I’ve been a Little Snitch user for almost 20 years now, and this unobtrusive little app has more than once given me insight into which apps behave as if your Mac is part of a big bad marketing intel machine by calling home when none such behaviour is asked for. My privacy means a lot to me, so I have Little Snitch watching over my olde machine all the time. And now, Little Snitch 6 has been released and it’s probably the most significant upgrade ever.
Little Snitch 6 offers significant advancements like DNS encryption, convenient access to blocklists, a redesigned interactive traffic chart, a versatile new Control Center in the menu bar, new hierarchical grouping options in the connection list, sound notifications, and an overall Sonoma-looks UI.
My version 5 of Little Snitch can’t obfuscate where my Mac is calling from if and when I deem such a call is required. When I’m surfing the web, for example, anyone can see which websites I visit by spying on my DNS requests. That party is over with Little Snitch 6. The new Little Snitch encrypts these requests and uses trusted DNS services such as Quad9 to keep your browsing private and secure. Requests are encrypted using DoH, DoT, or DoQ.
In my version, I have Peter Lowe’s Blocklist activated, which is very useful as it protects me against the most vicious IP-addresses that are unscrupulously trying to pry information about me from my Internet behaviour. But in order to have Lowe’s list, I had to manually install it. No more of that with Little Snitch 6 as it has a curated list of Blocklists of which Lowe’s isn’t even the biggest. You can simply check the lists you want Little Snitch to use.
Little Snitch 6 also has network traffic analysis tools, so you can follow up your network traffic much better than with version 5, and the Network Monitor chart looks a bit nicer too. Even better is that Little Snitch enables you to activate acoustic notifications for selected network connections. Yep, you heard that right. You can now hear your Mac connecting to specific servers, even when you’re away from the screen. Some notification sounds are even modulated depending on the amount of data transmitted. That’s one feature I would love to have.
Furthermore, you can now organise firewall rules by topic to conveniently turn related rules on or off together. Little Snitch also has better and more precise control over external connections initiated by web applications. It contains improved Firewall Rules that use cryptographic code signing identifiers for better process identification, resistant to renaming or moving of apps and enhanced Xcode Simulator support.
Unfortunately for me, Little Snitch 6 won’t run on my mid-2017 iMac with Ventura’s latest installed. It needs Sonoma or later. If you have a Sonoma machine, and based on my own experiences with version 5.7.6, I’d recommend this app instantly. It’s very reassuring to know that nobody whose business it is not is going to eavesdrop on your Internet / network activity because of this gatekeeper that sits there quietly doing its job in the menu bar.
Little Snitch 6 is available now for 59 EUR/USD per single license. Existing users can upgrade at a discounted price starting at 39 EUR/USD. Licenses that have been purchased after January 1, 2024, are already valid for Little Snitch 6 at no additional cost. A free demo mode is also included, which offers full functionality for three hours per session and can be reactivated as often as desired.
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