About this site

This site presents a list of open source HTTP proxies written in java and python, with comparison tables, so that you compare the proxies on a feature by feature basis. Further detail is available on each proxy: click it's name for more info.

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Detailed information about PYTHON proxy: Willow
Proxy Name Willow
Language and version python version: 2.2.2
HTTP version 1.1
HTTPS Connect yes
Windows NTLM support yes
Last updated YYYY-MM-DD 2003-06-06
Platform Linux only. From the product page: "There is no windows suport at this time. It is being worked on and an should be release shortly."
Author Digital Lumber
Home page http://www.digitallumber.com/willow
Primary features Bayesian content filtering, browser-based interface, caching, Windows NTLM authentication
Features

From the product page

Willow is a content-filtering proxy server. It bears one similarity to the many other pieces of software available for web filtering in that it is designed to filter web content. That, however, is where the similarities end. The differences between Willow and other solutions are significant, and these differences make Willow the first really usable internet filter.

In addition to being the first web filter to really work, Willow was also designed to make life easy on network administrators. To this end Willow supports the following:

  • HTTPS tunneling
  • response caching
  • filtering based on any part of the request or response (domain, url, headers, etc.)
  • through-the-web management
  • authentication to a Windows NT/2000 domain
  • authentication through unix password files
License LGPL
Design Architecture Asyncore
Notes Willow is interesting because it uses Bayesian filtering to recognise the bad content that you don't want to see. Which means that it has a Bayesian network that has to be trained on good and bad content in order to be able to tell the difference between them. Which means that you need some bad content in order to train it: a problem which the authors have solved by including a corpus of pornography in the download!