- Announcing Privoxy v.3.0.11
------------------------------------------------------------------
+ Announcing Privoxy 3.0.28 stable
+--------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Privoxy 3.0.27 stable scales better in multi-user environments
+and brings a couple of tuning directives.
-3.0.11 is a stable release which includes many enhancements but no major
-new features. The most prominent new feature is "keep-alive" support for
-outgoing connections.
+Privoxy 3.0.28 stable fixes two regressions introduced in 3.0.27.
-See http://www.privoxy.org/3.0.11/user-manual/whatsnew.html for details.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------
+ChangeLog for Privoxy 3.0.28
+--------------------------------------------------------------------
+- Bug fixes for regressions in 3.0.27:
+ - Fixed misplaced parentheses.
+ Reported by David Binderman.
+ - Changed two regression tests to depend on config directive
+ enable-remote-toggle instead of FEATURE_TOGGLE.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
-ChangeLog for Privoxy
+ChangeLog for Privoxy 3.0.27
--------------------------------------------------------------------
+- General improvements:
+ - Add a receive-buffer-size directive which can be used to
+ set the size of the previously statically allocated buffer
+ in handle_established_connection().
+ Increasing the buffer size increases Privoxy's memory usage but
+ can lower the number of context switches and thereby reduce the
+ CPU usage and potentially increase the throughput.
+ This is mostly relevant for fast network connections and
+ large downloads that don't require filtering.
+ Sponsored by: Robert Klemme
+ - Add a listen-backlog directive which specifies the backlog
+ value passed to listen().
+ Sponsored by: Robert Klemme
+ - Add an enable-accept-filter directive which allows to
+ toggle accept filter support at run time when compiled
+ with FEATURE_ACCEPT_FILTER support.
+ It makes testing more convenient and now that it's
+ optional we can emit an error message if enabling
+ the accept filter fails.
+ Sponsored by: Robert Klemme
+ - Add a delay-response{} action.
+ This is useful to tar pit JavaScript requests that
+ are endlessly retried in case of blocks. It can also
+ be used to simulate a slow Internet connection.
+ Sponsored by: Robert Klemme
+ - Add a 'trusted-cgi-referrer' directive.
+ It allows to configure another page or site that can be used
+ to reach sensitive CGI resources.
+ Sponsored by: Robert Klemme
+ - Add a --fuzz mode which exposes Privoxy internals to input
+ from files or stdout.
+ Mainly tested with American Fuzzy Lop. For details see:
+ https://www.fabiankeil.de/talks/fuzzing-on-freebsd/
+ This work was partially funded with donations and done
+ as part of the Privoxy month in 2015.
+ - Consistently use the U(ngreedy) flag in the 'img-reorder' filter.
+ - listen_loop(): Reuse a single thread attribute object
+ The object doesn't change and creating a new one for
+ every thread is a waste of (CPU) time.
+ Sponsored by: Robert Klemme
+ - Free csp resources in the thread that belongs to the csp instead
+ of the main thread which has enough on its plate already.
+ Sponsored by: Robert Klemme
+ - Improve 'socket timeout reached' message.
+ Log the timeout that was triggered and downgrade the
+ log level to LOG_LEVEL_CONNECT to reduce the log noise
+ with common debug settings.
+ The timeout isn't necessary the result of an error and
+ usually merely indicates that Privoxy's socket timeout
+ is lower than the relevant timeouts used by client and
+ server.
+ Sponsored by: Robert Klemme
+ - Explicitly taint the server socket in case of CONNECT requests.
+ This doesn't fix any known problems, but makes
+ some log messages less confusing.
+ - Let write_pid_file() terminate if the pid file can't be opened.
+ Logging the issue at info level is unlikely to help.
+ - log_error(): Reduce the mutex-protected area by not using a
+ heap-allocated buffer that is shared between all threads.
+ This increases performance and reduces the latency with
+ verbose debug settings and multiple concurrent connections.
+ Sponsored by: Robert Klemme
+ - Let zalloc() use calloc() if it's available.
+ In some situations using calloc() can be faster than
+ malloc() + memset() and it should never be slower.
+ In the real world the impact of this change is not
+ expected to be noticeable.
