After a year of development published release of the proxy server Privoxy 4.1.0, designed for creating personal web content filters. Using Privoxy, you can cut out advertisements, discard tracking cookies, remove pop-up dialogs, block the loading of third-party JavaScript code, and make arbitrary changes to web pages that the user requires. Privoxy supports installation both on local systems of individual users and on servers to create a centralized content filtering infrastructure on a local network. The project code is written in C and distributed under the GPLv2+ license. Ready-made assemblies are prepared for Linux (deb) and Windows.
Of the advanced features of Privoxy, we can note: the ability to bind tags to change the behavior of filters depending on individual client and server HTTP headers; HTTPS inspection mode, which allows you to filter HTTPS requests and responses; using regular expressions in configuration files; the ability to replace animated gifs with cut-down static images. Privoxy can be used to block ads and unwanted content on devices that cannot install appropriate browser add-ons.
Among the changes in the new release:
- Added support for decompression using the Zstandard algorithm.
- When building with Using the wolfssl cryptographic library, the code for connecting to servers has been translated to use the wolfTLS_client_method() function instead of wolfSSLv23_method(), similar to curl (both methods have problems with individual sites, for example, wolfTLS_client_method does not work with fsf.org, and wolfSSLv23_method with media.ccc.de and traxxas.com).
- The create_hexadecimal_hash_of_host() function has been switched to using snprintf() instead of sprint().
- The address and port of connection processing have been saved to the log.
- Support for the pcre1 library has been removed.
- Added protection against tracking connections to social networks, to determine which the presence or absence of a redirect to the login page is assessed when trying to download an image from a social network site (if the picture has loaded, there is a valid session, if not, the login has not been made).
- Fast redirects for “.bahn.de/” and “report.error-report.com/”.
- Added blocking of requests to “mv.outbrain.com/”.
- Removed blocking for “metrics.1aeo.com/” and “.crates.io/”.
- Disabled filtering by banner size for “github.com” and “.jwz.org/”.
- Stopped converting animated GIF images for “.githubusercontent.com/”.
- Blocking mask ‘metrics.’ replaced with ‘.metricts.’.