In order to keep my web browsing at work private, I’ve been proxying all my requests through a Squid proxy on my hosted box. By the magic of Secure Shell (SSH), I tunnel from my local machine to my hosted box and reroute all connections going to local port 8080 to port 3128 at the remote end. This set up encrypts all my web traffic and bypasses any transparent proxies which may be set up in the office.
While nattering about this setup last week, someone mentioned Privoxy. This brought up memories of looking at it briefly many moons ago, but dropping it quickly; I couldn’t remember why.
Looking again, the feature list is enticing: ‘capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data and HTTP headers, controlling access, and removing ads and other obnoxious Internet junk’. I installed it.
After downloading some recommended actions from http://www.neilvandyke.org/privoxy-rules/ I reconfigured my browser to use that, rather than the Squid service.
I’m happy with the system – the default rules block the majority of ads I see on websites, negating the need for using something like AdBlock, and also strip out the forwarding and referrer headers, tracking bugs and various nasty browser tricks (javascript nastiness, basically). I used this vanilla set up over the weekend.
This morning I tweaked some rules myself – added a filter which removes all adverts from a client’s site (it now looks much better!) and started playing with removing Facebook’s ads too – not an easy task. I also managed to integrate it into Squid the benefits of both can be utilised.
Tonight I signed up for Google Voice. Google offer sending and receiving text messages for free in the USA. Given mine and Emma’s November bills for international texting made our eyes water, this is great news! The only downside is I will be using an email interface for messages rather than my iPhone’s native ‘Message’ application. But I can live with that. Emma will just be SMSing a generic US number, so no change for her.