[Privoxy-users] Query about enabling javascript?

[Fabian Keil]

rjb73 at protonmail.com wrote on 2020-12-24:

> I downloaded privoxy 3.0.29 earlier today on a windows 7 32-bit machine
> with the brave 1.15.76 browser,initially it did not work until i went
> into the settings in brave and clicked on "Open your computers proxy
> settings" and clicked on the Lan settings tab and manually entered
> 127.0.0.1. & port 8118 and ticked the box that says use a proxy server
> for your Lan. Then it seems to be working fine as when i used startpage
> search for my IP address it came back different and in a different
> location which is good.

Note that Privoxy by itself does not hide your IP address.

You need to chain it to another proxy like Tor to do this:
https://www.privoxy.org/faq/misc.html#IP
https://www.privoxy.org/faq/misc.html#TOR

I'm not familiar with "Brave" but as it's supposed to have
integrated Tor support I'm also wondering if you didn't
effectively only change how Tor is accessing the Internet.

Privoxy works best with Tor when configured like this:
Browser -> Privoxy -> Tor -> Internet

One can also configure it like this:
Browser -> Tor -> Privoxy -> Internet

In the second case Privoxy only sees encrypted connections
from Tor and can only forward them without filtering ads etc.

You can try to access http://p.p/ to see if Privoxy is
getting http requests from the browser.

> I wanted to ask please if i should be allowing javascript to be enabled
> as when ever i click edit on the privoxy icon in the taskbar brave asks
> to enable javascript and when i allowed it and blocked all the requests
> for everything else,location,Usb devices,sound,images,payment handlers
> etc except allowing javascript i wondered if javascript should stay
> blocked on each page that opens in brave whilst using privoxy?

While Privoxy has some filters that affect JavaScript,
it can't reliably suppress JavaScript and thus does not
protect against JavaScript-based attacks.

The browser is in a much better position to reliably suppress
JavaScript so if your browser allows to disable JavaScript,
and that is what you want, you should probably continue to
leave this job to the browser.
 
Fabian
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