When you visit to a website, there are multiple connections happening behind the scenes, not only one connection, like it appears.

For an idea, some conservative estimates:

– a reasonably popular site – 25+ connections
– KeriBlog – 4
– Buzzfeed – 50+

It’s a good idea to monitor these, and approve / deny what you feel comfortable with connecting to your laptop.

Example:

Why, out of nowhere, is Celebuzz site trying to connect to my machine?

At the time of this connection request, I was not surfing gossip sites, but I have in the past, which is why the site is checking in on me.

Connection denied.

How I’m doing this

I use a program called Little Snitch.

(this is NOT an endorsement)

It installs deep in my operating system, so no matter which program I’m using (iTunes / internet browser / photo editing software), it halts all incoming connections, until I tell it how to proceed.

It looks like this:

You teach it rules (example: I accept all connections from Google.ca, I deny all connections to many ad serving URLs).

I deny everything with “track”, “metrics” or “ads” in the URL, and don’t much notice a decline in quality of browsing.

It’s free to try, and a licence is $35. I bought mine like, 4 years ago, still works.

How this helps

Keeping your computing environment as clean as possible helps. And monitoring software, while it doesn’t replace an anti-virus software, can help catch malicious connections.

A small example:

While streaming TV from one-of-those sites, the site asked to have some dedicated space on my hard drive…

Had I not stopped the connection, the website would have not only connected to my laptop,
but stored up to 1 MB of “something” on it!

The video played fine even after I denied it access.

They’re not posting free, timely TV episodes because of kindness, because they care if I’m up-to-date on The Office.  This is the price guys.