Proxomitron or Privoxy?

Which has more filter list support? Which do you like better? How do they differ?

 

Can people on the internet see Proxomitron/Privoxy and use it as a Proxy Server?

 

I use Privoxy with great success:

http://www.privoxy.org/

Honestly, Proximitron is quite long in the tooth in 2010:

http://homepage.usask.ca/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/ijm451/proxo/proxo.org/index.html

With the release of Naoko 4.5, Scott discontinued all further development and support of his program (Proximitron) and pulled the official home of Proxomitron off the Web.

 

You should get your "facts" straighten up a bit!

 

I use Proxomitron with Sidki's filter set and have been doing so for the past year. It works great and I've had very few issues.

Privoxy on the other hand always felt sluggish in comparison. I don't know why but browsing was noticeably slower.

Sidki's filter set also seemed to be more complete in terms of blocking ads whereas I had to add quite a few more filters to privoxy manually.

However, the biggest con to proxomitron and sidki filter set is that it seems like you should never bother to expect any updates. Last update to sidki was about a year ago.

 

There is also BFilter.

Im a little concerned about the Web Proxy Server aspect of this. Can users on the internet use Proxomitron as a Proxy Server?

I loaded Proxomitron and then set the Level to 6 and it wouldnt even let me sign into Wilders. Then I set it to Level 1. But I had problems with Browser slowdown. So I removed it. Still contemplating using one of these in my system though...perhaps on only one Browser for special use.

 

No. Proxomitron is a web filtering proxy that is locally installed. It's not usable by anyone else.

 

Can it be exploited? what are the risks?

I want to use Privoxy to block popups/ads but the main reason I'm not using it is because I'm afraid of having privoxy may impose higher risks than nothing having one.



I heard about Polipo... it has multi-threading feature. looks good but I can't get it to work on my pc.

 

Proxomitron has very little in common with the more commonly known web or remote proxies usually referred to by the term "proxy". The potential danger with a web proxy is that it's on another PC over which you have no control. Proxomitron is on your own system. You have full control over it. It's not even an installed program as such, no registry changes, new services, etc. It's completely freestanding. Although I'm specifically naming Proxomitron in many examples, most all of them will apply to the other web filtering apps as well.

There's no risk that I'm aware of to using a web content filtering application like Privoxy or Proxomitron. With a good set of filters, they reduce the risks of your browser being exploited. They can filter out and/or modify much more than ads. Most any content that can be rendered by the browser can be filtered by Proxomitron. This can even include code for unpatched browser exploits if the user has a sample of the code to base a filter on.

I've been using Proxomitron for better than 5 years and consider it to be part of my core security package. The application itself won't be updated any more, but I see nothing about the app itself that needs it. It's the filters that need updating to keep pace with changing web content. Several are doing that. With knowledge of HTML and javascript, you can write your own. You can also select what you want from the different filter sets and assemble your own from that. Mine is a combination of the originals, Grypen, Sidki, Andrew, JDlist, and a few of my own. The JDlist filters are old, but are quite an education for anyone who wants to learn to write filters.

Regarding Proxomitron and web speed, good filtering will speed up the loading of web pages by filtering out the useless content. Most of the time when it seems that web filtering software is slowing your browser, it's usually due to incorrect system proxy settings and/or firewall rules. These apps use loopback (localhost) connections. Your firewalls have to be configured to allow your browsers to connect back your your own PC on the port that Proxomitron is configured to use, port 8080 by default. Most browsers want to establish loopback connections even when they can connect directly to the web. Most 3rd party browsers will continue to work properly if these are blocked, but Internet Explorer can become very sluggish at times if it isn't allowed to.

When using a premade filterset, don't just load up an advanced or high level set. Look through the individual filters. Most sets have filters that either block cookies or make them session cookies. With Proxomitron, each individual filter can be enabled and disabled. Go through the filters, select what fits your needs, and make the filterset your own.

 

Hi All, this is my first "actual" post. I came across Privoxy first and so I'm using that. Right now, I'm just feeling my way along with it, limiting my activity to the user.action file and quite happy with the way things are going.

Since I'm using Chrome, I needed something that would actually block download of unwanted content.

But I'm really happy to see a thread going here on the subject.