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Apple's apps bypass firewalls like LittleSnitch and LuLu on macOS Big Sur

(twitter.com)
1183 points robenkleene | 1 comments | 20 Oct 20 15:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.336s | source
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joncp ◴[20 Oct 20 16:20 UTC] No.24839189[source]▶
That totally breaks my use case for Little Snitch: working tethered. When I tether my laptop it thinks it has free reign with the bandwidth and all of the little background processes can kill my data in a few minutes. With a firewall, I can grant access to only the processes that I need to get my work done.

Now, I guess I have to run some external firewall between my laptop and my phone. ... or better yet, abandon Apple.

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1. lilyball ◴[23 Oct 20 01:24 UTC] No.24865182[source]▶
Last year Apple introduced 2 flags on the network: “constrained” (the Low Data Mode toggle) and “expensive” (most cellular and personal hotspots). These are intended to let the app make intelligent decisions about what network requests to do. For example, “expensive” networks should disable background or speculative fetches and only fetch what the user asked for.

Presumably Apple apps that bypass the network filter are making use of these flags already, to avoid unnecessary network traffic.