+1.4.6. How can I hide my IP address?
+
+ You cannot hide your IP address with Privoxy or any other software,
+ since the server needs to know your IP address to send the answer to
+ you.
+
+ Fortunately there are many publicly usable anonymous proxies out
+ there, which solve the problem by providing a further level of
+ indirection between you and the web server, shared by many people and
+ thus letting your requests "drown" in white noise of unrelated
+ requests as far as user tracking is concerned.
+
+ Most of them will, however, log your IP address and make it available
+ to the authorities in case you abuse that anonymity for criminal
+ purposes. In fact you can't even rule out that some of them only exist
+ to *collect* information on (those suspicious) people with a more than
+ average preference for privacy.
+
+ You can find a list of anonymous public proxies at [63]multiproxy.org
+ and many more through Google.
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+1.4.7. Can Privoxy guarantee I am anonymous?
+
+ No. Your chances of remaining anonymous are greatly improved, but
+ unless you are an expert on Internet security it would be safest to
+ assume that everything you do on the Web can be traced back to you.
+
+ Privoxy can remove various information about you, and allows you more
+ freedom to decide which sites you can trust. But it's still possible
+ that web sites can find out who you are. Here's one way this can
+ happen.
+
+ A few browsers disclose the user's email address in certain
+ situations, such as when transferring a file by FTP. Privoxy does not
+ filter FTP. If you need this feature, or are concerned about the mail
+ handler of your browser disclosing your email address, you might
+ consider products such as NSClean.
+
+ Browsers available only as binaries could use non-standard headers to
+ give out any information they can have access to: see the
+ manufacturer's license agreement. It's impossible to anticipate and
+ prevent every breach of privacy that might occur. The professionally
+ paranoid prefer browsers available as source code, because
+ anticipating their behavior is easier. Trust the source, Luke!
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+1.4.8. Might some things break because header information is being altered?
+
+ Definitely. More and more sites use HTTP header content to decide what
+ to display and how to display it. There is many ways that this can be
+ handled, so having hard and fast rules, is tricky.
+
+ "USER AGENT" in particular is often used in this way to identify the
+ browser, and adjust content accordingly. Changing this now is not
+ recommended, since so many sites do look for this. You may get
+ undesirable results by changing this.
+
+ For instance, different browsers use different encodings of Russian
+ and Czech characters, certain web servers convert pages on-the-fly
+ according to the User Agent header. Giving a "User Agent" with the
+ wrong operating system or browser manufacturer causes some sites in
+ these languages to be garbled; Surfers to Eastern European sites
+ should change it to something closer. And then some page access
+ counters work by looking at the "REFERER" header; they may fail or
+ break if unavailable. The weather maps of Intellicast have been
+ blocked by their server when no "REFERER" or cookie is provided, is
+ another example. There are many, many other ways things can go wrong
+ when trying to fool a web server.
+
+ If you have problems with a site, you will have to adjust your
+ configuration accordingly. Cookies are probably the most likely
+ adjustment that may be required, but by no means the only one.
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+1.4.9. Can Privoxy act as a "caching" proxy to speed up web browsing?
+
+ No, it does not have this ability at all. You want something like
+ [64]Squid for this. And, yes, before you ask, Privoxy can co-exist
+ with other kinds of proxies like "Squid".
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+1.4.10. What about as a firewall? Can Privoxy protect me?
+
+ Not in the way you mean, or in the way a true firewall can, or a proxy
+ that has this specific capability. Privoxy can help protect your
+ privacy, but not really protect you from intrusion attempts.
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+1.4.11. The Privoxy logo that replaces ads is very blocky and ugly looking.
+Can't a better font be used?
+
+ This is not a font problem. The logo is an image that is created by
+ Privoxy on the fly. So as to not waste memory, the image is rather
+ small. The blockiness comes when the image is scaled to fill a largish
+ area. There is not much to be done about this, other than to use one
+ of the other "imageblock" directives: pattern, blank, or a URL of your
+ chosing.
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+1.4.12. I have large empty spaces now where ads used to be. Why does Privoxy
+leave these large gaps?
+
+ It would be easy enough to just eliminate this space altogether,
+ rather than fill it with blank space. But, this would create problems
+ with many pages that use the overall size of the ad to help organize
+ the page layout and position the various components of the page where
+ they were intended to be. It is best left this way.
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+1.4.13. How can Privoxy filter Secure (HTTPS) URLs?
+
+ This is a limitation since HTTPS transactions are encrypted SSL
+ sessions between your browser and the secure site, and are meant to be
+ reliably secure and private. This means that all cookies and HTTP
+ header information are also encrypted from the time they leave your
+ browser, to the site, and vice versa. Privoxy does not try to
+ unencrypt this information, so it just passes through as is. Privoxy
+ can still catch images and ads that are embedded in the SSL stream
+ though.
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+1.4.14. Privoxy runs as a "server". How secure is it? Do I need to take any
+special precautions?
+
+ There are no known exploits that might effect Privoxy. On Unix-like
+ systems, Privoxy can run as a non-privileged user, which is how we
+ recommend it be run. Also, by default Privoxy only listens to requests
+ from "localhost". It is not itself directly exposed to the Internet in
+ this configuration. If you want to have Privoxy serve as a LAN proxy,
+ this will have to be opened up to allow for LAN requests. In this
+ case, we'd recommend you specify only the LAN gateway address, e.g.
+ 192.168.1.1 in the main Privoxy config file. All LAN hosts can then
+ use this as their proxy address in the browser proxy configuration. In
+ this way, Privoxy will not listen on any external ports. Of course, a
+ firewall is always good too. Better safe than sorry.
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+1.4.15. What is a "default.filter"?
+
+ The "default.filter" is used to "filter" any page content. By
+ "filtering" we mean it can modify, remove, or change anything on the
+ page, including HTML tags, and JavaScript. Regular expressions are
+ used to accomplish this. This is potentially a very powerful feature,
+ but requires some expertise.
+
+ If you are familiar with regular expressions, and HTML, you can look
+ at the provided default.filter with a text editor and see some of
+ things it can be used for.
+
+ Presently, there is no GUI editor option for this part of the
+ configuration.
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+1.5. Troubleshooting
+
+1.5.1. I just upgraded and am getting "connection refused" with every web
+page?
+
+ Either Privoxy is not running, or your browser is configured for a
+ different port than what Privoxy is using.
+
+ The old Privoxy used port 8000 by default. This has been changed to
+ port 8118 now, due to a conflict with NAS (Network Audio Service),
+ which uses port 8000. If you haven't, you need to change your browser
+ to the new port number, or alternately change Privoxy's
+ "listen-address" setting in the config file used to start Privoxy.
+ _________________________________________________________________
+
+1.5.2. I just added a new rule, but the steenkin ad is still getting
+through. How?