LS4 has had a few private betas up until now, but it's in public beta at this point and some of the new stuff they've been working on is pretty interesting. Their main landing page has been updated for LS4 [1] and has a nice general summary of new features with screenshots, but trying to submit that link just goes back to the HN discussion on LS3 five months back [2]. The What's New is more detailed. I'm particularly curious how their improved Research Assistant 2.0 will turn out. They're making an effort to open it up and turn LS4 into a bit more of a platform, allowing 3rd party devs to make specific descriptive information available:
>Third party developers can now bundle their apps with an Internet Access Policy file containing descriptions of all network connections that are possibly triggered by their app. Little Snitch will then display that information to users, helping them in their decision how to handle a particular connection. A description of the policy file format will be provided soon.
Research Assistant is a useful feature and at first blush this seems to have the potential to make it even better, assuming LS has enough market penetration to actually get more then a handful of devs to provide a description. The spirit of transparency is a good one too. One thing I wonder about though is how well they're prepared to deal with lying, because this seems like it could possibly open up a potential risk for social engineering. Can the developer of an application making a connection a power user would consider worth blocking actually be trusted provide their own description? If they do lie (directly or by omission) or even simply obfuscate about what it's doing, is Obdev up to policing that?
I'm wondering whether I even need Littlesnitch at all now. And if I do buy 4 how long until I need to buy 5.
- Little Snitch has a bunch of features most people don't even know about - like keeping statistics on every app, including how long it was active and how many bytes up and down were transmitted, bandwidth rates are over time and which ports an app connected to.
- Sep 02, 2019.
Little Snitch High Sierra Beta Download
Having used it since version one though I'm excited about a lot of the new changes. I hope OpenSnitch and similar projects are inspired and vice versa.
1: https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html
Little Snitch Sale
Little Snitch High Sierra Beta 6
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443858