Privoxy 3.0.17 User Manual
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# 3. What's New in this Release

Privoxy 3.0.17 is a stable release. The changes since 3.0.16 stable are:

- Fixed last-chunk-detection for responses where the content was small enough to be read with the body, causing Privoxy to wait for the end of the content until the server closed the connection or the request timed out. Reported by "Karsten" in #3028326.

- Responses with status code 204 weren't properly detected as body-less like RFC2616 mandates. Like the previous bug, this caused Privoxy to wait for the end of the content until the server closed the connection or the request timed out. Fixes #3022042 and #3025553, reported by a user with no visible name. Most likely also fixes a bunch of other AJAX-related problem reports that got closed in the past due to insufficient information and lack of feedback.

- Fixed an ACL bug that made it impossible to build a blacklist. Usually the ACL directives are used in a whitelist, which worked as expected, but blacklisting is still useful for public proxies where one only needs to deny known abusers access.

- Added LOG_LEVEL_RECEIVED to log the not-yet-parsed data read from the network. This should make debugging various parsing issues a lot easier.

- The IPv6 code is enabled by default on Windows versions that support it. Patch submitted by oCameLo in #2942729.

- In mingw32 versions, the user.filter file is reachable through the GUI, just like default.filter is. Feature request 3040263.

- Added the configure option --enable-large-file-support to set a few defines that are required by platforms like GNU/Linux to support files larger then 2GB. Mainly interesting for users without proper logfile management.

- Logging with "debug 16" no longer stops at the first nul byte which is pretty useless. Non-printable characters are replaced with their hex value so the result can't span multiple lines making parsing them harder then necessary.

- Privoxy logs when reading an action, filter or trust file.

- Fixed incorrect regression test markup which caused a test in 3.0.16 to fail while Privoxy itself was working correctly. While Privoxy accepts hide-referer, too, the action name is actually hide-referrer which is also the name used one the final results page, where the test expected the alias.

- CGI interface improvements:

  - In finish_http_response(), continue to add the 'Connection: close' header if the client connection will not be kept alive. Anonymously pointed out in #2987454.

  - Apostrophes in block messages no longer cause parse errors when the blocked page is viewed with JavaScript enabled. Reported by dg1727 in #3062296.

  - Fix a bunch of anchors that used underscores instead of dashes.

  - Allow to keep the client connection alive after crunching the previous request. Already opened server connections can be kept alive, too.

  - In cgi_show_url_info(), don't forget to prefix URLs that only contain http:// or https:// in the path. Fixes #2975765 reported by Adam Piggott.

  - Show the 404 CGI page if cgi_send_user_manual() is called while local user manual delivery is disabled.

- Action file improvements:

  - Enable user.filter by default. Suggested by David White in #3001830.

  - Block .sitestat.com/. Reported by johnd16 in #3002725.

  - Block .atemda.com/. Reported by johnd16 in #3002723.

  - Block js.adlink.net/. Reported by johnd16 in #3002720.

  - Block .analytics.yahoo.com/. Reported by johnd16 in #3002713.

  - Block sb.scorecardresearch.com, too. Reported by dg1727 in #2992652.

  - Fix problems noticed on Yahoo mail and news pages.

  - Remove the too broad yahoo section, only keeping the fast-redirects exception as discussed on ijbswa-devel@.

  - Don't block adesklets.sourceforge.net. Reported in #2974204.

  - Block chartbeat ping tracking. Reported in #2975895.

  - Tag CSS and image requests with cautious and medium settings, too.

  - Don't handle view.atdmt.com as image. It's used for click-throughs so users should be able to "go there anyway". Reported by Adam Piggott in #2975927.

  - Also let the refresh-tags filter remove invalid refresh tags where the 'url=' part is missing. Anonymously reported in #2986382. While at it, update the description to mention the fact that only refresh tags with refresh times above 9 seconds are covered.

  - javascript needs to be blocked with +handle-as-empty-document to work around Firefox bug 492459. So move .js blockers from +block{Might be a web-bug.} -handle-as-empty-document to +block{Might be a web-bug.} +handle-as-empty-document.

  - ijbswa-Feature Requests-3006719 - Block 160x578 Banners.

  - Block another omniture tracking domain.

