There are many improvements and new features since Privoxy 3.0.8, the last stable release:
Added SOCKS5 support (with address resolution done by - the SOCKS5 server). Patch provided by Eric M. Hopper. -
The "blocked" CGI pages include a block reason that was - provided as argument to the last-applying block action. -
If enable-edit-actions is disabled (the default since 3.0.7 beta) - the show-status page hides the edit buttons and explains why. - Previously the user would get the "this feature has been disabled" - message after using the edit button. -
Forbidden CONNECT requests are treated like blocks by default. - The now-pointless treat-forbidden-connects-like-blocks action - has been removed. -
Not enabling limit-connect now allows CONNECT requests to all ports. - In previous versions it would only allow CONNECT requests to port 443. - Use +limit-connect{443} if you think you need the old default behaviour. -
The CGI editor gets turned off after three edit requests with invalid - file modification timestamps. This makes life harder for attackers - who can leverage browser bugs to send fake Referers and intend to - brute-force edit URLs. -
Action settings for multiple patterns in the same section are - shared in memory. As a result these sections take up less space - (and are loaded slightly faster). Problem reported by Franz Schwartau. -
Linear white space in HTTP headers will be normalized to single - spaces before parsing the header's content, headers split across - multiple lines get merged first. -
Host information is gathered outside the main thread so it's less - likely to delay other incoming connections if the host is misconfigured. -
New config option "hostname" to use a hostname other than - the one returned by the operating system. Useful to speed-up responses - for CGI requests on misconfigured systems. Requested by Max Khon. -
The CGI editor supports the "disable all filters of this type" - directives "-client-header-filter", "-server-header-filter", - "-client-header-tagger" and "-server-header-tagger". -
Fixed false-positives with the link-by-url filter and URLs that - contain the pattern "/jump/". -
The less-download-windows filter no longer messes - "Content-Type: application/x-shockwave-flash" headers up. -
In the show-url-info page's "Final results" section active and - inactive actions are listed separately. Patch provided by Lee. -
The GNUmakefile supports the DESTDIR variable. Patch for - the install target submitted by Radoslaw Zielinski. -
Embedding the content of configuration files in the show-status - page is significantly faster now. For a largish action file (1 MB) - a speedup of about 2450 times has been measured. This is mostly - interesting if you are using large action files or regularly use - Privoxy-Regression-Test while running Privoxy through Valgrind, - for stock configuration files it doesn't really matter. -
If zlib support is unavailable and there are content - filters active but the prevent-compression action is disabled, - the show-url-info page includes a warning that compression - might prevent filtering. -
The show-url-info page provides an OpenSearch Description that - allows to access the page through browser search plugins. -
The obsolete kill-popups action has been removed as the - PCRS-based popup filters can do the same and are slightly - less unreliable. -
The inspect-jpegs action has been removed. -
The send-wafer and send-vanilla-wafer actions have been removed. - They weren't particular useful and their behaviour could be emulated - with add-header anyway. -
Privoxy-Regression-Test has been significantly improved. -
Most sections in the default.action file contain tests for - Privoxy-Regression-Test to verify that they are working as intended. -
Parts of Privoxy have been refactored to increase maintainability. -
Building with zlib (if available) is done by default. -
For a more detailed list of changes please have a look at the ChangeLog.
A quick list of things to be aware of before upgrading from earlier - versions of Privoxy:
The recommended way to upgrade Privoxy is to backup your old - configuration files, install the new ones, verify that Privoxy - is working correctly and finally merge back your changes using - diff and maybe patch. -
There are a number of new features in each Privoxy release and - most of them have to be explicitly enabled in the configuration - files. Old configuration files obviously don't do that and due - to syntax changes using old configuration files with a new - Privoxy isn't always possible anyway. -
- Note that some installers remove earlier versions completely, - including configuration files, therefore you should really save - any important configuration files! -
- On the other hand, other installers don't overwrite existing configuration - files, thinking you will want to do that yourself. -
- standard.action now only includes the enabled actions. - Not all actions as before. -
In the default configuration only fatal errors are logged now. - You can change that in the debug section - of the configuration file. You may also want to enable more verbose - logging until you verified that the new Privoxy version is working - as expected. -
Three other config file settings are now off by default: - enable-remote-toggle, - enable-remote-http-toggle, - and enable-edit-actions. - If you use or want these, you will need to explicitly enable them, and - be aware of the security issues involved. -
The "filter-client-headers" and - "filter-server-headers" actions that were introduced with - Privoxy 3.0.5 to apply content filters to - the headers have been removed and replaced with new actions. - See the What's New section above. -
Privoxy 3.0.27 stable scales better in multi-user environments and brings a + couple of tuning directives. Privoxy 3.0.28 stable fixes two regressions + introduced in 3.0.27.
+Changes in Privoxy 3.0.28 stable:
+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.
+Changes in Privoxy 3.0.27 stable:
+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
+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.
+A quick list of things to be aware of before upgrading from earlier versions of Privoxy:
+The recommended way to upgrade Privoxy is to backup your old + configuration files, install the new ones, verify that Privoxy is working + correctly and finally merge back your changes using diff and maybe + patch.
+There are a number of new features in each Privoxy release and most of + them have to be explicitly enabled in the configuration files. Old configuration files obviously don't do + that and due to syntax changes using old configuration files with a new Privoxy isn't always possible anyway.
+Note that some installers remove earlier versions completely, including configuration files, therefore you + should really save any important configuration files!
+On the other hand, other installers don't overwrite existing configuration files, thinking you will want + to do that yourself.
+In the default configuration only fatal errors are logged now. You can change that in the debug section of the configuration file. You may also want to enable more verbose + logging until you verified that the new Privoxy version is working as + expected.
+Three other config file settings are now off by default: enable-remote-toggle, enable-remote-http-toggle, and enable-edit-actions. If you use or want these, you will need to + explicitly enable them, and be aware of the security issues involved.
+