented on this in the past. So yes, as commented upstream a separate firewall is better as you can completely control it. But when traveling, LittleSnitch is much better than carrying an additional firewall device to protect you from Apple's poor software.
Click to expand...
Do you have a link?
 
Paradoxally said:
Don't start with this rent-seeking nonsense. This is exactly how we got almost every paid app to be a subscription.

Let people actually buy software and own it instead of just renting.
Click to expand...
Do you not use a music service like Spotify or Apple Music? Pandora, or any other streaming service? By this model, you must go out and purchase all of your music on CD, or buy in the iTunes Store so you can avoid renting music. Do you ever rent a video? Or do you purchase all. The model has changed in how we purchase software. Wishing it to go back to "buy one time" works for some developers but for most, it's like wishing you could still buy bread for $0.05. Times change. Don't get me wrong, I miss the days I could spend a few hundred dollars on the Adobe Creative Suite and have my own little set of DVDs to install from whenever I wanted. However, that soon changed to $1500 for a software that only updated once every 2 years. Whatever bug was in it, I was stuck with it until the next version. Any enhancements? Nope, wait until the next version and then you pay a $799 upgrade for the "new" DVDs. Over time, it became obvious that paying a small amount per month actually added up exactly to the large, one every two year prices. It just spread out the cost month to month. And in trade, I get updates, new features much faster, etc. I get the argument, but if you really stand back and look at all the good that has come out of many of the subscriptions, I'll take that over the former.
 
nt5672 said:
There are a number of sites that Apple does not allow LittleSnitch to block. Or in other words, sites that Apple's OS goes around the normal network stack. This is a contra indication that Apple has superior security, because we do not known exactly what Apple allows to bypass LittleSnitch. This is not LittleSnitch's fault, but more Apple nanny'isms

LittleSnitch has commented on this in the past. So yes, as commented upstream a separate firewall is better as you can completely control it. But when traveling, LittleSnitch is much better than carrying an additional firewall device to protect you from Apple's poor software.
Click to expand...

I will do the right thing and blame Meta not Apple. It’s their cookies and they should **** off from installing cookies if we did not visit them.
 
Paradoxally said:
Don't start with this rent-seeking nonsense. This is exactly how we got almost every paid app to be a subscription.

Let people actually buy software and own it instead of just renting.
Click to expand...
The challenge with that is that the company only makes money at the point of sale and the incentive to keep developing it "for free" is lost. Then we get these sort of "upgrade" fees where sometimes security fixes are addressed and people that don't update use dated software with security flaws.

All apps need constant maintenance these days and that needs to me financed in some way.
 
NagasakiGG said:
Why do they always charge users for upgrade...ugh. Companies like them and Parallels are the reason why people pirate.
Click to expand...
I hear you, and was in the same boat especially when companies like Final Draft decided to NOT make any significant changes yet still charge us for the update and make the new version NOT backward compatible.

I'd rather pay full price for every update every 2 years and get substantial improvement AND the promise that FD6 will open with FD10 and an FD10 file can at least be opened with FD6.

I've used Little Snitch 3, but found even then it was overkill for what I needed, glad to see that it's still thriving and frankly the interface looks WAY better than what I remember.
 
NagasakiGG said:
Why do they always charge users for upgrade...ugh. Companies like them and Parallels are the reason why people pirate.
Click to expand...

Imagine this. You have a house built, you like the house, but you find that a friend adds a hot tub to their house. The hot tub is nice, you also want a hot tub but you do not have one.

The hot tub will not be free, because it requires materials and labor.

This is how software always used to be and how it should be, because people deserve to be paid for their labor, especially if you want to enjoy something. If you don't want trash software, you should want to pay for things.
 
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NagasakiGG said:
Why do they always charge users for upgrade...ugh. Companies like them and Parallels are the reason why people pirate.
Click to expand...

It's about 30USD to jump from 5 to 6, and you can always just not upgrade at all; they've maintained stability of earlier versions throughout MacOS changes. In fact this is such a solid program that if version 1 could run on modern MacOS you'd still have access to a sizable portion of features. And if you chose to upgrade from 5 to 6 (and 6 to 7) you're rewarding the company for its hard-work maintaining the software and adding new features, without a subscription model.

pi6xjdskfa said:
is this mainly used to block software from contacting registration servers? what is the main reason to have it? i am interested but doesn't mac os x provide enough privacy?
Click to expand...

I would describe it as a way retaining some control over your network when you're visiting (nearly) every website. Even websites that have comparatively few trackers and extraneous connections, such as Macrumors.com (sorry) still has several extraneous connections... adthrive.com, skimresources.com, google-analytics.com, googletagmanager.com, onthe.io, gravatar.com, doubleclick.net, etc. And by traveling around the internet you'll soon notice that you're connecting to the same extraneous connections over and over... which means those extraneous websites are watching you travel from place to place and slowing your speed.

I would add (1) that I don't know how much it does to protect privacy, but it does seem to make connection to websites uninterrupted; and (2) it takes a few weeks to 'block forever' enough extraneous websites so that the pop-ups are few and far between.
 
ThunderSkunk said:
No, it’s for everything, to complete Apples half-baked approach to security. You’ll be amazed at the incredible amount of contact the software you use every day tries to make to servers around the world. Even (especially) mail & safari. This app tells & shows you, “this message that’s trying to load wants to open a connection to Russia/Nigeria/Somalia, Approve or Deny?” Safari is a harder beast to tame bc of the sheer mass of garbage that comes built in to every webpage now, so loading a single url can often mean clicking “Deny” on half a dozen other background urls trying to scour your data to track & sell you. Safari usually takes a while to block effectively as you learn which recurring background services you need for sites to work. You can block all googles invasive tracking BS, for instance, but if you block the google api urls, you’ll quickly realize most of the web runs on those api’s. This upgrade makes that easier with ready-made blocklists, pretty nice. Sometimes you’ll just bite the bullet and choose allow all until quit, so you can just jump on to a site & back off again quick. But this places all the awareness & control in your hands, instead of just hiding it from you & leaving the barn door hanging wide open like Mac OS does by default.

Having a super wonderful firewall on your network is really great as long as you never leave your house.
Click to expand...
It’s called self hosting a VPN and DNS sinkhole. Now whenever you leave the house your blocking follows you. 👍🏻
 
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kjvmartin said:
I am not sure I get the appeal of this app. If you are this interested in network security, you'll probably already have a robust firewall for your entire network and this would be mostly redundant.
Click to expand...
A robust firewall works when you're using a network that you manage, but if you're traveling or on a network that isn't yours, this still works.
 
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