Little Snitch: Tom’s Budget Software Pick

Time again for another Budget Software Pick. If you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed that we changed the name to be a bit more reflective of the criteria I use to make the selection. Each software application will have two primary attributes: quality and extraordinary value.

Little Snitch

This Saturday’s pick is Little Snitch from Objective Development. Little Snitch is an application that sits quietly out of the way most of the time, but will blow the whistle on any application that attempts to connect to the Internet. Sure, there are lots of applications that should be connecting to the Internet: your email program, your browser, your weather update application, and many more. But there are also applications that attempt to phone home without ever informing you of their intent.

Using Little Snitch, I’ve come across a few games that do this. I’m not necessarily against applications phoning home. There are many good reasons to do this, including checking for updates, grabbing high score info for games, or even feeding an ad for a free ad-supported application. But all applications should be up front and tell you that they will do this. Little Snitch will sniff out the applications that are connecting to the Internet behind your back.

Little Snitch is available for $29.95 for a single user or $59.00 for a five-user family pack. Little Snitch also offers a fully functional demo that will operate for three hours each time you start it up.

Previous titles from Tom’s Budget Software Picks.