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Feature requests: Tray icon actions, SSL, NT service, ...
Jun. 30, 2006, 06:25 AM
Post: #1
Feature requests: Tray icon actions, SSL, NT service, ...
1 Make it easy to turn forward proxy on/off from tray icon. Make it possible to select from a preconfigured list. Same as Proxomitron.
2 SSL. I know it's been discussed before. I have configured a list of sites I use often to go through BFilter and everything else to go through Proxomitron - and eventually Tor. Lack of SSL support forced me to add exceptions for sites, such as addons.mozilla.org to my .pac file.
3 Ability to run as a service would be great. Anyone tried doing with srvany? Useful on machines with multiple users, esp if using FUS.
4 Ability to copy from Request Log. Like Privoxy. Or even better: Right Click > Copy gets whole line if nothing selected.

I've been using BFilter for two weeks now and I'm very pleased with it.

One comment: Memory usage can get fairly high. Much higher than Proxomitron. Memory usage doubles or triples after having viewed the Request Log and doesn't go back down again.
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Jun. 30, 2006, 07:55 AM
Post: #2
RE: Feature requests: Tray icon actions, SSL, NT service, ...
Quote:1 Make it easy to turn forward proxy on/off from tray icon. Make it possible to select from a preconfigured list. Same as Proxomitron.
I like this idea. It's going to be particularly useful when BFilter supports socks proxies to be able to forward to Tor directly. Support for socks proxies is coming in the next version. Because going from a single proxy to multiple ones is not that easy to implement, it's going to have to wait for another version or two.


Quote:2 SSL. I know it's been discussed before. I have configured a list of sites I use often to go through BFilter and everything else to go through Proxomitron - and eventually Tor. Lack of SSL support forced me to add exceptions for sites, such as addons.mozilla.org to my .pac file.
If you want just forwarding (not filtering), then there are good news for you, as HTTPS forwarding is coming in the next version.


Quote:3 Ability to run as a service would be great. Anyone tried doing with srvany? Useful on machines with multiple users, esp if using FUS.
Well, you are not the first one to ask for it. I haven't looked at the subject yet, so I don't know how hard will it be to implement an NT service, but I feel negative about it. The main reason for negative feelings is that the service won't have a GUI, so you loose much of the convenience associated with it. I suppose it's possible to have a service with a GUI, but it's certainly not going to be easy to implement.


Quote:4 Ability to copy from Request Log. Like Privoxy. Or even better: Right Click > Copy gets whole line if nothing selected.
It's already implemented. Double click copies a single URL, Ctrl+C copies the whole list. It's documented in the legend.


Quote:One comment: Memory usage can get fairly high. Much higher than Proxomitron. Memory usage doubles or triples after having viewed the Request Log and doesn't go back down again.
I just tried opening the request log, and memory usage went up by about 650K. After closing it, memory usage didn't go down. It could be a memory leak, or just memory fragmentation. I'll investigate it further.
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Jun. 30, 2006, 02:20 PM
Post: #3
RE: Feature requests: Tray icon actions, SSL, NT service, ...
Quote:4 Ability to copy from Request Log. Like Privoxy. Or even better: Right Click > Copy gets whole line if nothing selected.
Quote:It's already implemented. Double click copies a single URL, Ctrl+C copies the whole list. It's documented in the legend.
Indeed it is! Excellent, that way is probably even more useful than privoxy.

Quote:One comment: Memory usage can get fairly high. Much higher than Proxomitron. Memory usage doubles or triples after having viewed the Request Log and doesn't go back down again.
Quote:I just tried opening the request log, and memory usage went up by about 650K. After closing it, memory usage didn't go down. It could be a memory leak, or just memory fragmentation. I'll investigate it further.
Here it will go from 2 or 3 MB to 6 or 7 MB. Right now it's on 6,xxxK after having been out and left on idle. When I wrote the above post it was using 2,000K.

Re NT Service: Privoxy run using srvany will have a gui and a trayicon. Since I mastered tray icons using Visual Basic I wrote my own versions of a few utilities to run as a service - for example for controlling Winamp. (It's a pain when you have two computers but the other one is mostly used by someone else [but has speakers attached].)

