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Comment by jmspring | Hacker News Reader

If you are on OS X, buy and run Little Snitch. The connections for outbound requests are quite amazing.

It gets really annoying really fast though.

I agree. Run Charles Proxy on their free trial for 15 minutes with the OS X proxy turned on and find out what your Mac is really sending out and taking in. Then buy it because it's an incredible tool that proves extremely useful when debugging your own work!

Technically I think they are different beasts. Charles proxy is for, as you say, inspecting and debugging. Little snitch is for making a white/blacklist of connections.

That being said I 100% agree that Charles is a fantastic application.

Getting offtopic here - if I wanted egress filtering at the router level, what could I add to my network that wouldn't force LAN traffic through the same port? OpenWRT isn't an option on my router because the 802.11AC radios aren't (and probably will never be) supported.

Happy to add another {mips32,armv7} box to my network, though.

I'd love to help you but this is not my area of expertise. (Just responding as you replied to me, hopefully someone else can chime in).

You could buy a different router. OpenWRT does support the ac chipset in my TP-Link Archer C7 and many other routers.

Charles Proxy and Little Snitch offer insights into what is going on.

The both happen to have different use cases.

Charles is my go to for tracing what is going on when I need to snoop SSL traffic.

A decent free alternative to Charles is https://mitmproxy.org/

I was also annoyed to tears by it. That's why I built an alternative called Radio Silence (https://radiosilenceapp.com).

Radio Silence doesn't use popups or alerts. It's completely passive and invisible when you don't have the app's UI open. If you want to monitor connections, you can open the app and take a look at the monitor tab.

Good opportunity to market you app you got there, hehe. Anyway, I thought the thing about little snitch was that even before the connection was made for the first time you were able to cancel it, you would miss out on that with your app.

Can you also disallow certain requests with your app? It seems to be app-wide only, but if I wanted to block e.g. chrome (or, all app) from specifically connecting to "adWare.com", would that be possible?

Nope, Radio Silence only blocks whole apps/processes. Little Snitch is probably still the best choice for fine-tuning and reactive blocking.

Apropos of anything else, I definitely appreciate your ability to acknowledge and recognize a competing/separate product as better suited than your own for certain things.

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