Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Little Snitch Mini

obdev.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 276 posts

Re: Little Snitch Mini

#161

Post by rsync »

Two questions from someone who genuinely considering paying for "Little Snitch Mini":

1) Can I install this myself, without the app store ? Is there a binary or .dmg (or whatever) with published checksums that I can just download ? I assume the answer is "no" but ... surprise me.

2) What network traffic does LSM itself send home to LSM developers ? Can I disable all traffic as a specific preference or do I need to configure LSM to watch LSM itself ? (A specific preference would, in my mind, be preferable).

Re: Little Snitch Mini

#162

Post by WA »

hayst4ck wrote: post #105
latexr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3-4 years of subscription approximately being equal to a license sounds reasonable. Which is probably why the apps on the App Store which offer both subscription and lifetime pricing tend to have the latter at about 3 times the cost of the former. But Little Snitch Mini does not offer that choice. I’d be willing to pay more than 40$ for a one-time purchase of Little Snitch Mini, but there’s zero chance I’ll do it a…

I see both sides. This dilemma is capitalist hell. Why is obdev sku-ifying their product? Because the incentive model for selling a license means that the market can saturate and there is a lack of recurring or stable income/income safety for the dev. In order to get new spikes of income, a new product is generated. If the market for a particular license becomes saturated, how will they make more money? Licensed base…

A subscription model is not rent seeking. Most developers continue to work on their products and continue to provide customer support etc. If they don’t, you can simply stop paying your subscription.

The lifetime value per customer isn’t infinite either. Most people don’t use a single software forever. A subscription kinda slices the LTV up and puts a premium on it for long-term users. It is an increase in price, hence every company loves it, but this isn’t rent-seeking.

Re: Little Snitch Mini

#163

Post by vaxman »

inconceivable wrote: post #148
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.

What OP is talkin’ about is “The Way” that Apple requires such devs to interface with its (not their) Business customers via its AppStore. Mac-only devs do have to cater to those customers whether they have them direct or resell thru MacAppStore, or they don’t make it very long. The problem with selling direct is that the Business customers all want the conveniences of only dealing with a single vendor (the Apple) since that’s possible now (via the MacAppStore).

Platform gatekeepers in 2023 should simply vet third-party app stores and award them a Certificate once they pass anti-Fraud. The hardware itself should otherwise run open source firmware that only enforces UL/FCC certification requirements and basic UI standards (be they audio, video, or network). If Apple wants to go beyond that, they can setup Claris or something with its own such Certificate to compete with Amazon and all the other potential third-party ecosystems. This hunk of garbage may look ridiculous, but cast it in an Al custom NC enclosure with miniLED and an m2ultra and… https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/brother-geobook-nb-80...

Re: Little Snitch Mini

#164

Post by bendiksolheim »

JasonZ2 wrote: post #116
happybuy wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know from personal experience of making and selling an App Store app [1] that it can be difficult to show accurate pricing on your products website. There can be 175+ different territories that you may sell an app in, each with a different local price point. You also can't expect to simply show a converted $US dollar amount either as you may want to do price discrimination (so that the app is cheaper for regions th…

Sounds like an excuse to just not display the price. > 2. Only show $US pricing on the website and let non-US customers manually translate to their local pricing - not a great experience for non-US users It's a worse experience for someone to convert USD to their currency (instant mentally or 2 seconds on Google) compared to launching the app store, installing the app, getting to the purchase menu, and seeing the pri…

You don’t need to install the app, the prices are displayed on the product page in the App Store, towards the bottom. It’s listed automatically for all apps.

Re: Little Snitch Mini

#165

Post by microtonal »

ary wrote: post #10

People are probably going to be confused between this and the "full" version of Little Snitch. My take on it is that Little Snitch Mini is something you can install on a non-technical friend or family member's computer whereas power users may want to stick with the existing offering. I say this as a long time heavy user of Little Snitch. It's very annoying when you first get it installed, but it provides really usefu…

I have been a Little Snitch user for a long time, but I am still very much interested in Mini. When an App Store version of something is provided, I prefer that because of the mandatory sandboxing.

Re: Little Snitch Mini

#167

Post by yuuho »

dmix wrote: post #29
ary wrote: post #10

People are probably going to be confused between this and the "full" version of Little Snitch. My take on it is that Little Snitch Mini is something you can install on a non-technical friend or family member's computer whereas power users may want to stick with the existing offering. I say this as a long time heavy user of Little Snitch. It's very annoying when you first get it installed, but it provides really usefu…

I've always thought this should be a feature in an OS for advanced users. Combined with some OS level security optimizations it could be quite a powerful security feature for the paranoid and at-risk. I haven't tried mini but there's probably plenty of UX gains in between the standard Little Snitch fine control approach and the UBlock Origin style community curated defaults where control/customization is optional/on-…

Anything external to the OS level is doomed anyway, from the security standpoint. APIs offered to the good guys can be misused by the bad guys. You see this with all those snakeoil virus scan offerings which dramatically increase attack surface (exploited regularly, but that's not what Symantec an friends are telling you).

Plus, anything external to OS level is easier to trick into not seeing what you are doing. And again, if sth external can install itself so deep into the OS that that's hard, then the bad guys can do that too and hide.

Re: Little Snitch Mini

#168

Post by eviks »

Wistar wrote: post #15
dt3ft wrote: post #14

Is there a Little Snitch alternative for Windows?

A good question. I looked it up. The AlternativeTo site offers a few PC alternatives to Little Snitch: "Little Snitch is not available for Windows but there are plenty of alternatives that runs on Windows with similar functionality. The best Windows alternative is GlassWire, which is free." https://alternativeto.net/software/little-snitch/?platform=w...

It's not free for the most important part - blocking

Re: Little Snitch Mini

#170

Post by eviks »

elesiuta wrote: post #95
colordrops wrote: post #88

Is there an equivalent for Linux?

I wrote picosnitch [1] which has the same notification and bandwidth monitoring features, however it doesn't block traffic for a couple reasons: avoiding scope creep so I can focus on more reliable detection and do things like hash every executable, which makes it harder to block traffic in a timely fashion. https://github.com/elesiuta/picosnitch

Blocking traffic is also the most important part of the scope of such firewall apps
Post reply on HN