[privoxy.git] / doc / webserver / announce.txt

              Announcing Privoxy v.3.0.20 beta
--------------------------------------------------------------------

This is a beta release that introduces new features and fixes a
couple of bugs. One new feature (tolerate-pipelining) is enabled
in the default configuration, depending on the feedback it may be
disabled in the next release.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
ChangeLog for Privoxy
--------------------------------------------------------------------
*** Version 3.0.20 Beta ***

- 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 through the taskbar icon.
    Reported by Tim H. in #3525694.
  - Fix the compilation on Windows when configured without IPv6 support.
  - Fix an assertion that could cause debug builds to abort() in case of
    socks5 connection failures with "debug 2" enabled.
  - Fix an assertion that could cause debug builds to abort() if a filter
    contained nul bytes in the replacement text.

- General improvements:
  - Significantly improved keep-alive support for both client and server
    connections.
  - New debug log level 65536 which logs all actions that were applied to
    the request.
  - New directive client-header-order to forward client headers in a
    different order than the one in which they arrived.
  - New directive tolerate-pipelining to allow client-side pipelining.
    If enabled (3.0.20 beta enables it by default), Privoxy will keep
    pipelined client requests around to deal with them once the current
    request has been served.
  - New --config-test option to let Privoxy exit after checking whether or not
    the configuration seems valid. The limitations noted in TODO #22 and #23
    still apply. Based on a patch by Ramkumar Chinchani.
  - New limit-cookie-lifetime{} action to let cookies expire before the end
    of the session. Suggested by Rick Sykes in #1049575.
  - Increase the hard-coded maximum number of actions and filter files from
    10 to 30 (each). It doesn't significantly affect Privoxy's memory usage
    and recompiling wasn't an option for all Privoxy users that reached the
    limit.
  - Add support for chunk-encoded client request bodies. Previously
    chunk-encoded request bodies weren't guaranteed to be forwarded correctly,
    so this can also be considered a bug fix although chunk-encoded request
    bodies aren't commonly used in the real world.
  - Add support for Tor's optimistic-data SOCKS extension, which can reduce the
    latency for requests on newly created connections. Currently only the
    headers are sent optimistically and only if the client request has already
    been read completely which rules out requests with large bodies.
  - After preventing the client from pipelining, don't signal keep-alive
    intentions. When looking at the response headers alone, it previously
    wasn't obvious from the client's perspective that no additional responses
    should be expected.
  - Stop considering client sockets tainted after receving a request with body.
    It hasn't been necessary for a while now and unnecessarily causes test
    failures when using curl's test suite.
  - Allow HTTP/1.0 clients to signal interest in keep-alive through the
    Proxy-Connection header. While such client are rare in the real world, it
    doesn't hurt and couple of curl tests rely on it.
  - Only remove duplicated Content-Type headers when filters are enabled.
    If they are not it doesn't cause ill effects and the user might not want it.
    Downgrade the removal message to LOG_LEVEL_HEADER to clarify that it's not
    an error in Privoxy and is unlikely to cause any problems in general.
    Anonymously reported in #3599335.
  - Set the socket option SO_LINGER for the client socket.
  - Move several variable declarations to the beginning of their code block.
    It's required when compiling with gcc 2.95 which is still used on some
    platforms. Initial patch submitted by Simon South in #3564815.
  - Optionally try to sanity-check strptime() results before trusting them.
    Broken strptime() implementations have caused problems in the past and
    the most recent offender seems to be FreeBSD's libc (standards/173421).
  - When filtering is enabled, let Range headers pass if the range starts at
    the beginning. This should work around (or at least reduce ) the video
    playback issues with various Apple clients as reported by Duc in #3426305.
  - Do not confuse a client hanging up with a connection time out. If a client
    closes its side of the connection without sending a request line, do not
    send the CLIENT_CONNECTION_TIMEOUT_RESPONSE, but report the condition
    properly.
  - Allow closing curly braces as part of action values as long as they are
    escaped.
  - On Windows, the logfile is now written before showing the GUI error
    message which blocks until the user acknowledges it.
    Reported by Adriaan in #3593603.
  - Remove an unreasonable parameter limit in the CGI interface. The new
    parameter limit depends on the memory available and is currently unlikely
    to be reachable, due to other limits in both Privoxy and common clients.
    Reported by Andrew on ijbswa-users@.
  - Decrease the chances of parse failures after requests with unsupported
    methods were sent to the CGI interface.

