freedombox-privoxy

James Vasile james@jamesvasile.com

One thing many people seem to agree the FreedomBox should do is web filtering for privacy and ad-removal. Toward that end, this is a first draft version of a privoxy package for FreedomBox.

To use, you can do the usual

 cd freedombox-privoxy
 make
 sudo make install

Or if you are on a Debian system:

 cd freedombox-privoxy
 sudo apt-get build-dep privoxy
 sudo apt-get install logrotate docbook-website dpatch
 make deb
 sudo apt-get purge privoxy # yes, this is necessary the first time
 sudo dpkg -i Debian/*.deb
 sudo service freedombox-privoxy restart

If you want to see what I changed, look in Debian/freedombox-privacy/debian/patches/9.dpatch after doing the make deb. I'll get some binary packages up for x86 and Dream Plug soon.

This package differs from the standard Debian privoxy package in a few key ways.

First (and most importantly) it doesn't just listen on localhost. The plan is eventually to control access to it via iptables, so by default it listens to the world. Be careful with that if your FreedomBox is reachable via public net.
Second, I imported the https-everywhere ruleset as a privoxy action file and modified the privoxy binary to handle it.
Third, I imported the easyprivacy ruleset from Ad-Block Plus as a privoxy action file. Easyprivacy is not included in ABP and most users are unaware that they can add it in. To me, that makes it a good candidate for inclusion here.
Fourth, I started to pull in the easylist ruleset from ABP. It is impossible to fully duplicate easylist with a proxy because the proxy lacks information the browser uses to make more nuanced decisions about what to block. Scripted import of easylist might be buggy, and this needs more investigation.
Fifth, I lowered the amount of filtering compared to the stock privoxy config (see the match-all.action file for details). I did this because unlike a proxy running on your local machine, a proxy that clients don't control should be a bit more careful about breaking sites. I'm trying to get down to a level where we don't break anything and then seeing how we build up from there.

If you are a privoxy user, please do give this package a test run and report any problems to:

 https://github.com/jvasile/freedombox-privoxy/issues

Further work will include writing a script to test all the https-everywhere rules and discard the ones that are broken.
As well as one to periodically check for new regexes. Anybody who wants to contribute to writing that is welcome to jump on in!

Dependencies

Privoxy

Internet Junkbuster

Privoxy is in turn based on the Internet Junkbuster originally written by and copyright (C) 1997 Anonymous Coders and Junkbusters Corporation. http://www.junkbusters.com The Internet Junkbuster was released under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later.

https-everywhere

This package downloads https-everywhere, which is released under GNU General Public License version 2 or later and has the following copyright information:

jvasile / freedombox-privoxy

readme

freedombox-privoxy

Dependencies

Privoxy

Internet Junkbuster

https-everywhere

git2changelog