Little Snitch - the best gets better

Little Snitch by Objective Development is one of those tools that many Mac geeks adore. It's a network monitor and application firewall that lets you know about when and how applications on your Mac are connecting to the Internet and get very detailed control over what is happening via rules. I've been using this tool for years now but stopped about 9 months ago because I wasn't seeing much utility in it anymore. That changed yesterday when I saw a mention of the 6.1.2 update on TidBITS. What brought me back and made me pay the $39 upgrade from version 5? Blocklists and support for encrypted DNS.

Blocklists

Anyone that's into the privacy space on the web will know what a blocklist is as they're an integral part of ad/tracker blockers like uBlock Origin or the built-in ad/tracker blocking in the Brave browser or the Vivaldi browser. Little Snitch now supports a curated set of blocklists, as well as being able to add your own choices like the great lists maintained by Hagezi. Because this lives at the system level your control over what is happening on your system increases a lot (vs. just using them in a web browser).

Encrypted DNS

Long-supported in web browsers encrypted DNS hides the queries the browser is making to grab things off the Internet as you're browsing. Little Snitch now supports this directly and because it's at the system level all of the DNS queries from your machine are encrypted, not just web traffic.

What it doesn't do

Blocklists are great but they aren't a full replacement for an ad blocker. They will get rid of a lot but an ad blocker usually allows picking of certain items on a page to hide and creating rules to handle removing things from pages. Little Snitch doesn't do this but it works wonderfully in tandem with ad blockers.

Highly recommended. This tool became so much handier with the version 6 update.