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Comment by ianmf | Hacker News Reader

I owned several versions of Little Snitch too. It started to be annoying when you had to approve each request, especially when running command-line scripts. Then I moved to run in silent-approval mode. At that point, there was no reason to have LS any longer, so I uninstalled it. Haven't used it in years now. But not to discredit LS, it is an amazing software when you need it.

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LS is beyond annoying for the first couple of days on a new computer. "Do you want to connect to gmail.com on port 443? What about kagi.com on port 443? What about your employer on port 443? Mind if Weather.app checks the weather?" After a couple of days, I have blanket rules like "allow Safari to connect to any host :443, except for googleadservices.com because nah".

It quickly tapers down to alerting about rare new connections, which is when it becomes hugely useful. RandomTool.app normally connects to cloud.randomtool.xyz. Why is it suddenly asking to connect to exfiltrate.ru?

> But not to discredit LS, it is an amazing software when you need it.

Yes! I perhaps didn't make this as clear as I should have. Little Snitch is fantastic software, no question. I'm just not sure that most people need it, I think a custom local firewall was always a bit of a power user tool, and nowadays with security being so much better than 20+ years ago, firewalls on personal machines just feel like an outdated concept to me.

Which command line script are u using that much other than curl/npm etc..

Thanks.

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