Having to use srvany wouldn't be elegant I know.
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Jun. 30, 2006, 03:28 PM
Post: #4
RE: Feature requests: Tray icon actions, SSL, NT service, ...
6 to 7 MB is a normal memory consumpton for BFilter. It starts at 5M (not cold start, but after a few requests), and the JavaScript engine is configured to do garbage collection at every 2 MB allocated. You can see low memory consumption such as 2 MB after a lot of idle time, but I think it just means that Windows has swapped out the unused parts.
I've run a leak detector, and it didn't find any leaks. So I guess it's just memory fragmentation. I'd say that unless it goes as high as 10 MB, it's OK.

As for NT service, I would certainly prefer people to use things like srvany, because that would save me the work of implementing it myself. I'd like to hear how well does BFilter run under srvany, and what are the pros and cons compared to having a native NT service functionality.
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Jul. 01, 2006, 07:29 AM
Post: #5
RE: Feature requests: Tray icon actions, SSL, NT service, ...
It seems like all the action is with BFilter going forward!

I'm now running BFilter using srvany. Smile! Took three minutes to configure - using same method as for Privoxy* - and it seems fine. I'll document in a new thread.

Quote:If you want just forwarding (not filtering), then there are good news for you, as HTTPS forwarding is coming in the next version.
Yes I think this is great.
Quote:...It's going to be particularly useful when BFilter supports socks proxies to be able to forward to Tor directly.
HTTPS would forward through SOCKS (to Tor) I presume? Important as pages might include a mixture of http and https (and ftp) resources in order to deviously figure out where you're actually coming from.

* Re Privoxy hacking to run as service, as mentioned I'm fine with using srvany now, but someone here:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php...tid=311118
...managed to hack Privoxy to have it running as a service. I don't use it because that binary is not the latest version and I haven't looked at the code for the patch either. Just thought it might be of tangential interest.
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Jul. 01, 2006, 08:00 AM
Post: #6
RE: Feature requests: Tray icon actions, SSL, NT service, ...
Quote:HTTPS would forward through SOCKS (to Tor) I presume? Important as pages might include a mixture of http and https (and ftp) resources in order to deviously figure out where you're actually coming from.
HTTPS will work with any configuration: direct connection, through upstream http proxy, or through socks proxy. Also, specifically for Tor, I implemented socks4a, so that domain names would be resolved through Tor, not through your ISP.
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Jul. 19, 2006, 01:46 PM
Post: #7
RE: Feature requests: Tray icon actions, SSL, NT service, ...
jgwright Wrote:3 Ability to run as a service would be great. Anyone tried doing with srvany? Useful on machines with multiple users, esp if using FUS.
Use scheduled tasks - schedule a task and specify to start "at system startup". For all practical purposes, it becomes a service then. The only difference is that you control it from scheduled tasks rather than from MMC; and that in order to change settings, you have to stop the task, run bfilter "manually", change the settings, quit, restart the task.
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Jul. 21, 2006, 03:03 PM
Post: #8
RE: Feature requests: Tray icon actions, SSL, NT service, ...
jart Wrote:the service won't have a GUI, so you loose much of the convenience associated with it. I suppose it's possible to have a service with a GUI, but it's certainly not going to be easy to implement.
The easiest is to have separate application (or, even better, MMC snap-in) for editing the settings, and the service polling those settings periodically.

Vaidm Rapp
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Jul. 21, 2006, 04:12 PM
Post: #9
RE: Feature requests: Tray icon actions, SSL, NT service, ...
That's not what I call easy.
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Jul. 21, 2006, 07:21 PM
Post: #10
RE: Feature requests: Tray icon actions, SSL, NT service, ...
actually, the application for editing the settings may be the same today's bfilter - upon start, it would fail to grab the port, but that does not matter. The only thing is to have the service periodically looking at the settings in case they were changed.
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Jul. 21, 2006, 08:08 PM
Post: #11
RE: Feature requests: Tray icon actions, SSL, NT service, ...
That may sound easy, but I'd say it's maybe 5-10 times as much work as implementing SSL forwarding. Also, this kind of work is really boring.
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