WebCleaner 2.19 (Win/Lin) - A filtering HTTP proxy.

[Gordon Darling]

An alternative to The Proxomitron or Privoxy

WebCleaner 2.19 - A filtering HTTP proxy.

About:
WebCleaner is a filtering HTTP proxy. It can disable animated GIFs,
compress documents on-the-fly (with gzip), add/remove HTTP headers, and
remove unwanted HTML (adverts, Javascript, etc.). It can be customized to
your needs.

Changes:
URL quoting on redirects has been fixed. The HTML configuration now has a
favicon and the block message is now more concise. The ImageReducer and
Compress filter modules have been fixed.

Release focus: Major bugfixes
License: GNU General Public License (GPL) Project URL:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/webcleaner/

Homepage: http://webcleaner.sourceforge.net
Tar/GZ:
http://freshmeat.net/redir/webcleaner/11389/url_tgz/webcleaner-2.16.tar.gz
Debian package:
http://freshmeat.net/redir/webcleaner/11389/url_deb/unstable

"Features
HTTP/1.1 support
HTTPS proxy CONNECT and optional SSL gateway support integrated HTML
parser, removes unwanted HTML (adverts, flash, etc.) integrated JavaScript
engine, allows popup filtering detection and correction of known HTML
security flaws compress documents on-the-fly (with gzip) disable animated
GIFs
filter images by size, removes banner adverts reduce images to
low-bandwidth JPEGs
remove/add/modify arbitrary HTTP headers usage of SquidGuard blacklists
antivirus filter module
Basic, Digest and (untested) NTLM proxy authentication support per-host
access control
configurable over a themable web interface

Why should I use WebCleaner?

The first feature that sets WebCleaner apart from other proxies is exact
HTML filtering, and this removes a lot of advertisings. The filter does
not just replace some strings, the proxy parses all HTML data. The parser
is fast (written in C) and can cope with every broken HTML page out there;
if the parser does not recognize HTML structures, it just passes the data
over to the proxy until it recognizes a tag again. No valid HTML data is
ever discarded or dropped.

Another feature is the JavaScript filtering: JavaScript data is executed
in the integrated Spidermonkey JavaScript engine which is also used by the
Mozilla browser suite. This eliminates all JavaScript obfuscation, popups,
and document.write() stuff, but the other JavaScript functions still work
as usual.

Exact HTML filtering has another good side-effect: it is possible to
detect and prevent known security flaws in HTML processors. Several known
buffer overflow exploits or Denial of Service attacks are detected and
fixed by the HtmlSecurity class.

Furthermore, WebCleaner can filter SSL traffic used in https:// URLs. See
the SSL gateway documentation for more info."

Regards
Gordon

 

[John Latter]

An alternative to The Proxomitron or Privoxy

WebCleaner 2.19 - A filtering HTTP proxy.

About:
WebCleaner is a filtering HTTP proxy. It can disable animated GIFs,
compress documents on-the-fly (with gzip), add/remove HTTP headers, and
remove unwanted HTML (adverts, Javascript, etc.). It can be customized to
your needs.

Changes:
URL quoting on redirects has been fixed. The HTML configuration now has a
favicon and the block message is now more concise. The ImageReducer and
Compress filter modules have been fixed.

Release focus: Major bugfixes
License: GNU General Public License (GPL) Project URL:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/webcleaner/

Homepage: http://webcleaner.sourceforge.net
Tar/GZ:
http://freshmeat.net/redir/webcleaner/11389/url_tgz/webcleaner-2.16.tar.gz
Debian package:
http://freshmeat.net/redir/webcleaner/11389/url_deb/unstable

"Features
HTTP/1.1 support
HTTPS proxy CONNECT and optional SSL gateway support integrated HTML
parser, removes unwanted HTML (adverts, flash, etc.) integrated JavaScript
engine, allows popup filtering detection and correction of known HTML
security flaws compress documents on-the-fly (with gzip) disable animated
GIFs
filter images by size, removes banner adverts reduce images to
low-bandwidth JPEGs
remove/add/modify arbitrary HTTP headers usage of SquidGuard blacklists
antivirus filter module
Basic, Digest and (untested) NTLM proxy authentication support per-host
access control
configurable over a themable web interface

Why should I use WebCleaner?

The first feature that sets WebCleaner apart from other proxies is exact
HTML filtering, and this removes a lot of advertisings. The filter does
not just replace some strings, the proxy parses all HTML data. The parser
is fast (written in C) and can cope with every broken HTML page out there;
if the parser does not recognize HTML structures, it just passes the data
over to the proxy until it recognizes a tag again. No valid HTML data is
ever discarded or dropped.

Another feature is the JavaScript filtering: JavaScript data is executed
in the integrated Spidermonkey JavaScript engine which is also used by the
Mozilla browser suite. This eliminates all JavaScript obfuscation, popups,
and document.write() stuff, but the other JavaScript functions still work
as usual.

Exact HTML filtering has another good side-effect: it is possible to
detect and prevent known security flaws in HTML processors. Several known
buffer overflow exploits or Denial of Service attacks are detected and
fixed by the HtmlSecurity class.

Furthermore, WebCleaner can filter SSL traffic used in https:// URLs. See
the SSL gateway documentation for more info."

Regards
Gordon

In the 'Notes' section at:

http://webcleaner.sourceforge.net/

it says:

"Surf performance will decrease, especially with the Rewriter and the
Replacer module enabled. It will decrease further with JavaScript
parsing enabled, since the proxy downloads and parses <script src="">
tags in the background."

I presume this will also be true of Proximitron & Privoxy. I'm on
dial-up, don't know a lot about this kinda stuff, and was wondering if
anyone knew to what degree surf performance is degraded for any of
them - though I guess (as indicated above) it will depend upon how
many rules/options are enabled.

--

John Latter

Model of an Internal Evolutionary Mechanism (based on an extension to homeostasis) linking Stationary-Phase Mutations to the Baldwin Effect.
http://members.aol.com/jorolat/TEM.html

'Where Darwin meets Lamarck?' Discussion Egroup
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evomech

 

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[Italy Anonymous Remailer]

An alternative to The Proxomitron or Privoxy

WebCleaner 2.19 - A filtering HTTP proxy.

snip

Sounds interesting. I've just submitted the post to the Proxomitron user
Yahoo group for feedback. It looks like it could be a very viable
alternative, but I'll wait for the (hopefully objective) feedback from the
experienced filter writers.

Regards,

Scott

 

[Italy Anonymous Remailer]

An alternative to The Proxomitron or Privoxy

WebCleaner 2.19 - A filtering HTTP proxy.

snip

Sounds interesting. I've just submitted the post to the Proxomitron user
Yahoo group for feedback. It looks like it could be a very viable
alternative, but I'll wait for the (hopefully objective) feedback from the
experienced filter writers.

Regards,

Scott