Setting up Tor with Privoxy and Proxomitron

[laighleas]

Firstly, I dumped using either Privoxy or SocksCap altogether to chain Proxomitron, and socksified Proxomitron with FreeCap, running on XP sp2. Now it runs Browser ->Proxomitron+Freecap->Tor. Proxomitron's proxy settings aren't set, because Tor's port is set in FreeCap. The results are excellent: stable and does what it says on the tin.

Secondly, the Tor team aren't entirely happy with Privoxy:

We recommend Privoxy as a good scrubbing web proxy, but it's unmaintained and still has bugs, especially on Windows. While we're at it, what sensitive information is not kept safe by Privoxy? Are there other scrubbing web proxies that are more secure?
http://tor.eff.org/volunteer.html

So I mentioned Proxomitron and the Proximodo project to them. The following is Nick Mattheson's reply, which may be of interest to someone:

Proxomitron looks like really nice software. If anybody wanted to do
Tor integration with it, all they would have to do is support SOCKS4a,
or SOCKS5 with hostname addresses. No further work would be needed.

Of course, I'm not sure whether this could be done without modifying
proxomitron, which I'm not sure that the license permits.

> http://castlecops.com/forum-cat14.html
> http://prxbx.com/forums/index.php

Can you point me to the actual discussions about Tor? I didn't have
time to filter through all of these forums.

I really like the idea of expansible filters, but there are two
reasons why I think that we'll still be looking for an alternative to
Privoxy besides Proxomitron.

1. If I'm reading it right, Proxomitron's license doesn't conform to
DFSG; we need a solution that Free/Open Source software
distributions can ship on their CDs.

2. Requiring WINE to work on Linux is not the same as being portable;
most Linux users don't have or haven't installed WINE. In addition
to single-platform solutions, we need a general portable one. And
if I'm reading the license correctly, it doesn't allow anybody to
modify Proxomitron to make it portable.

This is not to put down Proxomitron at all; again, it looks like good
software, better in many ways than Privoxy. But unless I'm wrong
about the license issues (and I might be wrong, I'm not a lawyer), our
search for a better alternative to Privoxy is not complete.

Proximodo, however, looks quite promising. According to SF, it's
GPL-licensed, and it seems to be kind of sane. We might want to look
into putting work into making it suitable to replace Privoxy.
Assuming we have the spare time. Guys? (In any case, I might as well
download the code and take a look.)

thanks for the info,
--
Nick Mathewson

There's a link on the Tor site for contacting him, otherwise I can pass the email address along.

Kevin