Little Snitch 2.0: networking monitor for Leopard

Objective Development today released Little Snitch 2.0, a "totally overhauled" application with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard compatibility. The latest release of the internet traffic monitoring and management utility introduces predefined "smart rule suggestions" to help less experienced users choose a reasonable action for each connection query. The update lists all defined rules and supports user-specific configurations for customized traffic management settings. Little Snitch 2.0 is priced at $25, with upgrades from older versions available for $13. Additionally, Little Snitch 1 users who have license keys starting with "32" can use the same key to activate Little Snitch 2 for free.

"As soon as a computer is connected to the internet, applications can potentially send information to any server they want," Objective Development said. "Little Snitch reliably informs the user about all attempts to establish an outgoing internet connection and allows in this way exact control about the network activity of the computer."

Users can also grant trusted applications specific permissions, while simply preventing other software from establishing a particular internet connection at all.

Once an application attempts to establish a network connection, Little Snitch shows a connection alert asking users whether to allow or deny the connection -- just once, until the application terminates, or permanently.

Further improvements include considerably enhanced traffic filtering, IPv6 support, and new structured help to guide new users.

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