Geekzone: technology news, blogs, forums
Guest
Welcome Guest.
You haven't logged in yet. If you don't have an account you can register now.


motorwayne

841 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 5


#21973 12-May-2008 15:12
Send private message

Little Snitch

Little Snitch informs you whenever a program attempts to establish an outgoing Internet connection. You can allow or deny these connections, or define rules to handle future attempts automatically. Little Snitch reliably prevents your private data from being sent out to the Internet without your knowledge.


http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

Motorwayne

Create new topic
wazzageek
1095 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 108

ID Verified
Trusted
Lifetime subscriber

  #130303 12-May-2008 17:33
Send private message

It's always a good idea to gain a better understanding of what is going on - however the level of protection that tools like this may be somewhat false - and you also need to have an understanding of what all the messages mean.

I've seen an example of a program, where the user tends to just simply click OK to every popup.  Then there is the situation (I'm thinking back to a Windows product, Zonealarm) - where some programs are utilised by many different processes - so once you've allowed the program out via a certain port, as long as a process uses the same port destination, you're none the wiser.

To bring this back to the Mac world - if you have a product that scripts mail in the background using applescript to email out via mail - the only way you'd know is if you checked your sent items box ...

In an environment where you want to just have things talking to each other, this could become quite an irritant (or a fascinating distraction)

I did trial this once ... but I *personally* found that it didn't really give me anything to entice me into thinking I had better security on my Mac ...

It's always a tough one ...

Cheers,
Warren.

Create new topic








Geekzone Live »

Try automatic live updates from Geekzone directly in your browser, without refreshing the page, with Geekzone Live now.



Are you subscribed to our RSS feed? You can download the latest headlines and summaries from our stories directly to your computer or smartphone by using a feed reader.