Little Snitch has been a truly great shareware application and one that I bought and have been using for many years. It’s purpose is to provide a filter/firewall for outgoing connections in Mac OS X, allowing a user to put a check to all those applications that like to phone-home every once in a while to test for newer versions or — in some cases — send anonymous or eponymous hardware and software information to their developers without the user’s consent.
The latest version, Little Snitch 2, coming out later this year, sports a revamped UI and includes a great network monitor that provides a real-time view of the connections applications make as they run.
And what a better network abusing network resource demanding application to test it with than Skype. Here are the results. In the video on the left you can see the connections Skype makes upon start-up. Hmm, video proof that Skype deserves its banishment from my machines. 🙂