  - Added a range-requests tagger.

  - Added two sections to get Flickr's Ajax interface working with default pre-settings. If you change the configuration to block cookies by default, you'll need additional exceptions. Reported by Mathias Homann in #3101419 and by Patrick on ijbswa-users@.

- Documentation improvements:

  - Explicitly mention how to match all URLs.

  - Consistently recommend socks5 in the Tor FAQ entry and mention its advantage compared to socks4a. Reported by David in #2960129.

  - Slightly improve the explanation of why filtering may appear slower than it is.

  - Grammar fixes for the ACL section.

  - Fixed a link to the 'intercepting' entry and add another one.

  - Rename the 'Other' section to 'Mailing Lists' and reword it to make it clear that nobody is forced to use the trackers

  - Note that 'anonymously' posting on the trackers may not always be possible.

  - Suggest to enable debug 32768 when suspecting parsing problems.

- Privoxy-Log-Parser improvements:

  - Gather statistics for ressources, methods, and HTTP versions used by the client.

  - Also gather statistics for blocked and redirected requests.

  - Provide the percentage of keep-alive offers the client accepted.

  - Add a --url-statistics-threshold option.

  - Add a --host-statistics-threshold option to also gather statistics about how many request where made per host.

  - Fix a bug in handle_loglevel_header() where a 'scan: ' got lost.

  - Add a --shorten-thread-ids option to replace the thread id with a decimal number.

  - Accept and ignore: Looks like we got the last chunk together with the server headers. We better stop reading.

  - Accept and ignore: Continue hack in da house.

  - Accept and higlight: Rejecting connection from 10.0.0.2. Maximum number of connections reached.

  - Accept and highlight: Loading actions file: /usr/local/etc/privoxy/default.action

  - Accept and highlight: Loading filter file: /usr/local/etc/privoxy/default.filter

  - Accept and highlight: Killed all-caps Host header line: HOST: bestproxydb.com

  - Accept and highlight: Reducing expected bytes to 0. Marking the server socket tainted after throwing 4 bytes away.

  - Accept: Merged multiple header lines to: 'X-FORWARDED-PROTO: http X-HOST: 127.0.0.1'

- Code cleanups:

  - Remove the next member from the client_state struct. Only the main thread needs access to all client states so give it its own struct.

  - Garbage-collect request_contains_null_bytes().

  - Ditch redundant code in unload_configfile().

  - Ditch LogGetURLUnderCursor() which doesn't seem to be used anywhere.

  - In write_socket(), remove the write-only variable write_len in an ifdef __OS2__ block. Spotted by cppcheck.

  - In connect_to(), don't declare the variable 'flags' on OS/2 where it isn't used. Spotted by cppcheck.

  - Limit the scope of various variables. Spotted by cppcheck.

  - In add_to_iob(), turn an interestingly looking for loop into a boring while loop.

  - Code cleanup in preparation for external filters.

  - In listen_loop(), mention the socket on which we accepted the connection, not just the source IP address.

  - In write_socket(), also log the socket we're writing to.

  - In log_error(), assert that escaped characters get logged completely or not at all.

  - In log_error(), assert that ival and sval have reasonable values. There's no reason not to abort() if they don't.

  - Remove an incorrect cgi_error_unknown() call in a cannnot-happen-situation in send_crunch_response().

  - Clean up white-space in http_response definition and move the crunch_reason to the beginning.

  - Turn http_response.reason into an enum and rename it to http_response.crunch_reason.

  - Silence a 'gcc (Debian 4.3.2-1.1) 4.3.2' warning on i686 GNU/Linux.

  - Fix white-space in a log message in remove_chunked_transfer_coding(). While at it, add a note that the message doesn't seem to be entirely correct and should be improved later on.

- GNUmakefile improvements:

  - Use $(SSH) instead of ssh, so one only needs to specify a username once.

  - Removed references to the action feedback thingy that hasn't been working for years.

  - Consistently use shell.sourceforge.net instead of shell.sf.net so one doesn't need to check server fingerprints twice.

  - Removed GNUisms in the webserver and webactions targets so they work with standard tar.

## 3.1. Note to Upgraders

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` has been merged into the `default.action` file.

- 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.

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