</div>
<div class="SECT1">
<h1 class="SECT1"><a name="WHATSNEW" id="WHATSNEW">3. What's New in this Release</a></h1>
- <p><span class="APPLICATION">Privoxy 3.0.26</span> stable is a bug-fix release for the previously released 3.0.25
- beta which introduced client-specific tags and included a couple of minor improvements.</p>
+ <p><span class="APPLICATION">Privoxy 3.0.27</span> stable scales better in multi-user environments and brings a
+ couple of tuning directives.</p>
<ul>
<li>
- <p>Bug fixes:</p>
+ <p>General improvements:</p>
<ul>
<li>
- <p>Fixed crashes with "listen-addr :8118" (SF Bug #902). The regression was introduced in 3.0.25 beta and
- reported by Marvin Renich in Debian bug #834941.</p>
+ <p>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</p>
</li>
- </ul>
- </li>
- <li>
- <p>General improvements:</p>
- <ul>
<li>
- <p>Log when privoxy is toggled on or off via cgi interface.</p>
+ <p>Add a listen-backlog directive which specifies the backlog value passed to listen(). Sponsored by:
+ Robert Klemme</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Highlight the "Info: Now toggled " on/off log message in the Windows log viewer.</p>
+ <p>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</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Highlight the loading actions/filter file log message in the Windows log viewer.</p>
+ <p>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</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Mention client-specific tags on the toggle page as a potentionally more appropriate alternative.</p>
+ <p>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</p>
</li>
- </ul>
- </li>
- <li>
- <p>Documentation improvements:</p>
- <ul>
<li>
- <p>Update download section on the homepage. The downloads are available from the website now.</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Add sponsor FAQ.</p>
+ <p>Consistently use the U(ngreedy) flag in the 'img-reorder' filter.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Remove obsolete reference to mailing lists hosted at SourceForge.</p>
+ <p>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</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Update the "Before the Release" section of the developer manual.</p>
+ <p>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</p>
</li>
- </ul>
- </li>
- <li>
- <p>Infrastructure improvements:</p>
- <ul>
<li>
- <p>Add perl script to generate an RSS feed for the packages Submitted by "Unknown".</p>
+ <p>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</p>
</li>
- </ul>
- </li>
- <li>
- <p>Build system improvements:</p>
- <ul>
<li>
- <p>strptime.h: fix a compiler warning about ambiguous else.</p>
+ <p>Explicitly taint the server socket in case of CONNECT requests. This doesn't fix any known problems, but
+ makes some log messages less confusing.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>configure.in: Check for Docbook goo on the BSDs as well.</p>
+ <p>Let write_pid_file() terminate if the pid file can't be opened. Logging the issue at info level is
+ unlikely to help.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>GNUMakefile.in: Let the dok-user target remove temporary files.</p>
+ <p>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</p>
</li>
- </ul>
- </li>
- </ul>
- <p>Changes between <span class="APPLICATION">Privoxy 3.0.25 beta</span> and the previous release:</p>
- <ul>
- <li>
- <p>Bug fixes:</p>
- <ul>
<li>
- <p>Always use the current toggle state for new requests. Previously new requests on reused connections
- inherited the toggle state from the previous request even though the toggle state could have changed.
