The firewall in Mac OS X is designed to stop incoming connections. When youire connected to the Internet directly, and your IP address is visible, hackers can generally see your Mac and construct a variety of attacks. These include port scans and then probes of specific ports that look for weaknesses in applications or OS daemons that use those ports. A firewall, with Stealth Mode turned on, stops that cold. A previous discussed how to customize the Mac OS firewall in those cases where controlled, authorized external access is required.

For example, SFTP or HTTP access from the outside. However, the firewall only blocks incoming connections. One of the features of the TCP/IP protocol is that outgoing packets from, say, a Web browser, are tagged with both the origin and destination IP addresses. Thatis how the packets of data sent out trigger a response that knows how to come back to your Mac. As a result, a connection to a Website can in principle bring back with it, embedded in the packets, a payload that will naturally bypass the firewall. If that didnit happen, youid never be able to browse with the firewall enabled. Sometimes, cleverly constructed, malicious code, coming back to a port handled by a specific application, can exploit poor code, cause a buffer to overflow, and external code brought in can be caused to execute.

Thatis bad news. In turn, that code could, for example, trigger the transmittal of private data on the hard disk back to the malicious Website, and thatis something thatis not controlled by the firewall.

As a result, for complete security, a vigilant Mac OS X user should also monitor outgoing connections. In turns out that there is an excellent piece of software that can do that:.

Donit let the fact that the developer is in Austria concern you; theyire the good guys. Once Little Snitch is installed, it will monitor all outgoing connections. You can set rules for trusted sites and block outgoing connections by application and by port. It sounds technical, but itis really easy. In the example below, the Address Book is not allowed to connect to homepage.mac.com. Mail is not allowed to connect on port 80 - as some graphics attachments in spam try to do.

Mac Os X Block Outgoing Connections. Block Outgoing Connection For Mac Windows 10

However, outgoing connections with iChat are allowed. Sample Little Snitch Configuration As you build up confidence in each Mac OS X application and system daemon and what it connects to, and grant your permission, Little Snitch dynamically builds an outbound set of filter rules. If some new and unexpected outbound connection happens, youill be offered the opportunity to block it. You can manually make changes to the rules as well.

Youill spend some early days training, but the payoff in the long run is that no data will leave your computer without your consent. That provides a lot of peace of mind. Little Snitch is modestly priced (US$24.95), well written and stable. The latest version is Leopard compatible.

Click to expand.Can you hook up to a wired network to see if it's a wireless problem? Most Application for a Mac will get installed in the Applications folder, unless you tell it otherwise. You can use System Profiler to see all Applications installed on the machine. System Profiler can be found in the Utilities folder within Applications. Once System Profiler starts, there is an option in the list under the Software category called Applications. This will show you everything installed (although you can't manage it from here, you'll have to find the application itself). OS X doesn't have a Add/Remove programs utility like Windows.

Don't get too frustrated.I'm sure it's something basic. Tips and tricks for macs. Hey once again, thanks for the replys yeah i hooked up via ethernet as well, but i still have the same problem. All outgoing programs don't work. Web browsing on safari works fine, and i am on it right now via wi-fi.

I looked at system profiler, everything seems normal? Not that i'd know though, i am new to this. But i havn't installed anything besides, firefox, windows messenger, and a.wmv plugin. Other than that my macbook pro is pretty much default; running only everything that comes with Leopard.?

I'm pretty sure i havn't reseted anything in Security, i havn't even gone there. Like i said, everything worked absolutely fine for the first few days, and now it is becoming a pain. I fine myself having to restart and boot to windows to do stuff.

Please help??