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CyberDragon Changelog

What's new in CyberDragon 1.6.5

Dec 15, 2014
  • Minor improvements:
  • Added option to use web inspector. You can access this by right clicking the page you are interested and choosing "Inspect" from context menu. That way you can inspect page HTML source and DOM tree.
  • Added WebGL enable/disable option. As the CyberDragon does not currently support *real* Hardware Acceleration (that's why "Accelerated Composing" is still disabled from General tab) I suggest that you keep it disabled.
  • If you enable it you will enable slow software acceleration and even worse, make yourself more vulnerable to browser fingerprinting. So enable it only if for some reason you *really* need WebGL.
  • Added "Disable Google Search Autocomplete" option to General tab.
  • Added "Prevent E-Tags tracking" option to General tab.
  • Changed the default home page from https://startpage.com to
  • https://startpage.com/do/mypage.pl?prf=f20d137624e7f67b0ad1d107f0796688. Because CyberDragon does not store cookies currently to disk the only other way to permanently store startpage settings is to use custom URL like above (you can check the settings by clicking the "Settings" link at the top of startpage). In short, I choosed the following startpage settings as default:
  • More results per page (100)
  • Enable Geogrpahical maps (allows doing Google static maps lookups while still retaining your privacy)
  • Do not use family filter for pictures.
  • Do not use video filter.
  • Anonymous images/video search this uses startpage proxy, ixquick-proxy.com)
  • If you don't like the above settings you can always generate your own custom URL by clicking "Generate URL" from startpage settings page and set it as your new home page.
  • Added ixquick-proxy.com to "Disable MCB for following URLs" list.
  • Added browser history drop-down menu.
  • Major improvements:
  • Fixed YouTube crash when closing tab.
  • Improved HTTP Referer controls from General tab.
  • Previously you could only choose between sending HTTP Referer or completely removing it.
  • Now you have two additional choices: Send the same URL as the currently open page as HTTP referer or send your own custom HTTP referer value.
  • Added Logger tab (key shortcut Alt + L). This is for debugging purposes only and to find new trackers.
  • Note: Logging slows things and doubly so if you choose to log to file. Use only when needed.
  • Added Plugins tab (key shortcut Alt + U). There you can choose individual plugins that you want to enable/disable.
  • Added Server Info tab (key shortcut Alt + S).
  • When enabled, you can see little details of the server you are in contact, like it's IP addresse(es), country, city etc...
  • Also, if you want, you can check it's location from Google maps. Note that this functionality needs MaxMinds GeoLiteCity.dat (free version) or GeoCity.dat (paid version) to work. Paid version is more accurate and up-to-date.
  • Updated included Qt Framework library from 5.2.1 to 5.4.0.
  • SECURITY UPDATE: Updated included OpenSSL library from 1.0.1g to 1.0.1j.
  • Disabled all the ciphers using SSLv3 protocol because poodle attack. In next version I will completely remove all the ciphers using SSLv3.
  • Default Blocked trackers increased from 6,000 to 30,000.
  • Changed the default tracker blocker rule list filters.txt to filters_optional.txt. I feel that the filters_optional.txt list is now good enough to start using it. So the good news are that now CyberDragon will block even more trackers. However, it might be a little bit slower than old list. Old list is still available if you want it.

New in CyberDragon 1.6.4 (Jun 14, 2014)

  • Minor improvements:
  • Added URL percent decoding.
  • Add "Save as PDF" button (can be found from top left).
  • This will let you "print" the currently open web page as an PDF file.
  • Added Content-Dispostion header support.
  • Added Find text functionality (Ctrl + F will take you to search field, just type to earch in current document)
  • Added username & password fields for proxy tab
  • Added allowed memory stored cookie view to Cookie tab.
  • Added key shortcut to Hide/Show settings (F12)
  • Added key shortcut to Home page (Alt + Home)
  • Updated GeoIP.dat file. This is used by Proxy checker for determining proxy country. This was quite old and outdated already so that's why the update. Note: If you are a paying customer of MaxMind then you can always use your own more complete GeoIP.dat file. For me, I can't afford them so that's why I use free database for determining proxy country.
  • Major improvements:
  • Fixed tab opening bug. This was caused by HTTPS Enforcing code (you didn't even have to had it on).
  • If the page wanted to open new tab it could not do so.
  • Updated included Qt Framework library from 5.2.0 to 5.2.1.
  • SECURITY UPDATE: Updated included OpenSSL library from 1.0.1e to 1.0.1h. Proxy checker works now (please read updated CyberDragonManual.pdf and its Proxy chapter)
  • Proxy checker simplified.

