Building a simple proxy checker tool

In case you’re trying to change the configuration of your proxy server you might want to check what appears in the logs of a web server returning data to your proxy. Maybe you want to suppress certain HTTP header fields or make sure that the browser’s user agent is forged correctly.

This post discusses a PHP script which tries to display helpful information from the web server’s perspective. Although it may not be complete you can easily extend it to suit your needs.

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Caching with dynamic proxy classes

In my last post I used AspectJ to implement a cache that stored the returned result of methods with a special annotation (@Cachable). If you can’t use AspectJ you may want to use a dynamic proxy class: in this post I’ll present a solution for this.

You can download the Eclipse project as a tar or zip file or view the code online here.

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Enhancing your privacy further with Squid and Tor

In my last post I described how to use Squid and Privoxy to enhance your privacy while surfing the internet. We want to push this a little bit further by adding onion routing with Tor. If you heard about Tor but don’t really know how it works, I suggest reading the Tor overview first.

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Enhancing your privacy using Squid and Privoxy

If you would like to surf the internet anonymously I’ll show you how to use Squid and Privoxy for this purpose. First we’ll configure Squid to filter some HTTP header fields. After this, web servers will most likely think that we aren’t requesting content through a proxy but rather directly with our browser. We will see that we can’t manipulate all HTTP header fields without running into problems: Privoxy will help us here.

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