A web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for protecting privacy

Written by Sorin Cirneala on October 1st, 2012

Privoxy is a proxy server that allows you to block specific pages and to protect the computer users from unwanted web content. The main purpose of the application is to control the webpages that can be opened and to filter out ads, pop-up windows and banners.

The application allows you to apply a customized set of rules that protects the user from being assaulted with unwanted information. Thus, you can block certain sites, stop others from saving cookies on your computer and disable the JavaScript on the potentially dangerous pages.

You can also use the application to prevent the user from accessing certain pages that are not necessary or appropriate to their activity. This approach can be used for companies that want to limit the Internet access in order to ensure proper bandwidth usage.

The parameters of the server are highly customizable and practically allow you to write your own rules and actions directly in the configuration files. Unlike other applications that hide some of them under the hood, Privoxy ensures the seasoned network administrators that they have access to every single parameter.

Although this feature labels the application as very flexible, it appears harder to configure for the casual users that have to learn the syntax and the parameters. However, the application provides you with detailed instructions in the configuration files and it is recommended to take time to read them before editing the parameters.

The proxy can also modify certain parts from the webpage in order to provide the end-user with the relevant information. This approach is used for removing banners and replacing them with dummy content in order to save bandwidth.

Since the interface is only required to read the log messages and to view the filtered content, it requires minimal resources and has no impact on the computer performance.

Privoxy is a good solution both for the users that want to block ads and for the administrators that want to filter the Internet traffic for multiple network computers.

Privoxy description


What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

Bug fixes:
· Client sockets are now properly shutdown and drained before being closed. This fixes page truncation issues with clients that aggressively pipeline data on platforms that otherwise discard already written data. The issue mainly affected Opera users and was initially reported by Kevin in #3464439, szotsaki provided additional information to track down the cause.
· Fix latency calculation for shared connections (disabled by default). It was broken since their introduction in 2009. The calculated latency for most connections would be 0 in which case the timeout detection failed to account for the real latency.
· Reject URLs with invalid port. Previously they were parsed incorrectly and characters between the port number and the first slash were silently dropped as shown by curl test 187.
· The default-server-timeout and socket-timeout directives accept 0 as valid value.
· Fix a race condition on Windows that could cause Privoxy to become unresponsive after toggling it on or off ...

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