The latest release of the proxy server Privoxy 4.2.0 has been announced. This proxy server is designed for creating personal filters for web content, allowing users to 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. Privoxy supports installation on both local systems of individual users and servers to create a centralized content filtering infrastructure on a local network. The project code is written in C and is distributed under the GPLv2+ license. Ready-made assemblies are available for Linux (deb) and Windows.
Among the advanced features of Privoxy are the ability to bind tags to change filter behavior based on individual HTTP headers, HTTPS inspection mode for filtering HTTPS requests and responses, using regular expressions in configuration files, and replacing animated gifs with static images. Privoxy can be used to block ads and unwanted content on devices that cannot install browser add-ons.
The new release includes several changes and improvements, such as the use of elliptic curve keys enabled by default in HTTPS inspection mode, implementation of different client tags for clients running on the same host, addition of the build option “–enable-acl-debugging” for advanced ACL debugging capabilities, and improved filter efficiency using separate linked lists for different filter types. Support for the mbedtls 2.x library and OpenSSL versions up to 2.0 has been discontinued.
- For “sourceforge,” a filter has been added to hide the vibe-coding panel.
- Two security issues have been fixed in this release:
- Buffer overflow in the parse_chunk_size() function when parsing data block size using “Chunked Transfer Encoding” in HTTP/1.0.
- Stack overflow in ssl_send_certificate_error