Privoxy on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Privoxy on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

This image runs Privoxy, a non caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, filtering web page content, managing HTTP cookies, controlling access, and removing ads, banners and other unwanted junk. Privoxy sits between a browser or any HTTP client and the web and rewrites or blocks requests and responses according to a flexible rule set. It is fully configured and security hardened, so you can filter web traffic for your network within minutes of launch without hand editing the proxy configuration.

Secure by default — not an open proxy. An open forward proxy is quickly abused as an abuse relay, so the appliance ships closed. Privoxy binds to the loopback address only (127.0.0.1:8118) and layers a restrictive client access list that admits the loopback address and the RFC1918 private ranges (10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, 192.168.0.0/16) and nothing else. No machine can use the proxy until you explicitly widen the bind to your own subnet with the bundled privoxy-access tool, and even then the access list confines clients to private networks — the proxy can never be reached from the public internet as shipped. The privoxy-access tool refuses a world open configuration as a hard guardrail.

Privoxy's internal configuration pages (http://config.privoxy.org/ and the short alias http://p.p/) are reachable only through the proxy, never as a public web server, and they are kept read only so the filtering rules cannot be edited remotely. Ad blocking and content filtering are active out of the box via Privoxy's default action and filter rules; add your own rules in /etc/privoxy/user.action and /etc/privoxy/user.filter.

What is included:

• Privoxy running as the privoxy system service on 127.0.0.1:8118
• Secure by default: loopback only bind plus a client access list restricted to loopback and RFC1918
• Ad blocking and content filtering active out of the box via the default action and filter rules
• Read only internal config pages — not editable or togglable remotely
• The privoxy-access management tool (status, listen, allow, deny) with an open proxy guardrail
• Per VM first boot initialisation that writes the proxy details to a root only information file
• Fully patched Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with unattended security upgrades enabled
• A paired step by step deployment guide and 24/7 cloudimg support

Licensing: Privoxy is standard GPL open source software from the Ubuntu archive and is free. The cloudimg charge covers packaging, security patching, image maintenance and 24/7 support. Scope your network security group so that the proxy port (TCP 8118) is reachable only from the client subnets that need the proxy; never expose it to the internet.