Hardened MacOS feat. Michael Bazzell

I recently read Michael Bazzells book Extreme Privacy. In this book, he goes through a extreme hardening of a MacOS device from scratch.

Naomi Brockwell recently made a video guide following this guide too.

Has anyone here tried this setup? What are your thoughts on this setup?

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I found that his beat recommendations were to do with little snitch, and the specific settings that reduce apple’s telemetry. Disabling the apple ecosystem and location services never caused my a problem since Im tied into Proton, use FOSS software, and have a GrapheneOS phone.

If you’re deep into the apple ecosystem it’s probably quite annoying to implement all his suggestions since you’d have to avoid all the wonderful features being part of it.

Getting littlesnitch would probably work well for everyone interested in improving their privacy since it doesn’t require you to have a complete overhaul of your current usage. Its also pretty great at showing you how frequently your software phones home.

Happy to say more about my personal experience.

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I second this. Little Snitch. I’ve been using it on my computer for ages. At first it’s surprising how often it snitches. What’s great about this is that you can learn about vulnerabilities. Then you can research them and decide if/what you want to do about it.

Is there a Little Snitch equivalent on Windows and Linux?

On linux there is OpenSnitch though I haven’t personally used it. I just tend to have nftables configured to block all incoming traffic, and allow all outgoing.

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