- Action file improvements:
  - Remove the comment that indicated that updated default.action versions
    are released on their own.
  - Block 'optimize.indieclick.com/' and 'optimized-by.rubiconproject.com/'
  - Unblock 'adjamblog.wordpress.com/' and 'adjamblog.files.wordpress.com/'.
    Reported by Ryan Farmer in #3496116.
  - Unblock '/.*Bugtracker'. Reported by pwhk in #3522341.
  - Add test URLs for '.freebsd.org' and '.watson.org'.
  - Unblock '.urbandictionary.com/popular'.
  - Block '.adnxs.com/'.
  - Block 'farm.plista.com/widgetdata.php'.
  - Block 'rotation.linuxnewmedia.com/'.
  - Block 'reklamy.sfd.pl/'. Reported by kacperdominik in #3399948.
  - Block 'g.adspeed.net/'.
  - Unblock 'websupport.wdc.com/'. Reported by Adam Piggot in #3577851.
  - Block '/openx/www/delivery/'.
  - Disable fast-redirects for '.googleapis.com/'.
  - Block 'imp.double.net/'. Reported by David Bo in #3070411.
  - Block 'gm-link.com/' whis is used for email tracking.
    Reported by David Bo in #1812733.
  - Verify that requests to "bwp." are blocked. URL taken from #1736879
    submitted by Francois Marier.
  - Block '/.*bannerid='. Reported by Adam Piggott in #2975779.
  - Block 'cltomedia.info/delivery/' and '.adexprt.com/'.
    Anonymously reported in #2965254.
  - Block 'de17a.com/'. Reported by David Bo in #3061472.
  - Block 'oskar.tradera.com/'. Reported by David Bo in #3060596.
  - Block '/scripts/webtrends\.js'. Reported by johnd16 in #3002729.
  - Block requests for 'pool.*.adhese.com/'. Reported by johnd16 in #3002716.
  - Update path pattern for Coremetrics and add tests.
    Pattern and URLs submitted by Adam Piggott #3168443.
  - Enable +fast-redirects{check-decoded-url} for 'tr.anp.se/'.
    Reported by David Bo in #3268832.
  - Unblock '.conrad.se/newsletter/banners/'. Reported by David Bo in #3413824.
  - Block '.tynt.com/'. Reported by Dan Stahlke in #3421767.
  - Unblock '.bbci.co.uk/radio/'. Reported by Adam Piggott in #3569603.
  - Block requests to 'service.maxymiser.net/'.
    Reported by johnd16 in #3118401 (with a previous URL).
  - Disable fast-redirects for Google's "let's pretend your computer is
    infected" page.
  - Unblock '/.*download' to resolve actionsfile feedback #3498129.
    Submitted by Steven Kolins (soundcloud.com not working).
  - Unblock '.wlxrs.com/' which is required by hotmail.com.
    Fixes #3413827 submitted by David Bo.
  - Add two unblock patterns for popup radio and TV players.
    Submitted by Adam Piggott in #3596089.

- Filter file improvements & bug fixes:
  - Add a referer tagger.
  - Reduce the likelihood that the google filter messes up HTML-generating
    JavaScript. Reported by Zeno Kugy in #3520260.

