[Privoxy-devel] Future of Privoxy and comparison to mitmproxy

[Ian Silvester]

Hi Frank,

I can see the benefits of the idea - it would free the Privoxy project from dealing with the transmission protocol to allow focus on the core filtering and blocking functionality - however I can see two issues:

- licence incompatibility - Privoxy is GPL whilst mitmproxy is MIT. The MIT license allows downstream proprietary use whilst Privoxy cleaves to the 'free software' path of expecting downstream usage to also be free.
- mitmproxy add-ons are written in Python whilst Privoxy is C - wouldn't such a move imply rewriting Privoxy?

Despite these potential issues I am very interested to hear what other developers think of this proposal.

Ian


On Mon, 31 Jul 2023, at 18:55, Frank Herbrand wrote:
> Dear developers,
>
> Privoxy has been available for a very long time now and is constantly
> being developed. I would venture to guess that the developers, as well
> as the users, are on average as old as I am. For the last few years,
> almost all WWW communication has been encrypted via https. Privoxy has
> launched https inspection for this purpose. The necessary transfer of
> the "certificate authority" into the client applications is likely to be
> an increasing problem, since it is precisely this hacker trick that is
> taken into account as a risk in the clients.
>
> The team around mitmproxy, as the integration of a proxy as a
> man-in-the-middle, has put a lot of effort into their project to meet
> this challenge.
>
> Wouldn't it make sense for Privoxy to be "merged" into a mitmproxy
> plugin in the future that makes the previous extensive filtering and
> blocking features "crisis-proof" in this way with regard to current and
> future browser security standardisations?
>
> What do you think about the feature development and use cases of Privoxy
> in comparisopn to mitmproxy?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Frank
>
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