After a year of development, the release of the Privoxy proxy server 4.1.0 has been published, designed for creating personal filters for web content. With Privoxy, users can cut out advertising inserts, discard tracking cookies, remove pop-up dialogs, block the loading of third-party JavaScript code, and make necessary arbitrary changes to web pages. Privoxy supports installation on both local systems of individual users and on servers to create a centralized content filtering infrastructure in a local network. The project code is written in C and is distributed under the GPLv2+ license. Ready-made builds are prepared for Linux (deb) and Windows.
Among the advanced features of Privoxy, we can highlight: the ability to bind tags to change the behavior of filters depending on specific client and server HTTP headers; an HTTPS inspection mode that allows filtering of HTTPS requests and responses; use of regular expressions in configuration files; and the ability to replace animated GIFs with static images. Privoxy can be used to block ads and unwanted content on devices where it is not possible to install relevant browser add-ons.
Among the changes in the new release:
- Support for unpacking using the Zstandard algorithm has been added.
- When building with the wolfssl cryptographic library, the code for connecting to servers has been changed to use the wolfTLS_client_method() function instead of wolfSSLv23_method(), similar to curl (both methods have issues with specific sites, for example, wolfTLS_client_method does not work with fsf.org, and wolfSSLv23_method has issues with media.ccc.de and traxxas.com).
- The create_hexadecimal_hash_of_host() function has been updated to use snprintf() instead of sprint().
- Logging of the address and port of connection handling has been ensured.
- Support for the pcre1 library has been removed.
- Protection against tracking connections to social networks has been added, which determines whether a redirect to the login page occurred when attempting to load an image from the social network's site (if the image loads — a valid session exists, if not — login has not been performed).
- Quick redirects for ".bahn.de/" and "report.error-report.com/" have been disabled.
- Blocking requests to "mv.outbrain.com/" has been added.
- Blocks have been removed for "metrics.1aeo.com/" and ".crates.io/".
- Banner size filtering has been disabled for "github.com" and ".jwz.org/".
- The conversion of animated gif images for ".githubusercontent.com/" has been discontinued.
- The blocking mask ‘metrics.’ has been changed to ‘.metricts.’.
Source: opennet.ru