+ Sponsored by: Robert Klemme
+ - Never use select() when poll() is available.
+ On most platforms select() is limited by FD_SETSIZE while
+ poll() is not. This was a scaling issue for multi-user setups.
+ Using poll() has no downside other than the usual risk
+ that code modifications may introduce new bugs that have
+ yet to be found and fixed.
+ At least in theory this commit could also reduce the latency
+ when there are lots of connections and select() would use
+ "bit fields in arrays of integers" to store file descriptors.
+ Another side effect is that Privoxy no longer has to stop
+ monitoring the client sockets when pipelined requests are
+ waiting but can't be read yet.
+ This code keeps the select()-based code behind ifdefs for
+ now but hopefully it can be removed soonish to make the
+ code more readable.
+ Sponsored by: Robert Klemme
+ - Add a 'reproducible-tarball-dist' target.
+ It's currently separate from the "tarball-dist" target
+ because it requires a tar implementation with mtree spec
+ support.
+ It's far from being perfect and does not enforce a
+ reproducible mode, but it's better than nothing.
+ - Use arc4random() if it's available.
+ While Privoxy doesn't need high quality pseudo-random numbers
+ there's no reason not to use them when we can and this silences
+ a warning emitted by code checkers that can't tell whether or not
+ the quality matters.
+ - Show the FEATURE_EXTERNAL_FILTERS status on the status page.
+ Better late than never. Previously a couple of tests weren't
+ executed as Privoxy-Regression-Test couldn't detect that the
+ FEATURE_EXTERNAL_FILTERS dependency was satisfied.
+ - Ditch FEATURE_IMAGE_DETECT_MSIE.
+ It's an obsolete workaround we inherited from Junkbuster
+ and was already disabled by default.
+ Users that feel the urge to work around issues with
+ image requests coming from an Internet Explorer version
+ from more than 15 years ago can still do this using tags.
+ - Consistently use strdup_or_die() instead of strdup() in
+ cases where allocation failures aren't expected.
+ Using strdup_or_die() allows to remove a couple of explicit
+ error checks which slightly reduces the size of the binary.
+ - Insert a refresh tag into the /client-tags CGI page when
+ serving it while a client-specific tag is temporarily enabled.
+ This makes it less likely that the user ends up
+ looking at tag state that is out of date.
+ - Use absolute URLs in the client-tag forms.
+ It's more consistent with the rest of the CGI page
+ URLs and makes it more convenient to copy the forms
+ to external pages.
+ - cgi_error_disabled(): Use status code 403 and an appropriate response line
+ - Use a dedicated CGI handler to deal with tag-toggle requests
+ As a result the /client-tags page is now safe to reach without
+ trusted Referer header which makes bookmarking or linking to
+ it more convenient.
+ Finally, refreshing the /client-tags page to show the
+ current state can no longer unintentionally repeat the
+ previous toggle request.
+ - Don't add a "Connection" header for CONNECT requests.
+ Explicitly sending "Connection: close" is not necessary and
+ apparently it causes problems with some forwarding proxies
+ that will close the connection prematurely.
+ Reported by Marc Thomas.
+ - Fix compiler warnings.
+
+- Bug fixes:
+ - rfc2553_connect_to(): Properly detect and log when poll()
+ reached the time out. Previously this was logged as:
+ Could not connect to [...]: No error: 0.
+ which isn't very helpful.
+ Sponsored by: Robert Klemme
+ - add_tag_for_client(): Set time_to_live properly.
+ Previously the time_to_live was always set for the first tag.
+ Attempts to temporarily enable a tag would result in enabling
+ it permanently unless no tag was enabled already.
+ - Revert r1.165 which didn't perform as advertised.
+ While the idea was to use "https:// when creating links
+ for the user manual on the website", the actual effect
+ was to use "https://" when Privoxy was supposed to serve
+ the user manual itself.
+ Reported by Yossi Zahn on Privoxy-devel@.
+ - socks5_connect(): Fail in case of unsupported address types.
+ Previously they would not be detected right away and
+ Privoxy would fail later on with an error message that
+ didn't make it obvious that the problem was socks-related.
+ So far, no such problems have actually been reported.
+ - socks5_connect(): Properly deal with socks replies that
+ contain IPv6 addresses.