- Reported by Robert Klemme.</p>
+ <p>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</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Fixed two buffer-overflows in the (deprecated) static pcre code. These bugs are not considered security
- issues as the input is trusted. Found with afl-fuzz and ASAN.</p>
+ <p>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</p>
</li>
- </ul>
- </li>
- <li>
- <p>General improvements:</p>
- <ul>
<li>
- <p>Added support for client-specific tags which allow Privoxy admins to pre-define tags that are set for
- all requests from clients that previously opted in through the CGI interface. They are useful in multi-user
- setups where admins may want to allow users to disable certain actions and filters for themselves without
- affecting others. In single-user setups they are useful to allow more fine-grained toggling. For example to
- disable request blocking while still crunching cookies, or to disable experimental filters only. This is an
- experimental feature, the syntax and behaviour may change in future versions. Sponsored by Robert
- Klemme.</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Dynamic filters and taggers now support a $listen-address variable which contains the address the
- request came in on. For external filters the variable is called $PRIVOXY_LISTEN_ADDRESS. Original patch
- contributed by pursievro.</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Add client-header-tagger 'listen-address'.</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Include the listen-address in the log message when logging new requests. Patch contributed by
- pursievro.</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Turn invalid max-client-connections values into fatal errors.</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>The show-status page now shows whether or not dates before 1970 and after 2038 are expected to be
- handled properly. This is mainly useful for Privoxy-Regression-Test but could also come handy when dealing
- with time-related support requests.</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>On Mac OS X the thread id in log messages are more likely to be unique now.</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>When complaining about missing filters, the filter type is logged as well.</p>
+ <p>cgi_error_disabled(): Use status code 403 and an appropriate response line</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>A couple of harmless coverity warnings were silenced (CID #161202, CID #161203, CID #161211).</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
- </ul>
- </li>
- <li>
- <p>Action file improvements:</p>
- <ul>
<li>
- <p>Filtering is disabled for Range requests to let download resumption and Windows updates work with the
- default configuration.</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Unblock ".ardmediathek.de/". Reported by ThTomate in #932.</p>
+ <p>Fix compiler warnings.</p>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Documentation improvements:</p>
+ <p>Bug fixes:</p>
<ul>
<li>
- <p>Add FAQ entry for crashes caused by memory limits.</p>
- </li>
- <li>
- <p>Remove obsolete FAQ entry about a bug in PHP 4.2.3.</p>
- </li>
- <li>
- <p>Mention the new mailing lists were appropriate. As the archives have not been migrated, continue to
- mention the archives at SF in the contacting section for now.</p>
+ <p>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</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Note that the templates should be adjusted if Privoxy is running as intercepting proxy without getting
- all requests.</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>A bunch of links were converted to https://.</p>
+ <p>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@.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Rephrase onion service paragraph to make it more obvious that Tor is involved and that the whole website
- (and not just the homepage) is available as onion service.</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Streamline the "More information" section on the homepage further by additionally ditching the link to
- the 'See also' section of the user manual. The section contains mostly links that are directly reachable
- from the homepage already and the rest is not significant enough to get a link from the homepage.</p>
- </li>
- <li>
- <p>Change the add-header{} example to set the DNT header and use a complete section to make copy and
- pasting more convenient. Add a comment to make it obvious that adding the header is not recommended for
- obvious reasons. Using the DNT header as example was suggested by Leo Wzukw.</p>
- </li>
- <li>
- <p>Streamline the support-and-service template Instead of linking to the various support trackers (whose
- URLs hopefully change soon), link to the contact section of the user manual to increase the chances that
- users actually read it.</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
+ </ul>
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ <p>Action file improvements:</p>
+ <ul>
<li>
- <p>Add a FAQ entry for tainted sockets.</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>More sections in the documentation have stable URLs now.</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>FAQ: Explain why 'ping config.privoxy.org' is not expected to reach a local Privoxy installation.</p>
+ <p>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".</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Note that donations done through Zwiebelfreunde e.V. currently can't be checked automatically.</p>
+ <p>Unblock 'adventofcode.com/'. Reported by Clint Adams in Debian bug #848211. Fixes Roland's AF#937.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Updated section regarding starting Privoxy under OS X.</p>
+ <p>Unblock 'adlibris.com'. Reported by Wyrex in #935</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Use dedicated start instructions for FreeBSD and ElectroBSD.</p>
+ <p>Unblock .golang.org/</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Removed release instructions for AIX. They haven't been working for years and unsurprisingly nobody
- seems to care.</p>
+ <p>Add fast-redirects exception for '.youtube.com/.*origin=http'</p>
</li>
+ </ul>
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ <p>Privoxy-Log-Parser:</p>
+ <ul>
<li>
- <p>Removed obsolete reference to the solaris-dist target.</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Updated the release instructions for FreeBSD.</p>
+ <p>Bump version as the behaviour (slightly) changed.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Removed unfinished release instructions for Amiga OS and HP-UX 11.</p>
