Quick Tip: Little Snitch first-run

I finally got around to purchasing and installing Little Snitch today. I should have expected this, but upon first launch (after rebooting the computer) Little Snitch went crazy with the snitchin’. A couple of quick tips to make this go a little more smoothly:

  • You are going to have to choose to approve or disapprove many background processes, many of which request some pretty shady-sounding URLs. If you only approve them “Until Quit,” they will go into a list of “Temporary Approvals.” At this point, you can go through that list at your leisure, making the rules permanent, leaving them temporary, or denying them permanently as you see fit.
  • Although Little Snitch comes with reasonable defaults for Safari and Mail, it does not come with anything for Chrome or Firefox. If your web browser of choice is launched on startup, create the same rules for it as already exist for Safari; this will save you a lot of clicking. Additionally, Mail does not come pre-approved for ports 80 or 443. When it tries to render HTML messages, you will see popups. If you already are OK with HTML messages, might as well copy those rules (open port 80, 443) from Safari over to Mail as well.

Hopefully this saves you some time and clicking.

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