Micro Snitch – Know when someone spies on you
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Re: Micro Snitch – Know when someone spies on you
#2[deleted]
Re: Micro Snitch – Know when someone spies on you
#3How do you know when Micro Snitch spies on you? I couldn't find the source code anywhere.
Re: Micro Snitch – Know when someone spies on you
#4Or just install Oversight, it's free, does the same thing. And if you want you can support the author on Patreon.
Re: Micro Snitch – Know when someone spies on you
#5Is this the evolution of Little Snitch? They appear to be the same company, but the Little Snitch page is still active:
Re: Micro Snitch – Know when someone spies on you
#6Is this the evolution of Little Snitch? They appear to be the same company, but the Little Snitch page is still active: https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html
Nope, one is a firewall, the other one is a camera/microphone monitor.
Re: Micro Snitch – Know when someone spies on you
#7How do you know when Micro Snitch spies on you? I couldn't find the source code anywhere.
I was about to say, this would be the greatest social hack to get paranoid people to uncover their cameras only to use this very application to spy on them.
Re: Micro Snitch – Know when someone spies on you
#8How do you know when Micro Snitch spies on you? I couldn't find the source code anywhere.
I got MicroSnitch as part of a bundle with LittleSnitch, without really knowing what it was at the time. When I figured it out, I had the same thought as you.
It's definitely not something I'd ever trust completely, not only could it be spying on you, but I also don't really trust my hardware. However, I must say, it's still very nice to have. It at least narrows the possible spying vectors, and it's nice to know immediately what apps are listening; the best example being Android Studio emulator: always listening.
Re: Micro Snitch – Know when someone spies on you
#9Is this the evolution of Little Snitch? They appear to be the same company, but the Little Snitch page is still active: https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html
No, it's an entirely separate new product they introduced back in 2015 [1], Little Snitch is still far and away their main and most important offering. Micro Snitch does fit in with their overall company focus of monitoring application background transmissions of your data, but it's a lot more minimal in focus (and in turn very cheap). I'm not sure why it's getting an HN post now, it hasn't recently received any significant upgrades beyond some basic Mojave compatibility/Dark Mode.
Actually Mojave introduced some significant new per-application protections and permission requirements for privacy related equipment, including camera and microphone [2], so I'm not sure it's as relevant now as it was at launch. I suppose that even if you grant something permission it could still be useful to have more active monitoring of usage as well, it might get compromised or look legit but then do things you don't expect.
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1: https://blog.obdev.at/introducing-micro-snitch/
2: This can actually "break" old software in some cases, because it'll try to access something and fail but the OS permission dialog will be hidden by some other window or not show up properly. Sometimes you can work around this manually in the Privacy pane of the Security & Privacy preference panel, where it'll list software that recently tried to access a resource but couldn't and you can check it off to allow it in the future.
Re: Micro Snitch – Know when someone spies on you
#10I would really prefer all I/O devices, including touchscreens and antennas, have physical on/off switches. 1 for in and 1 for out where possible. Even if I have to open the device to flip them. I'd like to be able to turn a phone into receive-only device without worrying about what it's broadcasting. That's probably a lot more complicated than I'm imagining, but I'd like it if lines between what's a sender and what's a receiver were more clear, instead of everything being both.