By Graham K. Rogers

Most users of OS X are familiar with the firewall settings in the Security Preferences panel of System Preferences. A firewall is intended to prevent unwanted probing or data coming in to the system.

A great many applications and perhaps even malware, if it were to be installed, needs to send data out of the computer. Some of this is certainly legitimate. For example, I agree to send analytical data to Apple, and I also opt in to allowing my location to be used.

There are however, some applications and developers that try to transmit data that users may not want to be made available. For many years - to try and counteract this - I have used the utility, Little Snitch, which allows outgoing data only to those sites and IP numbers that the user agrees to.

The developers of Little Snitch, ObDev (an Austrian organisation) have just released version 3.3 of the software and in the notes for the download, users are informed that this is now compatible with the soon to be released, OS X 10.9, Mavericks.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.