SD! Failure

[Nick]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Are you using any kind of outbound firewall, like Little Snitch?

<SIGH>...You're so damned smart!

Yes, I have Snitch...been using it for a while with no problem. I just checked, and somehow it had a "new" (IOW, it didn't have it before I moved to the new machine) rule blocking connection to lacey.homeip.net. Obviously, during one of the connection attempts I accidentally told Snitch to block—instead of allow forever—the connection. I just changed it back, and now everything is working fine.

Thank you once again, Dave.


(OT: I'm beginning to wonder if Snitch provides any real benefit at all...it sure generates a lot of dialogs, requiring me to constantly click the "allow" or "deny" button whenever I'm receiving email from sites I subscribe to, but it certainly hasn't protected me from any real threats due to my installed apps.)

[dnanian]

Well, I can certainly say that use of Little Snitch ends up a souce of hassle for me. I think, generally, LS is used by people who are trying to prevent 'pirated' programs from disabling themselves using 'block lists'.

That isn't to say that there are 'reasonable' uses for LS... but we don't play any games, and for us, at least, it's just a PITA.

[Nick]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Well, I can certainly say that use of Little Snitch ends up a souce of hassle for me. I think, generally, LS is used by people who are trying to prevent 'pirated' programs from disabling themselves using 'block lists'.

That isn't to say that there are 'reasonable' uses for LS... but we don't play any games, and for us, at least, it's just a PITA.

I got it because of the hype (and my personal paranoia ) regarding its ability to be (in effect) a "reverse firewall" that protects you from the bad guys who somehow sneak malicious Mac spyware (which, BTW, doesn't yet seem to exist—I haven't heard of any, and ClamXav hasn't found any) onto your machine. But so far, all of the alerts I've gotten are generated by the ads that are linked to the emails I receive from my subscriptions to the major tech sites (MacWorld, TechRepublic, etc.) and major retailers (Staples, Sears, etc.) I've dealt with, and the occasional legitimate software version checking and updating activities of some of my installed applications. And while I do "allow" or "deny" as the mood strikes me, it is clearly a major PITA, and, moreover, I've yet to knowingly permanently deny anyone (at least, that's what I see in LS's rules list—the denial to lacey.homeip.net was a careless accident, which I've remedied). So, I'm now giving serious consideration to stop using it (...if I can get over the paranoia that drove me to try it in the first place! ).