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

LittleSnitch for Linux

obdev.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 489 posts

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#301

Post by lapcat »

heartbreak wrote: post #292
lapcat wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I'm not even going to respond to this ridiculousness. Why is it ridiculous? If you have electronic access to something of value and broadcast that fact on the internet, you’re at risk of a physical attack. That’s not controversial? Companies make employees do training about this for a reason.

> If you have electronic access to something of value and broadcast that fact on the internet, you’re at risk of a physical attack. That’s not controversial? Companies make employees do training about this for a reason.

You're talking as if all all "value" and all "risk" is equal, when they're definitely not. You can't equate a megacorporation with a little indie developer. Nobody cares about the latter.

I am a software developer, and I broadcast that fact on the internet. But nobody is coming to Wisconsin to hit me on the head with a wrench. That's just a silly paranoid fantasy.

If anyone hits me on the head with a wrench, it would be not be a nation-state but rather a two-bit local mugger who has no idea who I am and just wants cash from my wallet. I live in a pretty safe area though.

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#302

Post by ta8903 »

lilOnion wrote: post #235
cromka wrote: post #167

I know it sounds crazy at this point, but with popular YouTubers switching to Linux, gamers overall well-aware of Steam on Linux advantages and switching as well, plus popular software like LittleSnitch getting ported, 2026 can without irony be named as Year of Linux Desktop, right?

2026 is the year of the linux phone. We need to embrace that the year of the linux desktop (2025) was successful.

Sadly year of the linux phone feels like it's getting farther away.

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#303

Post by dizhn »

veber-alex wrote: post #284
preisschild wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then development will stop and users don't have the software anymore. If users consider this software important they should donate so they can keep using it.

How exactly is this different from payed software?

There is a ton of software that lives on because it matters to the developer(s). I know "but mah monetization" is huge on this forum but it's not an all encompassing rule and it does not completely reflect the existing reality.

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#304

Post by serious_angel »

jiveturkey wrote: post #27
serious_angel wrote: post #16

> The macOS version can make stronger guarantees because it can have more complexity. On Linux, the foundation is eBPF, which is powerful but bounded: it has strict limits on storage size and program complexity. Under heavy traffic, cache tables can overflow, which makes it impossible to reliably tie every network packet to a process or a DNS name. > And reconstructing which hostname was originally looked up for a gi…

I guess you haven't actually implemented anything in eBPF.

I have, but in the scopes of Kprobes non-network but memory. Here, I am sure you haven't at this point. I also provided projects you may check prior stating another nonsense. Instead, you could also provide some more evidence you disagree with.

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#305

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

lapcat wrote: post #296
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah just yolo install whatever, it’s not like applications or libraries such as axios which have a decade of trusted history would all of a sudden become malicious and do nasty things to developer machines, just chill, everything’s fine.

> Yeah just yolo install whatever That's not even remotely what I said. > it’s not like applications or libraries such as axios iTerm doesn't use NPM. Little Snitch doesn't use NPM. I don't use NPM.

[flagged]

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#306

Post by serious_angel »

littlesnitch wrote: post #289
serious_angel wrote: post #16

> The macOS version can make stronger guarantees because it can have more complexity. On Linux, the foundation is eBPF, which is powerful but bounded: it has strict limits on storage size and program complexity. Under heavy traffic, cache tables can overflow, which makes it impossible to reliably tie every network packet to a process or a DNS name. > And reconstructing which hostname was originally looked up for a gi…

eBPF programs are able to accuratly process network traffic in high performance, but the amount of CPU instructions you can use is limited. Otherwise it would not be high performance. This limits the complexity of in-kernel processing.

Thank you for the response. Yet, how the heck the CPU instructions you inject in (that are being processed within the same network processing) limit the capabilities of the flow, if you literally put your calls within the same networking context? Please provide any actual document that proves your point.

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#307

Post by givinguflac »

fsflover wrote: post #176
justsid wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a naive view on computer security. It’s not just about spyware, which is also not exclusive to commercial vendors.

What else is this about? Debian repositories still contain no malware and if you install software exclusively from them, you'll be safe.

Ads, trackers, general boost to privacy. Not every protection tool is just about malware.

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#308

Post by philipstorry »

alhazrod wrote: 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...

What I really liked about ZoneAlarm wasn't just that it was a very nice technology - and it was; but also that it got the user expectations and training right from a very early stage.

It was quite insistent on the fact that it would be "noisy" at first as it queried all the programs you ran, but would then quieten down once it had been "trained". It got that across in clear, simple language.

I think it was so successful because it got the soft side of its security job right as well as the hard part. It's certainly why I recommended it to anyone at the time...

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#309

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

lapcat wrote: post #298
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same people who targeted the open source uncommercial library axios *last week*? Access to little snitch would be worth millions to the right party.

>> I still don't know why anyone thinks that, among all developers in the world, a little indie Mac developer is getting targeted specifically. > The same people who targeted the open source uncommercial library axios last week ? axios is an NPM package. Little Snitch doesn't use NPM. Thus, these people must be pretty damn incompetent if they were trying to target Little Snitch. > Access to little snitch would be wor…

Shell (and probably root) access to tens of thousands of development machines wouldn’t be worth millions to the right party?

Re: LittleSnitch for Linux

#310

Post by pixelat3d »

supernes wrote: post #165

Tried it on Fedora 43 (6.19.11 x86_64) and it loaded all CPU cores, dumped 50K lines in the journal and failed to start. > Error: the BPF_PROG_LOAD syscall returned Argument list too long (os error 7). > littlesnitch.service: Consumed 3min 38.832s CPU time, 13.7G memory peak.

From the download page on the website:

"Note: Little Snitch version 1.0.0 does not currently work with the Btrfs file system! Btrfs is used by default on Fedora, so Little Snitch does not currently identify processes on Fedora. We are working on an 1.0.1 release to fix the issue as soon as possible!"

Post reply on HN