New in CyberDragon 1.6.3 (Mar 17, 2014)

  • Major improvements:
  • Fixed image showing bug. For some users images did not show when starting the browser. This should now be fixed.
  • HTTPS Enforcing. This feature is similar to EFF HTTPS Everywhere Firefox extension. However, where EFF's HTTPS Everywhere does use a lots of regular expression rules to handle most of it's https handling CyberDragon tries to solve the same thing with as little as possible of those rules (there is currently only one rule and that's for Googles case) HTTPS Enforcing actually packs three features with the price of one. One general and two Google specific.
  • Firstly:
  • The general feature of HTTPS Enforcing, like the name suggest, tries to use HTTPS protocol in as many sites as possible. So everytime you type some www-address (without the http:// part) it will try to load the https:// version, if available/working. Also, everytime you click some http:// link it will first try to load https:// version and again, if none is available/working it will fallback to http:// version. Sadly, not all the sites offer alternate https:// version of their content. And even those that do offer the https:// version of their content are often broken/buggy. In these cases there really is no other way than use http:// version instead.
  • Secondly:
  • Activating HTTPS Enforcing will also disable JavaScript for Google Search (for both www.google.* and encrypted.google.* domains) The reason is that Google loads some pretty crazy JavaScript stuff in background that does not play nicely with HTTPS Encorcing! *Especially* when you have User-Agent spoofing enabled and you have chosen to impersonate your browser as "Chrome" or "Firefox" (Google does some browser sniffing in addition to it's JavaScript mumbo jumbo) So you will loose Google Autocompletion (booo-hooo!) but in return you will get faster and safer connection to google search that uses less your bandwidth (yay!).
  • Thirdly:
  • And lastly there is this thing called "Google Tracking Redirect links". When you search something (like let's say "Knight wikipedia") from Google and then move your mouse over the link you will see something like this on CyberDragon statusbar at the bottom: https://www.google.fi/url?q=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight &sa=U&ei=tLckU96_CcuJhQf7nYG4Bw&ved=0CCAQFjAA& usg=AFQjCNFoh5hRriPh-IyM5PekEfve73V5Ww That's Google doing it's tracking when (if) you click that search result link. And even disabling JavaScript won't help against that!
  • There are two ways to change that horrible thing to correct, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight version:
  • Use the browser's User-Agent spoofing and lie that you are using either Chrome or Firefox. If you do that then "magically" Google won't show you anymore tracking redirect links in it's search results but the normal correct links. Actually, when you remember the fact that Chrome is owned & developed by Google and that Firefox itself get's 85% of it's annual income from Google then maybe this is not surprising at all ... http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/15/mozilla-releases-annual-report-for-2011-revenue-up-33-to-163m-majority-from-google/
  • Enable HTTPS Enforcing and let it dynamically rewrite all those filthy search result links to their normal, correct, non-tracking form. So there! You get three features with the price of one :-) However, keep in mind that this is still experimental feature and it needs a lot of testing (that's why I didn't enable it by default) For those brawe souls who want to try it right now head to "Encryption" tab, check the "Try to use HTTPS whenever possible" option and do some surfing/searching on Google and see how many http:// links are automatically loaded to https:// version instead when clicked over (wikipedia.org at least does).

New in CyberDragon 1.6.2 (Feb 26, 2014)

  • Major improvements:
  • Fix crash during startup.
  • This version should fix the crash when trying to startup CyberDragon.

New in CyberDragon 1.6.1 (Feb 18, 2014)

