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LittleSnitch for Linux

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111–120 of 489 posts

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#111
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Options range from carefully targeted phishing or social engineering attacks to poor opsec and a five dollar wrench.

> a five dollar wrench. I'm not even going to respond to this ridiculousness. I still don't know why anyone thinks that, among all developers in the world, a little indie Mac developer is getting targeted specifically.

Some targets are more valuable than others. A firewall product has obvious security value. The fact that it requires high privilege is another reason.

I have the same thoughts about other Mac apps. e.g. iTerm2 - cause they "see" so much sensitive data.

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#112
post #6

I remember before Little Snitch there was ZoneAlarm for Windows[0] (here is a good screenshot[1]). No clue if the current version of ZoneAlarm does anything like that (have not used it in 2 decades). I always found it weird that Linux never really had anything like it. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZoneAlarm [1]: https://d2nwkt1g6n1fev.cloudfront.net/helpmax/wp-content/upl...

Wow. Insane throwback. I think I first learned about ZoneAlarm from some PC magazine my parents bought for me. Completely forgot about this great piece of freemium!

I learned about it from Leo and Patrick on The Screen Savers

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#113

> The macOS version uses deep packet inspection to do this more reliably. That's not an option here. Isn't MacOS just *nix under the hood? Genuinely curious about this difference.

An operating system is roughly broken into three parts: the kernel, the core system tools, and the shell (the desktop environment and/or the CLI shell). Linux: Linux kernel, GNU coreutils (usually), KDE/Gnome/etc + CLI shells. macOS: XNU, BSD userland + launchd/etc, Aqua/Cocoa. Windows: NT kernel, Win32/WinRT/etc, Windows Shell.

The systems LittleSnitch uses to do packet inspection are very much OS-specific. There's no generic standard for doing high-performance packet inspection. XNU and Linux are *very* different kernels. Linus Torvalds built Linux from scratch as a monolithic kernel because he wanted a Unix-like OS that wasn't encumbered. XNU is based on the Mach microkernel though XNU is a hybrid or monolithic kernel, not a microkernel. The point is, they have very different heritage and very different systems for... well pretty much everything. So "just *nix under the hood" is kind of true but also completely besides the point as far as packet inspection goes. And even then, while there are a lot of similarities between the core system tools of Linux and macOS, they're still quite different and unless you're limiting yourself to POSIX-standard interfaces (which are only a fraction of the system), you're not going to be able to use the same code on both systems.

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#114

> The macOS version uses deep packet inspection to do this more reliably. That's not an option here. Isn't MacOS just *nix under the hood? Genuinely curious about this difference.

From what I understand, macOS uses weird kernel implementation, which is almost open source, but not 100%

You're correct, but for a bit more context: The macOS kernel is XNU, which is derived from/based on the Mach kernel, but heavily modified. The kernel itself is open source but some drivers/kernel extensions are not so it's not actually usable (unless you provide your own implementations of those).

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#115
post #19

LittleSnitch doesn't tattle on itself phoning home.

Is that true? If so, that’s not a good sign. I remember how impressed I was by ZoneAlarm in the early 2000s asking permission for itself to connect to the Internet, using the exact same dialogue it presented for any other program, with no dark patterns suggesting that the user should give preferential treatment to it.

[deleted]

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#116
post #6

I remember before Little Snitch there was ZoneAlarm for Windows[0] (here is a good screenshot[1]). No clue if the current version of ZoneAlarm does anything like that (have not used it in 2 decades). I always found it weird that Linux never really had anything like it. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZoneAlarm [1]: https://d2nwkt1g6n1fev.cloudfront.net/helpmax/wp-content/upl...

Completely forgot about ZoneAlarm. I remember using it in the early 2000s!

Such nostalgia! I probably forgot about it after switching over to Linux 25 years ago.

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#117

So if this is free to use on linux, what is to stop someone from doing what Colima did to Docker? Aka make a tiny Linux VM on MacOS and package Little Snitch within that?

Little Snitch requires packet inspection. If you ran it in a Linux VM, it will inspect packets within the VM. So... kind of useless for monitoring connections on the host.

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#118
post #6

I remember before Little Snitch there was ZoneAlarm for Windows[0] (here is a good screenshot[1]). No clue if the current version of ZoneAlarm does anything like that (have not used it in 2 decades). I always found it weird that Linux never really had anything like it. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZoneAlarm [1]: https://d2nwkt1g6n1fev.cloudfront.net/helpmax/wp-content/upl...

Who remembers BlackICE Defender tho?

https://archive.org/details/BlackICE_Defender

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#119
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything has a price though… (I also use little snitch)

> Everything has a price though… What is that supposed to mean in this context?

Well, that is obvious, is it not? It means They are interested in The Plan and have enough power that a vague comment is all you gonna get. Cannot have Them finding out that we are on to Them. Though of course, The Plan already accounts for that, so They already know and will do Something about it. Want facts? Wake up, do your Research!

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#120

Congrats to Linux users on getting a great tool from a quality development shop. Objective Development is one of our (Mac users) exemplars for attention to detail and fit & finish. Congrats to Objective Development for expanding their well-loved tool to a new platform. You guys rock.

>attention to detail Why does LittleSnitch (Mac) pre-resolve IP addresses, before user presses Accept/Deny? IMHO DNS queries shouldn't initiate without user input.

Question for devs, not me.
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