How do I know if Privoxy is working?

How do I disable Privoxy?

From the Privoxy FAIf you want to be able to browse a web page on your PC, and not have it get redirected or filtered, why do you want to disable Privoxy?

Bypasses. I see a lot of websites that don't really need to be protected but you don't want a browser getting the wrong idea and redirecting the user to another site. It is also possible to bypass Privoxy using a number of tools, but I won't go into any details about these as there are hundreds of blog entries already about them.

Speedbump. Some web pages take an age to load - for example some online news sites will refuse to update a page for ten minutes while all the bits from the database are fetched. I wouldn't go through life at a slow pace.

Malware Scanner. While this is unlikely to apply to your non-malicious use, in rare cases Privoxy itself might be used for infection. If you have a machine you need to stay productive on and absolutely need access to everything, then you are better off without Privoxy.

How do I know if Privoxy is working?

I'm thinking it might not be a good idea to run things like wget on the same machine as Privoxy.

Can you confirm that you are running all of your web browsing from the command line? Is the web-browser running as sudo? Are there any error messages in the logs when you run the browser? The two are not the same. However, that said, if you have a specific question that can be answered by using the system to test whether it is actually working or not, that may well be the best answer.
teward: ok. Thank you for the explanation. In fact, I was asking more about using wget/curl from the command line, not about pulling through privoxy
And now that you say it is just a matter of pulling data, then there would seem to be no problem with having wget/curl running as non-privileged. mbeierl: if you have a specific question to ask, please do so. If you don't have a specific question, that's fine too.
teward: ok, that's what I was thinking. Here goes. "Does the web browser work? Or at least, is it working without errors that could be due to privoxy?"
mbeierl: I don't know how to see exactly where errors are that are not due to Privoxy, but that's because I don't use Privoxy. If there are errors, they're probably in the browser/config file.
mbeierl: i'm not familiar with that system. teward: ok, thanks. :) which would be in ~/.

How does Privoxy work?

Privoxy is a non-standard web proxy. It is completely separate from your system configuration, and can have a variety of settings that you can set with your web browser. See our wiki for more information.

What are the big benefits to using Privoxy? The main reason for using Privoxy is because of the advanced features that it has. In addition to offering a lot of configuration options, Privoxy also has a web interface which makes it possible for you to control it from any web browser. Another important thing about Privoxy is that you don't need to install additional software on your computer; you just run Privoxy and that's all.

What are the advantages of using Privoxy as a non-standard web proxy? There are a lot of advantages. First, you don't need to worry about your ISP's proxy blocking a certain website. We offer access to censored sites (such as those blocked by ISPs in Russia, China, Indonesia, Iran, Cuba, and Syria) as well as sites whose owners have decided to block their pages in protest against censorship. As a bonus, we also offer access to The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent trackers. These sites are normally blocked by ISPs to prevent people from downloading their content.

Many people believe that using a non-standard web proxy like Privoxy is unsafe. In addition to the fact that it is not controlled by an official authority, you are also less protected from eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attacks and computer viruses. Although you are still less likely to be able to stop someone from seeing what you are doing if they use network tools like tcpdump and Wireshark, Privoxy has some protection against those things because it does not perform any filtering, it simply proxies your web requests. However, although you cannot stop someone from listening to your private conversations, we do have some methods for limiting what programs can see. For example, we can limit requests to a particular program or IP address to one person at a time, so that they cannot get at the same information as you.