- Documentation improvements:
  - Revised all OS X sections due to new packaging module (OSXPackageBuilder).
  - Update the list of supported operating systems to clarify that all Windows
    versions after 95 are expected to work and note that the platform-specific
    code for AmigaOS and QNX currently isn't maintained.
  - Update 'Signals' section, the only explicitly handled signals are SIGINT,
    SIGTERM and SIGHUP.
  - Add Haiku to the list of operating systems on which Privoxy is known to
    run.
  - Add DragonFly to the list of BSDs on which Privoxy is known to run.
  - Removed references to redhat-specific documentation set since it no longer
    exists.
  - Removed references to building PDFs since we no longer do so.
  - Multiple listen-address directives are supported since 3.0.18, correct the
    documentation to say so.
  - Remove bogus section about long and short being preferable to int.
  - Corrected some Internet JunkBuster references to Privoxy.
  - Removed references to www.junkbusters.com since it is no longer
    maintained. Reported by Angelina Matson.
  - Various grammar and spelling corrections
  - Add a client-header-tagger{} example for disabling filtering for range
    requests.
  - Correct a URL in the "Privoxy with Tor" FAQ.
  - Spell 'refresh-tags' correctly. Reported by Don in #3571927.
  - Sort manpage options alphabetically.
  - Remove an incorrect sentence in the toggle section. The toggle state
    doesn't affect whether or not the Windows version uses the tray icon.
    Reported by Zeno Kugy in #3596395.
  - Add new contributors since 3.0.19.

- Log message improvements:
  - When stopping to watch a client socket due to pipelining, additionally log
    the socket number.
  - Log the client socket and its condition before closing it. This makes it
    more obvious that the socket actually gets closed and should help when
    diagnosing problems like #3464439.
  - In case of SOCKS5 failures, do not explicitly log the server's response.
    It hasn't helped so far and the response can already be logged by enabling
    "debug 32768" anyway. This reverts v1.81 and the follow-up bug fix v1.84.
  - Relocate the connection-accepted message from listen_loop() to serve().
    This way it's printed by the thread that is actually serving the
    connection which is nice when grepping for thread ids in log files.

- Code cleanups:
  - Remove compatibility layer for versions prior to 3.0 since it has been
    obsolete for more than 10 years now.
  - Remove the ijb_isupper() and ijb_tolower() macros from parsers.c since
    they aren't used in this file.
  - Removed the 'Functions declared include:' comment sections since they tend
    to be incomplete, incorrect and out of date and the benefit seems
    questionable.
  - Various comment grammar and comprehensibility improvements.
  - Remove a pointless fflush() call in chat(). Flushing all streams pretty
    much all the time for no obvious reason is ridiculous.
  - Relocate ijb_isupper()'s definition to project.h and get the ijb_tolower()
    definition from there, too.
  - Relocate ijb_isdigit()'s definition to project.h.
  - Rename ijb_foo macros to privoxy_foo.
  - Add malloc_or_die() which will allow to simplify code paths where malloc()
    failures don't need to be handled gracefully.
  - Add strdup_or_die() which will allow to simplify code paths where strdup()
    failures don't need to be handled gracefully.
  - Replace strdup() calls with strdup_or_die() calls where it's safe and
    simplifies the code.
  - Fix white-space around parentheses.
  - Add missing white-space behind if's and the following parentheses.
  - Unwrap a memcpy() call in resolve_hostname_to_ip().
  - Declare pcrs_get_delimiter()'s delimiters[] static const.
  - Various optimisations to remove dead code and merge inefficient code
    structures for improved clarity, performance or code compactness.
  - Various data type corrections.
  - Change visibility of several code segments when compiling without
    FEATURE_CONNECTION_KEEP_ALIVE enabled for clarity.
  - In pcrs_get_delimiter(), do not use delimiters ouside the ASCII range.
    Fixes a clang complaint.
  - Fix an error message in get_last_url() nobody is supposed to see.
    Reported by Matthew Fischer in #3507301.
  - Fix a typo in the no-zlib-support complaint. Patch submitted by Matthew
    Fischer in #3507304.
  - Shorten ssplit()'s prototype by removing the last two arguments. We always
    want to skip empty fields and ignore leading delimiters, so having
    parameters for this only complicates the API.
  - Use an enum for the type of the action value.
  - Rename action_name's member takes_value to value_type as it isn't used as
    boolean.
  - Turn family mismatches in match_sockaddr() into fatal errors.
  - Let enlist_unique_header() verify that the caller didn't pass a header
    containing either \r or \n.
  - Change the hashes used in load_config() to unsigned int. That's what
    hash_string() actually returns and using a potentiallly larger type
    is at best useless.
  - Use privoxy_tolower() instead of vanilla tolower() with manual casting of
    the argument.
  - Catch ssplit() failures in parse_cgi_parameters().

