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by mkriss 3782 days ago
Is there a good open source "Little Snitch" alternative?
5 comments

Try umatrix, it's available for both firefox and chrome, and allows you to do whitelisting of third party domains for each domain you visit.
They don't cover the same use cases.

Little Snitch is basically a user-friendly general-purpose application Firewall. When a connection hasn't been whitelisted before, it pop up a dialog box allowing you to accept/reject connection to a host/domain/port permanently/temporarily.

uMatrix does not protect you against 'malicious' connections initiated by non-browser applications. Little Snitch does not provide the fine-grained URI-level filtering that uBlock/uMatrix provide.

Edit: if you have a Mac, Little Snitch is well-worth the money. It is very polished, does the job, and the developers are not greedy (I think I purchased an update once after I started using it in 2007 or 2008).

Maybe, but I haven't found anything as polished as Little Snitch. The level of control is amazingly high. I really don't use it to the full extent with profiles and the like. I set up some basic rules and let it work for awhile, then I pick and choose what to allow/disallow permanently... like a King :P

It's one of the first things I install on my Macs. Worth every penny.

Not exactly the same, but Privacy Badger from EFF is great.
For the network monitoring part, Private Eye is a free alternative, though not open source: http://radiosilenceapp.com/private-eye/

Disclaimer: I made it.

Wireshark or even tcpdump will get you most of the way there, I think.
Little Snitch doesn't just show you traffic, but also allows to block requests per domain per application.
Then add iptables to that list and I think you're set :-) seriously, all due respect to Little Snitch - I've heard a lot of good things about it and I'm sure it's much easier to use than the raw tools. But I doubt it's doing anything that can't be done with tcpdump/iptables.