+ Previously parts of the reply were left unread and
+ later on treated as invalid HTTP response data.
+ Fixes #904 reported by Danny Goossen who also provided
+ the initial version of this patch.
+
+- Action file improvements:
+ - Unblock 'msdn.microsoft.com/'.
+ It (presumably) isn't used to serve the kind of ads Privoxy should
+ block by default but happens to serve lots of pages with URLs that
+ are likely to result in false positives.
+ Reported by bugreporter1694 in AF#939.
+ - Disable gif deanimation for requests tagged with CSS-REQUEST.
+ The action will ignore content that isn't considered text
+ anyway and explicitly disabling it makes this more obvious
+ if "action" debugging (debug 65536) is enabled while
+ "gif deanimation" debugging (debug 256) isn't.
+ - Explicitly disable HTML filters for requests with CSS-REQUEST tag.
+ The filters are unlikely to break CSS files but executing
+ them without (intentionally) getting any hits is a waste of
+ cpu time and makes the log more noisy when running with
+ "debug 64".
+ - Unblock 'adventofcode.com/'.
+ Reported by Clint Adams in Debian bug #848211.
+ Fixes Roland's AF#937.
+ - Unblock 'adlibris.com'.
+ Reported by Wyrex in #935
+ - Unblock .golang.org/
+ - Add fast-redirects exception for '.youtube.com/.*origin=http'
+
+- Privoxy-Log-Parser:
+ - Don't gather host and resource statistics if they aren't requested.
+ While the performance impact seems negligible this significantly
+ reduces the memory usage if there are lots of requests.
+ - Bump version as the behaviour (slightly) changed.
+ - Count connection failures as well in statistics mode.
+ Sponsored by: Robert Klemme
+ - Count connection timeouts as well in statistics mode.
+ Sponsored by: Robert Klemme
+ - Fix an 'uninitialized value' warning when generating
+ statistics for a log file without response headers.
+ While privoxy-log-parser was supposed to detect this already,
+ the check was flawed and the message the user didn't see was
+ somewhat confusing anyway.
+ Now the message is less confusing, more helpful and actually printed.
+ Reported by: Robert Klemme
+
+- Documentation improvements:
+ - Refer to the git sources instead of CVS.
+ - Use GNU/Linux when referring to the OS instead of the kernel.
+ - Add FAQ entry for what to do if editing the config file is access denied.
+ - Add brief HTTP/2 FAQ.
+ - Add a small fuzzing section to the developer documentation.
+ - Add a client-header-tagger{client-ip-address} example.
+ - Stop suggesting that Privoxy is an anonymizing proxy.
+ The term could lead to Privoxy users overestimating
+ what it can do on its own (without Tor).
+ - Make it more obvious that SPI accepts Paypal, too.
+ Currently most donations are made through the Paypal account
+ managed by Zwiebelfreunde e.V. and a more even distribution
+ would be useful.
+ - Suggest to log applying actions as well when reproducing problems.
+ - Explicitly mention that Privoxy binaries are built by individuals
+ on their own systems. Buyer beware!
+ - Mention the release feed on the homepage.
+ - Remove a mysterious comment with a GNU FDL link as it isn't
+ useful and could confuse license scanners.
+ In May 2002 it was briefly claimed that "this document" was covered
+ by the GNU FDL. The commit message (r1.5) doesn't explain the motivation
+ or whether all copyright holders were actually asked and agreed to the
+ declared license change.
+ It's thus hard to tell whether or not the license change was legit,
+ but luckily two days later the "doc license" was "put" "back to GPL"
+ anyway (r1.6).
+ At the same time the offending comment with a link to the FDL
+ (not the GPL) was added for no obvious reason.
+ Now it's gone again.
+
+- Regression tests:
+ - Bump for-privoxy-version to 3.0.27 as we now rely on untrusted
+ CGI request being rejected with status code 403 (instead of 200).
+ - Update test for /send-stylesheet and add another one
-*** Version 3.0.11 ***
-
-- On most platforms, outgoing connections can be kept alive and
- reused if the server supports it. Whether or not this improves
- things depends on the connection.
