Polipo changes maintainer

by phobos | December 11, 2009

Congratulations to Chrisd for assuming maintainership of the Polipo codebase from Juliusz. The full announcement is available at the mailing list archives.

Why Chris?

Chrisd was a 2009 Google Summer of Code for Tor/EFF. His project was Polipo Portability Enhancements. Chris has proven himself to be a very competent coder and able to design and implement features as needed. He even wrote a SOCKS layer fix for Firefox bugs, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=280661.

What does this mean to Tor?

It means we have a fantastic new coder maintaining the polipo codebase. Bugfixes, features, and more frequent releases should help improve polipo beyond where it is today.

Is Tor going to control Polipo?

We're not going to influence Chris on the direction of Polipo, but provide him support, volunteers, and an infrastructure to let him do what he needs to do. Juliusz created polipo and got it off to a great start. We're going to support Chris in continuing the progress. The world still wants an http proxy that's modern, fast, and flexible. Privoxy is a fine alternative to polipo, perhaps the two projects can come together.

What's happening to Juliusz?

Juliusz is a busy person. His free time has been concentrated on Babel, http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/babel/, over the past year. Juliusz is still a committer to polipo. We appreciate all of his help during the transition and for the years of maintenance of polipo.

Comments

Please note that the comment area below has been archived.

Polipo isnt being used as a "privacy guardian", but rather as a socks pipelining shim between Firefox and Tor. None of its filtering capabilities, if any, are enabled.

Torbutton is used to stop script and content related privacy leaks.
You can install Adblock Plus or RequestPolicy add-ons to remove ads and cross-site requests.

December 12, 2009

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>On December 11th, 2009 Anonymous said:
>sorry but Polipo sucks hard as privacy guardian

Evidence, please.

December 13, 2009

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Great! Does this new patch fix the issue of polipo completely not working with the latest Tor packages for Mac and the latest Firefox with TorButton?

December 18, 2009

In reply to phobos

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Hi,

Thx for your contributions to the Tor project and this blog.

I detailed my problem using latest Torbutton on Flyspray #1021 (I had the previous "internal error" message with TB 1.2.2, now changed (but possibly same error message causing issue) to present TB 1.2.3 message. As mentioned in that report, doesn't matter if I use default check box Pilipo, or deselect and use the manual custom proxies settings (which are installed by default by TB?)...same error message.

Other than mozilla's forum, 2008 TB entry w/same error message I can't find a forum that shows where the problem is in the configuration setup?

http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=tr&forumId…

Is there anyone who has posted anywhere, the entire set of screenshots for OS X setup w/FF 3.6 or earlier?

TIA,

teadrinker (not the Anon post above)

December 14, 2009

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Privoxy for life!

I'll never switch from Privoxy to Polipo or another proxy, Privoxy just works so well I kiss the code and dance around proclaiming how wonderful Privoxy is! Woot!

Offtopic, yes, but I cannot see any benefits of using Polipo with Tor above Privoxy with Tor.

BTW, why not implement some ascii captchas like fscked.org torbutton author uses on his site (thanks, torbutton author for torbutton and for your ascii captchas!) for those of us who don't browse w/ images loaded. The ascii captchas his site has are actually readable every time. Thanks! Tor is great!

December 15, 2009

In reply to phobos

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I'm wondering if you could tell me how to disable the
pop-up that tells me a new TOR version is a available
every time I start up my Firefox.
I am happy with Privoxy, I don't want to switch to Polipo
just yet.

I realize that it's purpose is to annoy; but what a
disrespectful thing to do to a TOR user
because she chooses to ignore the pop-up (about
a thousand times).

December 19, 2009

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I have the current stable version of Tor/vidalia/polipo running on Mac. Tor works fine when enabled on firefox. However, since I installed the bundle all my other browsers and various apps can no longer access the web. I checked proxy settings and can't figure out the problem. Sometimes I get error message stating "request denied" (from polipo ?) Suggestions ? Thanks for all you do !

what bundle are you using? the latest on the easy-download page should work without issue. older versions had a bug where vidalia didn't pass the config file to polipo on start.

January 03, 2010

In reply to phobos

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Updated to vidalia bundle-0.2.1.21-0.2.6 and issues persist. Connections from other apps are still being denied access. Please advise, thanks. BTW Happy New Year!

January 06, 2010

In reply to phobos

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I uninstalled via instructions here:

http://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-osx.html.en

*but* could find no installed /Library/Torbutton file to remove, nor step #4 which says to remove Vidalia from your home directory, do they mean the d/l dmg file as I have nothing currently in *any* /Library I have searched on?

3. Remove /Library/Torbutton from your system.
4. In your home directory, go to Library, remove the Vidalia directory

I installed the latest bundle now available since my prior message, where the latest was 0.2.5 as of Dec. 3rd, now updated to 0.2.6 (to match the Intel version), checking the 'changes list' I see nothing that would pertain to the problem I continue to get, the bundle also installed a newer version of Tor Button, up from 1.2.3 > 1.2.4

Checking, still no installed /Library/Torbutton file to remove, before updating to 1.2.4, or after :(

Still getting this from latest FF 3.5.7 after successfully getting Vidalia (advanced message log) & TB 1.2.4 enabled:

The proxy server is refusing connections

Firefox is configured to use a proxy server that is refusing connections.

* Check the proxy settings to make sure that they are correct.

* Contact your network administrator to make sure the proxy server is
working.

Frustrated, is there forum on the net where someone knows how to troubleshoot Tor installation for PPC Macs can help us go step-by-step with screenshots?

shall I try the older 0.2.5 alpha release for PPC?

teadrinker

btw, preview of this post shows no punctuation

I found a solution. Deleted the privoxy folder from my startup items and rebooted. All is as it should be. Hope this helps. Thanks for responses.

January 06, 2010

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LOL,

Comment window shows punctuation...

looks terrible w/o punctuation as posted

teadrinker

January 17, 2010

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Clicking
https://wiki.torproject.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/PrivoxyConfig
causes Firefox to throw up a warning page containing
"
This Connection is Untrusted
You have asked Firefox to connect
securely to svn.torproject.org, but we can't confirm that your connection is secure.
Normally, when you try to connect securely,
sites will present trusted identification to prove that you are
going to the right place. However, this site's identity can't be verified.

What Should I Do?
If you usually connect to
this site without problems, this error could mean that someone is
trying to impersonate the site, and you shouldn't continue.

Technical Details
svn.torproject.org uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown.

(Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)

I Understand the Risks

If you understand what's going on, you
can tell Firefox to start trusting this site's identification.
Even if you trust the site, this error could mean that someone is
tampering with your connection.

Don't add an exception unless
you know there's a good reason why this site doesn't use trusted identification.
"

August 11, 2010

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Some of us use self signed certificates to save money.
My services are free and to only a select few people who understand why I do this.
Example, you want to do personal email while at the office and don't want the IT department reading your email on the servers spool.
My users just type "https://XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX/webmail" and they are connected vis 256Bit encryption. Of course that's after accepting the self signed certificate.
My wife uses it from work for email, and she also does a VPN connection to her Linux desktop to browse sites her company needs not to know.
Sometimes she is actually looking for a better job.
Don't want that known HUH?
What's so darn funny is the IT department where she works is so MicroSnot centric and click the button only they have no idea how to put up a decent firewall.
Maybe someday they will become enlightened but for now SSL is perfect for private communications.

December 03, 2010

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Made it through the installation docs for Ubuntu, until "(sudo) /etc/init.d/polipo restart". There is no polipo script whatsoever in /etc/init.d