When a questionable outgoing connection is detected, Little Snitch presents you with a dialog asking you whether or not you want to allow that connection. But new, unrecognized types of connections will generate an onscreen warning and-just as important-a request for the user’s intervention. The developers have pre-configured Little Snitch to recognize and allow several sorts of connections that assumed to be safe, such as Safari attempting to connect to any remote server on port 80 (the TCP/IP port commonly used for Web connections) and Mail attempting to send and receive email. But other incoming connection attempts may be unwanted, and that’s what a firewall is designed to protect against.Įnter Little Snitch, which watches for outgoing network connections and clears them with the user before allowing them to proceed.

Such incoming traffic can be “safe” for example, instant messages from a friend, visits to Web pages you’ve published using Web Sharing, or your own file-sharing connections when you’re away from your desk. With Little Snitch 2 ( $25), Objective Development has delivered a worthy successor, with more-informative alerts to the user, more ways of seeing what traffic is coming from your Mac, and more pre-configured rules for common types of network traffic.Īs with Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4), the firewall software Apple provides with Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) is designed to screen incoming network traffic-attempts to access your computer over its network ports. The built-in firewall monitored, and blocked, only incoming network traffic, and Little Snitch was one of the available options for dealing with outbound network traffic.

Reviewed Objective Development Software GmbH’s Little Snitch 1.2 for Macworld two years ago, it helpfully filled a gap in the ipfw firewall software Apple provides with Mac OS X.

Little snitch for iphone