Block ads and trackers on your Mac with Little Snitch

Do you know Little Snitch ? Of course you know Little Snitch. This macOS app does come up pretty often. It took me a few years between first hearing about it and finally trying it out, but here I am. And it's awesome. Basically, Little Snitch is a system-wide app-level firewall, letting  you decide which domain each and every app on your Mac should and shouldn't connect to.

If you're even a little privacy conscious, or annoyed by all these ads popping everywhere, you probably use one of the many ad-blocking browser extensions out there. I lost track of which one actually works a while ago. Maybe you also use something like Ghostery to block tracking. I st

But do you really know what rules they apply? Did they decide to allow acceptable ads without asking you? Are they reselling your anonymized and repackaged data? Is it even a legitimate ad-blocking extension? And good luck installing an ad-blocker on that email client to block those pesky e-mail tracking pixels.

Now, you could edit your hosts file to block pretty much anything. I find that cumbersome and annoying. Plus, there's no monitoring to add your own personal favorites. That's where Little Snitch comes in!

One of their latest features? Auto-updated rule groups subscriptions!

So, I installed it, and quickly went on setting it up. Then I started looking for some rule groups to subscribe to. And there weren't many lying around.

Two did stand out. Peter Lowe's adservers list (https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/) and Steven Black's host files. They contain lots of rules and domains, blocking both ads and trackers, including social ones. Exactly what I was looking for.

So, without any further ado, here are a few rule groups subscription you can add to Little Snitch to get started!

• https://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php?hostformat=littlesnitch-rule-group-subscriptions&mimetype=plaintext
• https://github.com/naveednajam/Little-Snitch---Rule-Groups

For the second one, you'll need to pick the .lsrules files you're interested in, access the raw files (should look like https://raw.githubusercontent.com/naveednajam/Little-Snitch---Rule-Groups/master/unified_hosts_base/stevenblack0.lsrules), and paste the urls into Little Snitch's 'New Rule Group Subscription' wizard, one at a time. There are approximately 10k rules per file, so your computer might choke on it for an instant, but it'll be fine.

Oh, and as an added bonus: you can also use it to block all these annoying consent pop-ups that started appearing a year ago.

Hope this helps, and a great day to all of you!