Privoxy

[thatch]

A recent Mac OS X Hint described how to more elaborately safeguard your info while surfing on the web with popular browsers using Privoxy. It's fantastic and worth checking out if you want to do away with pop-up ads, banners, related junk advertisements, cookies, etc... it goes on and on and is fully configurable.

The only problem I had with it was that IE 5.2.1 wouldn't accept any proxy configuration because the checkbox was grayed out for 'Web Proxy' but other browsers worked fine. It turns out that is a bug in IE and has been reported. There is a way around it though not as ideal as everyone would like. It is to configure the settings in System>Preferences>Network>Proxies and then they will show up in IE although still grayed. The one caveat is that those setting will be system-wide rather than user specific which other browsers will allow by configuring within their respective preferences. But everything still works great.

Check out privoxy.org for more info. It's hosted by sourceforge.net.

;)

[mervTormel]

i installed privoxy a couple weeks ago and ran it for a while. had trouble with ftp and the notion of opening links in a new window. if you experience the same and are able to configure fixes for them, post them here. if you don't experience them, post that, too, because perhaps those issues are fixed and i'd like to try privoxy again.

can we rename the thread "privoxy vs. junkbuster vs. other" ?

anybody run junkbuster?

[thatch]

So far, I haven't had any problem like what you mention, mT. FTP is not supported and so I wonder what your troubles with that could be? From what you said, it sounds like you go to an FTP site and cannot open another window from a link within that site. Perhaps you could elaborate a bit?

The version is up to 2.9.15 now, FWIW. I don't know what your browser of choice is either. But IE has a checkbox in the proxies preferences to bypass FTP web proxy stuff.

Sure, it's okay to rename the thread to compare the old JunkBuster and any other type of proxy for privacy. Privoxy is soon to be out of the beta stage and does already have certain advantages over JunkBuster which had stopped being developed back in 1998.

Privoxy does not currently handle protocols such as FTP, SMTP, IM, IRC, ICQ, or other Internet protocols.