Your Mac Is Phoning Home? Here’s How To Find Out.

By Tera Patricks | Tuesday, July 26, 2005 | Home » Mac Reviews »

Continued from Page 1…

You’re surprised, right? You thought your Mac was ultra secure? No worms. No viruses. No pop-up ads. No trojan horses. No worries. Except for all those applications on your Mac that are going right through your firewall and connecting in the other direction.

Let me do this again.

What Little Snitch does is, well, uh, it’s a snitch for applications that use the Internet to send or receive information without you knowing about it.

You thought the Mac’s firewall woiuld protect you against such dastardly deeds? Yes and no. Yes, it protects quite well against “incoming” attempts to connect to your Mac.

No, there’s no protection whatsoever against “outgoing” attempts to connect your Mac to the Internet or another computer.

Little Snitch changes that.

Objective Development’s web site explains that Little Snitch is an “application supervisor”:

“You start an application that tells you that a new version is available. You suddenly realize that with every start this application connects to the developer’s server. Even statistics information about your computer may be sent this way. Little Snitch helps you avoid this situation.

Trojan horses - i.e. programs transmitting unconsciously data stored on your computer - can be detected by Little Snitch and prevented on the transmission of data.

On a more general basis, network connections to certain servers can be denied.”

Yes, or much more depending on what applications are on your Mac and what they’re doing. I found a dozen apps that phone home; some were simple checks to see if there’s an update to the application. Other attempts were to a central server to let someone (publisher? developer?) know that I’m using their application.

I paid for it. I use it. I do NOT want anyone to know. Little Snitch prevents that.

Little Snitch runs in the background and hooks into the operating system kernel while you are logged in. When an application tries to establish a network connection, Little Snitch intercepts the attempt and brings up an alert panel, telling you all the connection details including the name of the application which initiated the connection. You can either allow the connection, deny it or add a permanent rule for similar future-connections.”

I like Little Snitch. Click Here to see why.

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Classy Mac360 Photo By Tera Patricks | Tera Patricks co-founded Mac360 in early 2004 with Bambi Brannan, Alexis Kayhill, and Ron McElfresh. Tera died in the summer of 2006 following a long bout with cancer. Her legacy site is Tera Talks.

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