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Little Snitch Mini

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Re: Little Snitch Mini

#141

Post by whynaut »

hayst4ck wrote: post #79
daneel_w wrote: post #73

I bought Little Snitch long ago but managed to squander my license a couple of years later. Mini is unfortunately a subscription app, which is something I these days consider a hostile/unfriendly business pattern. I won't be going back. LuLu is a free alternative.

I generally agree with you so I looked it up. In-App Purchases: Yearly Subscription $13.49 Monthly Subscription $1.49 That's surprisingly modest. 3-4 years of subscription approximately being equal to a license sounds reasonable. The real question is, is little snitch rent seeking? Given what happened after Catalina, I am giving them the benefit of the doubt at the moment. Paying for updates before receiving them def…

From their 'Compare' page, it seems like they are targeting entirely different kinds of users, not price points.

Re: Little Snitch Mini

#142

Post by zztop44 »

torstenvl wrote: post #135
jzb wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think influencers, sorry, “the enthusiastic” tend to vastly overestimate the value of word of mouth recommendations vs recurring revenue.

How did neglecting enthusiastic users work out for, say, Firefox's market share?

It’s a tricky one. I feel like enthusiastic users’ recommendations (browser tabs!!) is what grew Firefox in the first place, but also what killed its market share as users became enthusiastic about Chrome instead (fast! crashes limited to one tab only!!).

These days, Firefox just isn’t better than it’s competition in ways that large numbers of people care about, alas. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be any big cohort of users enthusiastic about any browser in particular right now. I doubt Mozilla can fix that easily. I think it’ll take the next revolution in browser tech (whatever that is).

Re: Little Snitch Mini

#143

Post by kccqzy »

I used to use Little Snitch quite a lot, but eventually I gave up. Two things contributed to it: (a) a lot of apps started using nsurlsessiond to load URLs, obscuring the real originator; (b) a lot of apps started making requests to ec2-xx-xxx-x-xx.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com and making the server essentially anonymous except that it's hosted on AWS.

Have things improved in the past few years?

Re: Little Snitch Mini

#144

Post by antifa »

guessmyname wrote: post #85

I've been using Little Snitch for years, and it's probably the most important software on my computer. However, I've noticed a problematic trend in modern software development: developers are using the same hostname to serve both functional and non-functional web APIs. For example, let's say that Apple's Xcode sends harmless data to their telemetry service at telemetry.apple.test. Even though the data is anonymous, I…

> I've been trying to solve this problem by routing my network traffic through my own software and manually inspecting the traffic from time to time.

What do you recommend for someone looking to get started with doing this to their own device(s)?

Re: Little Snitch Mini

#145

Post by ar9av »

I use Little Snitch on my MacBook Pro and love it. I’m a privacy nut and don’t relish the idea of behemoth corporations making money off me by exploiting my computer. It can be a pain to check every connection your browser tries to make but it’s worth it. Yesterday I shopped on three sites. None of them were Amazon. In that 24 hour period Amazon attempted to connect 259 times.- not their web services. To a lesser degree Google and then the social media sites. Facebook was the worst.

I use an IP identification site to look up each IP that attempts to connect on Firefox and see what company it belongs to. After awhile you learn which sites the first 2-5 numbers belong to. It is one of the finest security programs on the market and well worth the money.

Last week I did some holiday shopping for my granddaughter on the GAP site on my iPad and within 48 hours ads for GAP and all of their affiliated sites started showing up in my Twitter feed. I only use Firefox in private browsing mode now. Hope this helps!

Re: Little Snitch Mini

#146

Post by Jcowell »

stanmancan wrote: post #119
lockhouse wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like subscriptions either, but what is the sustainable alternative income source for app developers?

I like Jetbrains licensing. Essentially you pay for updates and once you stop paying you’re locked in at that specific version, but you can use it indefinitely.

How does support work for this? Are non-paying customers no longer eligible for support?

App wise would this lock features since developers would have no means of shipping X versions of an app

I wonder , once the EU opens up the App Store will devs have to deal with cracked apps. Probably the full end of offline apps

Re: Little Snitch Mini

#147

Post by Aldo_MX »

torstenvl wrote: post #135
jzb wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think influencers, sorry, “the enthusiastic” tend to vastly overestimate the value of word of mouth recommendations vs recurring revenue.

How did neglecting enthusiastic users work out for, say, Firefox's market share?

Well, back in the day the FF devs said "no" to background-position-x and y in CSS (when we didn't had HTTP 2 and we used CSS sprites as a way to load websites faster by decreasing the number of connections).

My reaction was to "sabotage" FF users by prioritizing IE and Chrome and not actively testing my websites in FF, but only waiting until users reported bugs.

My thinking back in the day was: Why would I write N times more lines of code for a browser that had way less market share than Internet Explorer, especially when Chrome was faster and worked better?

By the time Firefox corrected course and prioritized parity with other browsers (ie. the -webkit fiasco), their market share was already an order of magnitude smaller.

15 years later, I don't feel proud of my actions, but my own conclusion is that every individual action added up. Now I feel sad to see Firefox with less than 3% market share because the damage is irreparable now.

Re: Little Snitch Mini

#148

Post by inconceivable »

Terretta wrote: post #132

"The full feature set, including connection blocking, extended traffic history time ranges, advanced display and filtering options and more is available as an in-app purchase." So this means as a company using MDM, I cannot purchase it for all my employees. MacOS devs who see IAP and subscriptions as the only purchase paths are leaving corporate purchases on the table. We choose software we can pay for. We are fine i…

right, i'm sure this guy is going to turn his company into a very specific type of enterprise software vendor just because you want him to.

Re: Little Snitch Mini

#149

Post by quesera »

ar9av wrote: post #145

I use Little Snitch on my MacBook Pro and love it. I’m a privacy nut and don’t relish the idea of behemoth corporations making money off me by exploiting my computer. It can be a pain to check every connection your browser tries to make but it’s worth it. Yesterday I shopped on three sites. None of them were Amazon. In that 24 hour period Amazon attempted to connect 259 times.- not their web services. To a lesser deg…

> within 48 hours ads for GAP and all of their affiliated sites started showing up in my Twitter feed

That's called "retargeting". The advertising network tracks your web activity across multiple sites, and advertisers pay extra to target you because you've visited their site previously.

Ad blockers break the code that tracks you around the web and the display of ads, whether new or retargeted. There are some decent options for iOS.

Re: Little Snitch Mini

#150

Post by Aldo_MX »

hayst4ck wrote: post #112
mhb wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jetbrains' model?

If anyone else was wondering what the model was: https://www.jetbrains.com/store/#personal?billing=monthly https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What... Perpetual fallback license means that if you stop paying for a subscription, you can keep using the version you are on, in perpetuity. Sounds fairly reasonable. If there are no updates, you would cancel your subscription and use the fallback license…

I'm not sure if the Jetbrains model backfired with the Ukraine war, considering most of the dev team was Russian and they decided to close the Russian offices.

I remember that the launch of the 2022 versions had a drop in quality, I don't remember when was the last time I had crashes in a Jetbrains product, but with the launch of 2022 versions crashes occurred on a daily basis to the point I really considered cancelling my subscription, and I activated for the first time the option to block updates in Jetbrains Toolbox.

Months later they launched their promotion to keep the current pricing for 3 more years and I renewed. I acknowledge that promotion was a genius move by them, but I'm unsure if that promotion was a result of a drop in income for them.

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