Privoxy 3.0.14 Beta

Privoxy 3.0.14 Beta offers you a complete non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities which is designed for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data and HTTP headers, controlling access, and removing ads and other obnoxious Internet junk.

Privoxy has a flexible configuration and can be customized to suit individual needs and tastes. It has application for both stand-alone systems and multi-user networks. Privoxy is Free Software and licensed under the GPL2. Privoxy is an associated project of Software in the Public Interest (SPI).

Major Features:

1. Can keep outgoing connections alive and reuse them later on.
2. Supports tagging which allows to change the behavior based on client and server headers.
3. Can be run as an "intercepting" proxy, which obviates the need to configure browsers individually.
4. Sophisticated actions and filters for manipulating both server and client headers.
5. Can be chained with other proxies.
6. Integrated browser based configuration and control utility. Browser-based tracing of rule and filter effects. Remote toggling.
7. Web page filtering (text replacements, removes banners based on size, invisible "web-bugs", JavaScript and HTML annoyances, pop-up windows, etc.)
8. Modularized configuration that allows for standard settings and user settings to reside in separate files, so that installing updated actions files won't overwrite individual user settings.
9. Support for Perl Compatible Regular Expressions in the configuration files, and a more sophisticated and flexible configuration syntax.
10. Improved cookie management features (e.g. session based cookies).
11. GIF de-animation.
12. Bypass many click-tracking scripts (avoids script redirection).
13. Multi-threaded (POSIX and native threads).
14. User-customizable HTML templates for most proxy-generated pages (e.g. "blocked" page).
15. Auto-detection and re-reading of config file changes.
16. Improved signal handling, and a true daemon mode (Unix).
17. Every feature now controllable on a per-site or per-location basis, configuration more powerful and versatile over-all.
18. Many smaller new features added, limitations and bugs removed.

Enhancements:

• The latency is taken into account when evaluating whether or not to reuse a connection. This should significantly reduce the number of connections problems several users reported.
• If the server doesn't specify how long the connection stays alive, Privoxy errs on the safe side of caution and assumes it's only a second.
• The error pages for connection timeouts or missing server data use a Last-Modified date in the past. Retry attempts are detected and Privoxy removes the If-Modified-Since header to prevent the server from responding with status code 304 in which case the client would reuse the error message.
• Setting keep-alive-timeout to 0 disables keep-alive support. Previously Privoxy would claim to allow persistence but not reuse the connection.
• Pipelined requests are less likely to be mistaken for the request body of the previous request. Note that Privoxy still has no real pipeline support and will either serialize pipelined requests or drop them in which case the client has to resent them.
• Fixed a crash on some Windows versions when header randomization is enabled and the date couldn't be parsed.
• Privoxy's keep-alive timeout for the current connection is reduced to the one specified in the client's Keep-Alive header.
• For HTTP/1.1 requests, Privoxy implies keep-alive support by not If the socket isn't reusable, Privoxy doesn't temporarily waste a socket slot to remember the connection.
• If keep-alive support is disabled but compiled in, the client's Keep-Alive header is removed.
• Fixed a bug on mingw32 where downloading large files failed if keep-alive support was enabled.
• Fixed a bug that (at least theoretically) could cause log timestamps to be occasionally off by about a second.
• No Proxy-Connection header if added if there already is one.
• The configure script respects the $PATH variable when searching for groups and id.