  • Minor improvements:
  • It will now save "Clear Cookie list on page load" setting on exit.
  • Also "Supported Ciphers & their order of preference" settings are now saved as well on exit.
  • Fixed crash that happened if you had several tabs open, closed the latest one and then pushed
  • "Clear Cache Now!" button.
  • Added show/hide settings button it's that blue arrow on top right).
  • Added button to copy URLs from "Blocked Content URLs" view to "Disable Mixed content for following URLs" view to Encryption tab.
  • Major improvements:
  • Added FTP server browsing support.
  • You could not browse and see the contents of any public FTP server. Now you can do that too.
  • Added certificate information to Encryption tab.
  • Fixed the Cipher information that is shown for current connection on Encryption tab.
  • Now it should show correct information.
  • Important Note: If you change any cipher order or enable/disable them, the changes won't come to effect untill you tear down the curremt https connection by closing the currently open tab and reopening it.
  • Important Note 2: During testing Google https encryption I found the following. When visiting https://www.google.com it redirected me to my local language version https://www.google.fi. What I found there was that it used weak encryption cipher RC4 (that NSA has supposedly tampered with)! So as a safety mechanism I decided to move all four RC4 ciphers to very bottom of the cipher order list and disable them. That will force https://www.google.com to use stronger encryption cipher. For https://encrypted.google.com this was not necessary and it used AES cipher immediately.
  • Added user corfirmation dialog when trying to visit web site with self-signed SSL certificate. Before this, all the self-signed SSL connections were blocked by default. Now it ask if you are sure you want to continue.
  • Added User-Agent spoofing possibility to General tab. Please see General chapter on CyberDragonManualDraft.pdf
  • Added HTTP referer removing possibility to General tab. Please see General chapter on CyberDragonManualDraft.pdf
  • Added Google PREF cookie spoofing possibility to Cookie tab. This should not normally be needed as
  • CyberDragon will by default block all PREF cookies sent by Google.
  • Consider this as a experimental feature and use it *only* if you use some google service that needs
  • PREF cookie enabled so far I could only find SafeSearch using it).
  • It can be set to some particular value or set to randomly generate it each time you visit google pages.
  • Added few more proxy sources to proxy fetcher. On a good day, you could get an average of about 140 proxies when clicking "Get Proxies" button.

New in CyberDragon 1.6 (Dec 23, 2013)

  • Minor improvements:
  • Fixed bug that prevented blocked custom cookie rule to be shown on Cookie List view
  • Fixed sorting bug on Cookie List view. Now they are correctly sorted so that the last arriwed cookie is at the bottom of the Cookie List.
  • Fixed editing bug of custom cookie view if cookie action had selected as Blocked
  • Now when you click "move cookie to custom cookie view" button it will automatically replace any dot (.) character with \. for domain names.
  • Now when you click "Add exception to mixed content blocker" button it will automatically replace any dot (.) character with \. for domain names. It will also by default add the currently open tab URL to it.
  • Added optional filters_optional.txt file that has over 30 000 tracker blocker rules. You can change your current tracker blocker list by pushing "Browse ..." button from Tracker blocker tab. However, keep in mind that this list has not been optimized, it will contain redundant entries and it has not completely checked as yet. Also, it will make your surfing slower than the default filters.txt list.
  • Major improvements:
  • Upgraded Qt 5.1.0 to 5.2.0. Hopefully this does not introduce new bugs. At least it fixed the printer bug where the first printed page was looking funny.
  • Fixed Check/Stop Check proxy button. It had a bug that prevented you to do proxy checking more than once if you allowed the first check to complete (that is you, did not stop it between checks)
  • Random proxy hopping works again!
  • Added blacklist proxy option. This was needed because I found out that proxy checker anonymous checker was not 100% accurate. Out of 84 manually tested proxies 3 proxies were actually non-anonymous even tought the proxy checker had marked them as anonymous! So there is a bug in anonymous checker and I will try to fix it after holidays. In the meantime, you should manually recheck and corfirm that the proxies that have anonymous marked as "Yes" will indeed be anonymous and if not, blacklist them.
  • Fixed MCB (Mixed Content Blocker). No more is MCB blocking you if you are being redirected from https:// page/site to http:// page/site. Also removed redundant entries from "Disable mixed content for following URLs". I left few entries there but made them disabled, just in case if they are needed.
  • Added Supported ciphers view to Encrypted tab so that you can decide which ciphers and in what order, are being tried when making HTTPS connection.
  • Added view to Encrypted tab that will show the cipher that was used for that particular https:// page.
  • Fixed documentation for the regular expression stuff at Tracker blocker chapter, rewrited Encryption chapter and added Proxy chapter and how to use Tor with CyberDragon chapter.
  • Added file information to downloads tab and it will now show you all the little details like name,path,size, mimetype and SHA1 checksum when you click the finished filename from downloads view.

New in CyberDragon 1.5.4 (Dec 9, 2013)