+ <p>Count connection failures as well in statistics mode. Sponsored by: Robert Klemme</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Added a pointer to the Cygwin Time Machine for getting the last release of Cygwin version 1.5 to use for
- building Privoxy on Windows.</p>
+ <p>Count connection timeouts as well in statistics mode. Sponsored by: Robert Klemme</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Various typos have been fixed.</p>
+ <p>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</p>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Infrastructure improvements:</p>
+ <p>Documentation improvements:</p>
<ul>
<li>
- <p>The website is no longer hosted at SourceForge and can be reached through https now.</p>
+ <p>Refer to the git sources instead of CVS.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>The mailing lists at SourceForge have been deprecated, you can subscribe to the new ones at:
- https://lists.privoxy.org/</p>
+ <p>Use GNU/Linux when referring to the OS instead of the kernel.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Migrating the remaining services from SourceForge is work in progress (TODO list item #53).</p>
+ <p>Add FAQ entry for what to do if editing the config file is access denied.</p>
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ <p>Add brief HTTP/2 FAQ.</p>
</li>
- </ul>
- </li>
- <li>
- <p>Build system improvements:</p>
- <ul>
<li>
- <p>Add configure argument to optimistically redefine FD_SETSIZE with the intent to change the maximum
- number of client connections Privoxy can handle. Only works with some libcs. Sponsored by Robert
- Klemme.</p>
+ <p>Add a small fuzzing section to the developer documentation.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Let the tarball-dist target skip files in ".git".</p>
+ <p>Add a client-header-tagger{client-ip-address} example.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Let the tarball-dist target work in cwds other than current.</p>
+ <p>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).</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Make the 'clean' target faster when run from a git repository.</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Include tools in the generic distribution.</p>
+ <p>Suggest to log applying actions as well when reproducing problems.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Let the gen-dist target work in cwds other than current.</p>
+ <p>Explicitly mention that Privoxy binaries are built by individuals on their own systems. Buyer
+ beware!</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Sort find output that is used for distribution tarballs to get reproducible results.</p>
+ <p>Mention the release feed on the homepage.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Don't add '-src' to the name of the tar ball generated by the gen-dist target. The package isn't a
- source distribution but a binary package. While at it, use a variable for the name to reduce the chances
- that the various references get out of sync and fix the gen-upload target which was looking in the wrong
- directory.</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
+ </ul>
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ <p>Regression tests:</p>
+ <ul>
<li>
- <p>Add regression-tests.action to the files that are distributed.</p>
+ <p>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).</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>The gen-dist target which was broken since 2002 (r1.92) has been fixed.</p>
+ <p>Update test for /send-stylesheet and add another one</p>
</li>
+ </ul>
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ <p>Templates:</p>
+ <ul>
<li>
- <p>Remove genclspec.sh which has been obsolete since 2009.</p>
+ <p>Consistently use https:// when linking to the Privoxy website.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Remove obsolete reference to Redhat spec file.</p>
+ <p>Remove SourceForge references in Copyright header.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Remove the obsolete announce target which has been commented out years ago.</p>
+ <p>Remove a couple of SourceForge references in a comment. While at it, fix the grammar.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Let rsync skip files if the checksums match.</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Privoxy-Regression-Test:</p>
+ <p>Build system improvements:</p>
<ul>
<li>
- <p>Add a "Default level offset" directive which can be used to change the default level by a given value.
- This directive affects all tests located after it until the end of the file or a another "Default level
- offset" directive is reached. The purpose of this directive is to make it more convenient to skip similar
- tests in a given file without having to remove or disable the tests completely.</p>
+ <p>Prefer openjade to jade. On some systems Jade produces HTML with unescaped ampersands in URLs.</p>
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ <p>Prefer OpenSP to SP to be consistent.</p>
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ <p>Have Docbook generated HTML files be straight ASCII. Dealing with a mixture of ISO-8859 and UTF-8 files
+ is problematic.</p>
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ <p>Echo the filename to stderr for 'make dok-tidy'. Make it a bit easier to find errors in docbook
+ generated HTML.</p>
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ <p>Warn when still using select().</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Let test level 17 depend on FEATURE_64_BIT_TIME_T instead of FEATURE_PTHREAD which has no direct
- connection to the time_t size.</p>
+ <p>Warn when compiling without calloc().</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Fix indentation in perldoc examples.</p>
+ <p>Make it more obvious that the --with-fdsetsize configure switch is pointless if poll() is available.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Don't overlook directives in the first line of the action file.</p>
+ <p>Remove support for AmigaOS.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Bump version to 0.7.</p>
+ <p>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.</p>
</li>
<li>
- <p>Fix detection of the Privoxy version now that https:// is used for the website.</p>
+ <p>Add --enable-static-linking option for configure does the same thing as LDFLAGS=-static; ./configure but
+ nicer than mixing evars and configure options.</p>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
projects / privoxy.git / commitdiff