- Privoxy-Regression-Test:
  - Add an 'Overwrite condition' directive to skip any matching tests before
    it. As it has a global scope, using it is more convenient than clowning
    around with the Ignore directive.
  - Log to STDOUT instead of STDERR.
  - Include the Privoxy version in the output.
  - Various grammar and spelling corrections in documentation and code.
  - Additional tests for range requests with filtering enabled.
  - Tests with mostly invalid range request.
  - Add a couple of hide-if-modified-since{} tests with different date formats.
  - Cleaned up the format of the regression-tests.action file to match the
    format of default.action.
  - Remove the "Copyright" line from print_version(). When using --help, every
    line of screen space matters and thus shouldn't be wasted on things the
    user doesn't care about.

- Privoxy-Log-Parser:
  - Improve the --statistics performance by skipping sanity checks for input
    that shouldn't affect the results anyway. Add a --strict-checks option
    that enables some of the checks again, just in case anybody cares.
  - The distribution of client requests per connection is included in
    the --statistic output.
  - The --accept-unknown-messages option has been removed and the behavior
    is now the default.
  - Accept and (mostly) highlight new log messages introduced with
    Privoxy 3.0.20.

- uagen:
  - Bump generated Firefox version to 17.

- GNUmakefile improvements:
  - The dok-tidy target no longer taints documents with a tidy-mark
  - Change RA_MODE from 0664 to 0644. Suggested by Markus Dittrich in
    #3505445.
  - Remove tidy's clean flag as it changes the scope of attributes.
    Link-specific colors end up being applied to all text. Reported by Adam
    Piggott in #3569551.
  - Leave it up to the user whether or not smart tags are inserted.
  - Let w3m itself do the line wrapping for the config file. It works better
    than fmt as it can honour pre tags causing less unintentional line breaks.
  - Ditch a pointless '-r' passed to rm to delete files.
  - The config-file target now requires less manual intervention and updates
    the original config.
  - Change WDUMP to generate ASCII. Add WDUMP_UTF8 to allow UTF-8 in the
    AUTHORS file so the names are right.
  - Stop pretending that lynx and links are supported for the documentation.

- configure improvements:
  - On Haiku, do not pass -lpthread to the compiler. Haiku's pthreads
    implementation is contained in its system library, libroot, so no
    additional library needs to be searched.
    Patch submitted by Simon South in #3564815.
  - Additional Haiku-specific improvements. Disable checks intended for
    multi-user systems as Haiku is presently single-user. Group Haiku-specific
    settings in their own section, following the pattern for Solaris, OS/2 and
    AmigaOS. Add additional library-related settings to remove the need for
    providing configure with custom LDFLAGS.
    Submitted by Simon South in #3574538.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
About Privoxy:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

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 Free Software and licensed under the GNU GPLv2.

Privoxy is an associated project of Software in the Public Interest (SPI).

Helping hands and donations are welcome:

  * http://www.privoxy.org/faq/general.html#PARTICIPATE

  * http://www.privoxy.org/faq/general.html#DONATE

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,
FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, and various other flavors of Unix.

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:


    *  Supports "Connection: keep-alive". Outgoing connections can be kept
       alive independently from the client. Currently not available on all
       platforms.

    *  Supports IPv6, provided the operating system does so too,
       and the configure script detects it.

    *  Supports tagging which allows to change the behaviour based on client
       and server headers.

    *  Can be run as an "intercepting" proxy, which obviates the need to
       configure browsers individually.

    *  Sophisticated actions and filters for manipulating both server and
       client headers.

    *  Can be chained with other proxies.

    *  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.

    *  Web page filtering (text replacements, removes banners based on size,
       invisible <quote>web-bugs</quote> and HTML annoyances, etc.)

    *  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.

    *  Support for Perl Compatible Regular Expressions in the configuration
       files, and a more sophisticated and flexible configuration syntax.

    *  GIF de-animation.

    *  Bypass many click-tracking scripts (avoids script redirection).

    *  User-customizable HTML templates for most proxy-generated pages (e.g.
       "blocked" page).

    *  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/


  - Privoxy Developers <ijbswa-developers@lists.sourceforge.net>