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Copyright © 2001-2023 by Privoxy Developers <[email protected]>
Some source code is based on code Copyright © 1997 by Anonymous Coders and Junkbusters, Inc.
Portions of this document are "borrowed" from the original Junkbuster (tm) FAQ, and modified as appropriate for Privoxy.
Privoxy is free software; you can redistribute and/or modify its source code under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the license, or (at your option) any later version.
The same is true for Privoxy binaries unless they are linked with a mbed TLS or OpenSSL version that is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license in which case you can redistribute and/or modify the Privoxy binaries under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the license, or (at your option) any later version.
Privoxy is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the license for details.
A long time ago, there was the Internet Junkbuster, by Anonymous Coders and Junkbusters Corporation. This saved many users a lot of pain in the early days of web advertising and user tracking.
But the web, its protocols and standards, and with it, the techniques for forcing ads on users, give up autonomy over their browsing, and for tracking them, keeps evolving. Unfortunately, the Internet Junkbuster did not. Version 2.0.2, published in 1998, was the last official release, available from Junkbusters Corporation. Fortunately, it had been released under the GNU GPL, which allowed further development by others.
So Stefan Waldherr started maintaining an improved version of the software, to which eventually a number of people contributed patches. It could already replace banners with a transparent image, and had a first version of pop-up killing, but it was still very closely based on the original, with all its limitations, such as the lack of HTTP/1.1 support, flexible per-site configuration, or content modification. The last release from this effort was version 2.0.2-10, published in 2000.
Then, some developers picked up the thread, and started turning the software inside out, upside down, and then reassembled it, adding many new features along the way.
The result of this is Privoxy, whose first stable version, 3.0, was released August, 2002.
As of 2012 the Junkbusters Corporation's website (http://www.junkbusters.com/) has been shut down, but Privoxy is still actively maintained.