-- When dropping privileges, membership in supplementary groups
- is given up as well. Not doing that can lead to Privoxy running
- with more rights than necessary and violates the principle of
- least privilege. Users of the --user option are advised to update.
- Thanks to Matthias Drochner for reporting the problem,
- providing the initial patch and testing the final version.
-- Passing invalid users or groups with the --user option
- didn't lead to program exit. Regression introduced in 3.0.7.
-- The match all section has been moved from default.action
- to a new file called match-all.action. As a result the
- default.action no longer needs to be touched by the user
- and can be safely overwritten by updates.
-- The standard.action file has been removed. Its content
- is now part of the default.action file.
-- In some situations the logged content length was slightly too low.
-- Crunched requests are logged with their own log level.
- If you used "debug 1" in the past, you'll probably want
- to additionally enable "debug 1024", otherwise only passed
- requests will be logged. If you only care about crunched
- requests, simply replace "debug 1" with "debug 1024".
-- The crunch reason has been moved to the beginning of the
- crunch message. For HTTP URLs, the protocol is logged as well.
-- Log messages are shortened by printing the thread id on its
- own (as opposed to putting it inside the string "Privoxy()").
-- The config option socket-timeout has been added to control
- the time Privoxy waits for data to arrive on a socket.
-- Support for remote toggling is controlled by the configure
- option --disable-toggle only. In previous versions it also
- depended on the action editor and thus configuring with the
- --disable-editor option would disable remote toggling support
- as well.
-- Requests with invalid HTTP versions are rejected.
-- The template symbol @date@ can be used to include a date(1)-like
- time string. Initial patch submitted by Endre Szabo.
-- Responses from shoutcast servers are accepted again.
- Problem reported and fix suggested by Stefan.
-- The hide-forwarded-for-headers action has been replaced with
- the change-x-forwarded-for{} action which can also be used to
- add X-Forwarded-For headers. The latter functionality already
- existed in Privoxy versions prior to 3.0.7 but has been removed
- as it was often used unintentionally (by not using the
- hide-forwarded-for-headers action).
-- A "clear log" view option was added to the mingw32 version
- to clear out all of the lines in the Privoxy log window.
- Based on a patch submitted by T Ford.
-- The mingw32 version uses "critical sections" now, which prevents
- log message corruption under load. As a side effect, the
- "no thread-safe PRNG" warning could be removed as well.
-- The mingw32 version's task bar icon is crossed out and
- the color changed to gray if Privoxy is toggled off.
+- Templates:
+ - Consistently use https:// when linking to the Privoxy website.
+ - Remove SourceForge references in Copyright header.
+ - Remove a couple of SourceForge references in a comment.
+ While at it, fix the grammar.
+ - Move the site-specific documentation block before the generic one.
+ While most Privoxy installations don't have a site-specific
+ documentation block, in cases were it exists it's likely to
+ be more relevant than the generic one.
+ Showing it first makes it less likely that users stop reading
+ before they reach it, especially on pages that don't fit on
+ the screen.
+
+- Build system improvements:
+ - Prefer openjade to jade. On some systems Jade produces
+ HTML with unescaped ampersands in URLs.
+ - Prefer OpenSP to SP to be consistent.
+ - Have Docbook generated HTML files be straight ASCII.
+ Dealing with a mixture of ISO-8859 and UTF-8 files is problematic.
+ - Echo the filename to stderr for 'make dok-tidy'.
+ Make it a bit easier to find errors in docbook generated HTML.
+ - Warn when still using select().
+ - Warn when compiling without calloc().
+ - Make it more obvious that the --with-fdsetsize configure switch
+ is pointless if poll() is available.
+ - Remove support for AmigaOS.
+ - Update windows build system to use supported software.
+ The cygwin gcc -mno-cygwin option is no longer supported, so
+ convert the windows build system to use the cygwin cross-compiler
+ to build "native" code.
+ - Add --enable-static-linking option for configure
+ does the same thing as LDFLAGS=-static; ./configure
+ but nicer than mixing evars and configure options.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
About Privoxy:
-----------------------------------------------------------------
-Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering
-capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data,
-managing HTTP cookies, controlling access, and removing ads,
-banners, pop-ups and other obnoxious Internet junk. Privoxy
-has a flexible configuration and can be customized to suit
-individual needs and tastes. Privoxy has application for
-both stand-alone systems and multi-user networks.
+Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities 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 based on Internet Junkbuster (tm).
+Privoxy is Free Software and licensed under the GNU GPLv2.
-At present, Privoxy is known to run on Windows(95, 98, ME, 2000,
-XP, Vista), Linux (Ubuntu, RedHat, SuSE, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo and
-others), Mac OSX, OS/2, AmigaOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, and
-various other flavors of Unix.
+Our TODO list is rather long. Helping hands and donations are welcome:
-In addition to the core features of ad blocking and cookie management,
-Privoxy provides many supplemental features, that give the end-user
-more control, more privacy and more freedom:
+ * https://www.privoxy.org/faq/general.html#PARTICIPATE
+ * https://www.privoxy.org/faq/general.html#DONATE
- * Can keep outgoing connections alive and reuse them later on.
+At present, Privoxy is known to run on Windows 95 and later versions
+(98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7 etc.), GNU/Linux (RedHat, SuSE,
+Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Slackware and others), Mac OS X (10.4 and
+upwards on PPC and Intel processors), OS/2, Haiku, DragonFly, ElectroBSD,
+FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, and various other flavors of Unix.
- * Supports tagging which allows to change the behaviour based on client
- and server headers.
+In addition to the core features of ad blocking and cookie management,
+Privoxy provides many supplemental features, that give the end-user
+more control, more privacy and more freedom:
- * Can be run as an "intercepting" proxy, which obviates the need to
- configure browsers individually.
+ * Supports "Connection: keep-alive". Outgoing connections can be kept
+ alive independently from the client. Currently not available on all
+ platforms.
- * Sophisticated actions and filters for manipulating both server and
- client headers.
+ * Supports IPv6, provided the operating system does so too,
+ and the configure script detects it.
- * Can be chained with other proxies.
+ * Supports tagging which allows to change the behaviour based on client
+ and server headers.
- * Integrated browser based configuration and control utility at
- http://config.privoxy.org/ (shortcut: http://p.p/). Browser-based
- tracing of rule and filter effects. Remote toggling.
+ * Can be run as an "intercepting" proxy, which obviates the need to
+ configure browsers individually.
- * Web page filtering (text replacements, removes banners based on size,
- invisible "web-bugs", JavaScript and HTML annoyances, pop-up windows,
- etc.)
+ * Sophisticated actions and filters for manipulating both server and
+ client headers.
- * 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.
+ * Can be chained with other proxies.
- * Support for Perl Compatible Regular Expressions in the configuration
- files, and a more sophisticated and flexible configuration syntax.
+ * Integrated browser based configuration and control utility at
+ http://config.privoxy.org/ (shortcut: http://p.p/). Browser-based
+ tracing of rule and filter effects. Remote toggling.
- * Improved cookie management features (e.g. session based cookies).
+ * Web page filtering (text replacements, removes banners based on size,
+ invisible "web-bugs" and HTML annoyances, etc.)
- * GIF de-animation.
+ * 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.
- * Bypass many click-tracking scripts (avoids script redirection).
+ * Support for Perl Compatible Regular Expressions in the configuration
+ files, and a more sophisticated and flexible configuration syntax.
- * Multi-threaded (POSIX and native threads).
+ * GIF de-animation.
- * User-customizable HTML templates for most proxy-generated pages (e.g.
- "blocked" page).
+ * Bypass many click-tracking scripts (avoids script redirection).
- * Auto-detection and re-reading of config file changes.
+ * User-customizable HTML templates for most proxy-generated pages (e.g.
+ "blocked" page).
- * Improved signal handling, and a true daemon mode (Unix).
-
- * Every feature now controllable on a per-site or per-location basis,
- configuration more powerful and versatile over-all.
+ * Auto-detection and re-reading of config file changes.
+ * Most features are controllable on a per-site or per-location basis.
-Download location:
- http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=11118
-
-Home Page:
- http://www.privoxy.org/
+Home Page:
+ https://www.privoxy.org/
- - Privoxy Developers <ijbswa-developers@lists.sourceforge.net>
+ - Privoxy Developers <privoxy-devel@lists.privoxy.org>