I have been watching progress on FreedomBox ever since watching a video of Eben Moglen a few years ago.

Turns out that that they recently announced the availability of their 0.1 preview release. As part of this there is one component that is extremely useful for RaspberryPi users (funnily the co-founder of RasperryPi is also called Eblen by first name – go figure) out there concerned about increasing snooping of private information by governments and corporations for a variety of reasons.

Meet ‘freedombox-privoxy’

freedombox logo

https://www.gitorious.org/freedombox-privoxy/freedombox-privoxy

This software combines the functionality of the Adblock Plus ad blocker, the Easy Privacy filtering list, and the (HTTPS Everywhere](https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere) website redirection plugin into a single piece of software to run on your FreedomBox. Combining these different plugins into software for your FreedomBox means that you can use them with almost any browser or mobile device using a standard web proxy connection.

Best of all this has already been made available via the Raspbian repositories (http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/pool/contrib/f/freedombox-privoxy/) so the install is extremely simple.

sudo apt-get install freedombox-privoxy

Note: make sure that you have the ‘contrib’ branch in the Raspbian repositories enabled in /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian wheezy main contrib non-free
deb-src http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian wheezy main contrib non-free

Kudos to James Vasile for the technical work !

To get some more idea on the usage of privoxy you can check this article.

Leo Gaggl

ict business owner specialising in mobile learning systems. interests: sustainability, internet of things, ict for development, open innovation, agriculture

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. ericxjbrewer

    Please note the package name mentioned is incorrect…

    pi@freedombox ~ $ sudo apt-get install privoxy-freedombox
    Reading package lists… Done
    Building dependency tree
    Reading state information… Done
    E: Unable to locate package privoxy-freedombox

    pi@freedombox ~ $ sudo aptitude search privoxy
    p freedombox-privoxy – Privacy enhancing HTTP Proxy
    p privoxy
    – Privacy enhancing HTTP Proxy
    pi@freedombox ~ $ sudo apt-get install freedombox-privoxy
    Reading package lists… Done
    Building dependency tree
    Reading state information… Done
    The following extra packages will be installed:
    doc-base libuuid-perl libyaml-tiny-perl python-beautifulsoup python-chardet python-lxml
    Suggested packages:
    dhelp dwww doc-central yelp khelpcenter4 rarian-compat python-lxml-dbg
    The following NEW packages will be installed:
    doc-base freedombox-privoxy libuuid-perl libyaml-tiny-perl python-beautifulsoup python-chardet python-lxml
    0 upgraded, 7 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
    Need to get 2,329 kB of archives.
    After this operation, 7,495 kB of additional disk space will be used.
    Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y

  2. Leo Gaggl

    @ericxjbrewer: Thank you for letting me know. must have been a manual typo rather than cpy paste from terminal. Have corrected the article.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.