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Do you know about your Mac’s secret double life? All the time when you think it’s just the two of you, innocently hanging out online, your Mac is in contact with other computers and gossips behind your back about your likes and dislikes.
But this is not something you have to put up with! Little Snitch will show you every single connection attempt of your computer. And you’ll stay in control of all your data.
In Silent Mode you finally turn the tables: From now on you won’t miss a single connection attempt of your Mac. Just sit back and watch what was formerly going on unnoticed. You can decide later what you want to allow – and what to deny.
To open Network Monitor just click on the Little Snitch icon in the status menu and choose “Show Network Monitor”. You will find a list of all the apps which recently initiated an Internet connection. With just one click you can allow or deny these connections in the future.
In the Network Monitor you will find a lot of information about every server your computer has been in contact with. This information helps you to decide whether you want to allow or deny similar connections in the future.
You can see the location of every server your computer contacted on the world map. Learn more about the world map
If you don’t see the Inspector yet, just click on the i-button in Network Monitor. Now you will easily find the Research Assistant in the Inspector. Click on “Look up in Online Database” to retrieve more information about the selected connection.
Learn more about Internet Access Policy
Sometimes it’s best to just google a connection. You will find information on the developer’s website, on social media, dedicated blogs and many more sites on the Internet.
If you experience any problems with a connection, just look what happens when you change a rule. Every decision can easily be reversed.
How to manage rules in Network Monitor?
Which rules affect my app?
In Alert Mode you are in the driver’s seat. Every connection attempt on which you have not yet decided will be brought to your attention. You decide which app is allowed to contact which server. You can be sure that no data will transmitted until you have consented.
A decision is only as good as the information it was based on. Use the full power of the connection alert to make better decisions about your data.
Click on the Research Assistant Button to retrieve more information about the connection.
Learn more about Internet Access Policy
Sometimes it’s best to just google a connection. You will find information on the developer’s website, on social media, dedicated blogs and many more sites on the Internet.
If you experience any problems with a connection, just look what happens when you change a rule. Every decision can easily be reversed.
How to manage rules in Network Monitor?
Which rules affect my app?
In Network Monitor you can see and analyze all the network activity of your computer. Furthermore, you can easily and intuitively decide which connections to allow and which to deny.
Click the Little Snitch icon in the status menu and choose “Show Network Monitor”.
Network Monitor reveals all the apps which recently sent (or tried to send) data.
You can create and manage rules with a single click on the rule icons.
By clicking on the map icon you can see the connections of your computer on the world map.
Click on the Sidebar icon to open the Inspector. There you will find more information about the selected app and its connections to the Internet: Like: How much data was sent and received? How many connections did Little Snitch deny? When did the selected app connect first – and when last – to the Internet?
The Little Snitch Rules Window lists all the rules, no matter when and how you created them. It’s the right place to comfortably check, edit, and delete them. Or even add some new ones.
Click the Little Snitch icon in the status menu and choose “Little Snitch Rules…”.
When you look at your rules, you will see that some of them (seemingly) contradict each other. But Little Snitch uses a hierarchy of rules, so you can easily predict which rule takes precedence over another. Let’s look at an example. Say you want to use Chat.app, a popular app with a shady reputation, so you create a general rule to deny connections to any server. But this will render the app useless, so you’ll need a second, more specific rule which allows connections to the chat.com domain.
Now Little Snitch shows you that Chat.app also connects to a server named statistics.chat.com, something you definitely don’t want. Another, even more specific rule will deny this connection. Sounds complicated? Actually it isn’t. Just give it a try and then open the Rules Window. You will find that all the rules are already sorted according to their priority.
Little Snitch enables you to create rules in many different ways and on many different hierarchical levels. This may lead to redundant rules or invalid rules. Suggestions help you with cleaning up your existing rule set, as well as with creating new rules.
Little Snitch’s Rules Window comes with a handy feature to show all rules applying to a single app. Perform a right-click on the app and choose “Focus on Rules Affecting [app]”.
You will find the search box right above the rules in the Little Snitch Rules Window. Type in some search term to filter all your rules. Let’s try this: Type in “Deny” and you will find a list of all the rules denying Internet access.
Everybody has experienced this: You want to open a service on the Internet and it just doesn’t work. Sometimes the server is down or busy, sometimes you are not connected to the Internet at all.
When you have ruled out those reasons, you should look into you Little Snitch Network Monitor. You will find a couple of very helpful search features to support your inquiry.
Select a search feature to get more details.
Use the search box to look for specific names or keywords.
At the moment a connection gets denied the corresponding line flashes red.
Use the filter to list denied, incoming or other connections
See if rules apply for a certain connection by checking the state of the rule icons.
Right-click and choose “Show corresponding rule” to display all applying rules in the Little Snitch Rules Window.
In most cases, apps contact online services directly. But sometimes they use an extra helper process which is created by the app.
In the first case it’s easy to identify a connection problem. But if an app uses a helper process, you might not be able to link the name or icon of the process to the app which is affected by the problems. You will have to use the search features of Network Monitor to find out, which process causes the problems.
In the following examples, we will show you how to solve rule-related problems.
Let’s assume you are trying to visit twitter.com but the site cannot be reached.
First you check if you can visit other websites or if you can reach twitter.com on your mobile device. If this works you should open Network Monitor in Little Snitch.
Just change the responsible rule by clicking the allow icon. Your browser should now be able to access twitter.com. Just give it a try!
Assume that you are trying to manually update your browser. But every time you click the “Check for Updates” button you get an error message telling you that the “Update failed”.
A quick check reveals that no connections requested by Google Chrome are denied. It is possible that Google Chrome uses a helper process to look for updates on behalf of Google Chrome.
This helper process may have a different name than “Google Chrome” and a different icon. At first, it might be impossible for you to identify the right process.
The following steps demonstrate how to trace down such a process.
Just allow the connection by clicking on the allow icon. The helper process can now connect to the Internet and will finish update without further problems.
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