LS4 has had a few private betas up until now, but it's in public beta at this point and some of the new stuff they've been working on is pretty interesting. Their main landing page has been updated for LS4 [1] and has a nice general summary of new features with screenshots, but trying to submit that link just goes back to the HN discussion on LS3 five months back [2]. The What's New is more detailed. I'm particularly curious how their improved Research Assistant 2.0 will turn out. They're making an effort to open it up and turn LS4 into a bit more of a platform, allowing 3rd party devs to make specific descriptive information available:
Feb 18, 2019 I have just upgraded my 2017 (late) iMac to Mojave and the wifi is now greyed out and has an X. Also the Ethernet connection does not work. I am not running Little snitch (beta testers told everyone to upgrade that) and when I went to log in it took for ever and I have just restarted the iMac and we are looking at 20 mins plus so far to restart. It's because you were running Little Snitch 4.1; the support for Mojave came in Little Snitch 4.2. 3 points 1 year ago. This right here. As soon as I did the first beta of Mojave I went and got the nightly build of snitch and it worked great ever since. 2 points 1 year ago. Without a license key, Little Snitch runs in demo mode, which provides the same protection and functionality as the full version. The demo runs for three hours, and it can be restarted as often as you like. The Network Monitor expires after 30 days. Turn it into a full version by entering a license key.
>Third party developers can now bundle their apps with an Internet Access Policy file containing descriptions of all network connections that are possibly triggered by their app. Little Snitch will then display that information to users, helping them in their decision how to handle a particular connection. A description of the policy file format will be provided soon.
Research Assistant is a useful feature and at first blush this seems to have the potential to make it even better, assuming LS has enough market penetration to actually get more then a handful of devs to provide a description. The spirit of transparency is a good one too. One thing I wonder about though is how well they're prepared to deal with lying, because this seems like it could possibly open up a potential risk for social engineering. Can the developer of an application making a connection a power user would consider worth blocking actually be trusted provide their own description? If they do lie (directly or by omission) or even simply obfuscate about what it's doing, is Obdev up to policing that?
Having used it since version one though I'm excited about a lot of the new changes. I hope OpenSnitch and similar projects are inspired and vice versa.
1: https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443858
Installed Mojave from High Sierra (2017 MacBook Pro) and after it 'installed' it asked for me to pick a wifi network and manually enter the wifi password. Did this and then get a blank rectangle with a spinner in the center. 5 min later a dialog pops up; 'Mojave has to install a critical update for this machine' and 'Download failed'. Choices were 'try again' or 'shut down'...dialog also says, 'Mac won't work without this download'. So tried again three times, still no download. So I shut down and restarted, logged into my account and it did boot and get to my Desktop, but no internet access was working even though it was able to connect to wifi. Launched Safari and tried to load a couple of pages and 'can't find server'. Mail 'can't connect'.
Restarted and it went through the new install setup again asking for the wifi network and password. Same thing happened as above.
So basically, laptop is useless.
Gonna try and get it to boot, get me to the desktop and re-run the Install Mojave program. After that, I guess I am restoring from backup. I am running Little Snitch which also alerted that it wouldn't work on this version of the software (thanks for the warning Objective Dev!).
Little Snitch Beta Mojave 2
Hoping someone has some other suggestion.... kind of amazed this made it through beta.
MacBook Pro TouchBar and Touch ID, macOS High Sierra (10.13.6)
Little Snitch Beta Mojave Map
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