  • Minor improvements:
  • Fixed the HTTP Pipeling handling for POST request. Now The default is to use HTTP Pipeling for everything else except for Proxies and POST request.
  • Cleaned alot of clunky stupid code (that made sense at the time I writed it) and hopefully made CyberDragon more faster and less bugs.
  • Added Browse button to Cache tab so that you can much more easily select your cache folder.
  • Rechecked the proxies.txt file and throw out duplicates, non-working proxies and non-anonymous proxies. This left a file called anonymous_proxies.txt that contains about 30 proxies for your use.
  • Fixed that annoying flicker when switching from NOT CLEAN to CLEAN state (and vise versa) at tracker counter.
  • Added What's this button that with clicking it you will get more information of some of the elements. Currently I only had time to add information to General Settings tab settings.
  • Added Alt + D key shortcut for Downloads tab for easier access.
  • Major Improvements:
  • Rewritten the proxy handling code for fetching/importing/checking. Now it is possible to fetch proxies without checking them, import proxies without checking them or both, import AND fetching more proxies without checking them. The reason for this is that you might already have a good proxy list handy so there is no point of checking it over and over again each time. Now, when you want to check the proxies just push "Check Proxies" button. Also, now you can remove proxies from list (just right click and select remove proxy from pop up context menu) and export only proxies you have selected instead of exporting them all.
  • Added support for SOCK5 proxies (namely, Tor). The default is still to use HTTP(S) proxies. Note: The proxylist checker does not currently check if the proxies are http(s) or socks5. - Added lot's of notifications for proxy events, tracker events and most importantly for mixed content blocked event.
  • Added blocked mixed content view to Encryption tab so that you can actually see in realtime what were blocked.
  • Major overfaul of cookie system. So major that it takes too much of explaining it here. Please read the included CyberDragonManualDraft.pdf file for more information.
  • You can now finally add your own tracker rules, change tracker rules, remove tracker rules, export tracker rules and import tracker rules.
  • Started finally writing manual for CyberDragon. Just at draft stage now. See included CyberDragonManualDraft.pdf
  • And lastly, the most major improvement of all, tabs. Yes you can finally open content (image or link) into new tab with right clicking it and selecting "Open Link in New Tab". If you want to open completely new, empty tab press Ctrl + T. If you want to close current tab press it's close button or alternatively key shortcut Ctrl + W. Tabs are fully moveable. If you accidentally close last tab nothing bad happens but then you have to open new tab with Ctrl + T to continue.

New in CyberDragon 1.5.3 (Dec 9, 2013)

  • Minor improvements:
  • You can now finally set your own home page so that you don't have to stare https://startpage.com each time you start CD. Just enter what you like to "Home page" field at "General" tab or alternatively, push "Set currently open page" to set page you are viewing as your home page.
  • Added logo (yay!).Unfortunately you have to watch it with magnifying glass. Im not much of an artist.
  • Added "Open new window action policy for scripts" to "General" tab. Basically, what this does is that it let's you control how web pages that want to open new windows on their own (without your permission) should be handled. The default is to tell all those porn pages that you have been trying to visit (shame on you!) to open in the same window. The other two options are to block all such badly behaving .php links or to open them in a completely new CD browser instance window. Actually, you could not even visit any such naughty pages before because I had not implemented any open new window functionality before 1.5.3 version and CD has not yet tabbed browsing support (but will be!).
  • Finished context menu handling. Now, when you right click any link you can use the following.
  • For links:
  • Open Link. This is the same as default behaviour when you click any link. What happens will depend of the target of the link. If it's .html page then it will naturally open it in the same window. Same also for images. If the target of the link is any content that CD can't natively handle it will give you option to download and save it (Yes, CD has finally download support! More of that later...)
  • Open Link in New Window. This is the same as above except that a new CD browser window instance is created and the target of the link is tried to open in there. Important note: No matter what the "Open new window action policy for scripts" has been set, the *user* can always open new window whenever he/she wishes. So this menu option will skip any policies.
  • Save Link. This downloads and saves the target of the link. Be it image, .exe file, zip file, etc....
  • Copy Link. This saves the link address to clipboard.
  • For images:
  • Open Image. (I should have renamed this to Open Image in New Window). Does just that. Creates a new CD browser window instance and opens the image in there.
  • Save Image. Downloads and saves the image.
  • Copy Image to Clipboard. Copies image to clipboard that you can paste later to say, into word processor. For some reason I could not paste into Gimp program ...
  • Copy Image Address. Copies Image link to clipboard.
  • Added HTTP pipelining support to "General" tab and put it on by default. This is important for those who are surfing with mobile network that have higher latency (connection time) than other connection types. Should give you some speed boost.
  • For proxies pipelining is always disabled.
  • Optimized little bit of code for speed. This with above mentioned HTTP pipelining and the next major improvement should give you very good surfing speed.
  • Major improvements:
  • Added new "Cache" tab and disk cache support (Yay!). Now, by default, all the content you are surfing is cached to your disk for speedup. By default the cache directory is called "cache" and it will be created the first time you start CD to the same holder that it was started. Minimum (and default) size for cache is 50 MB and max 2048 MB. Besides enabling cache you can of course disable it or always use it (offline mode). In offline mode all the content are fetched always from cache and network is never used. Also, you can naturally clear the cache any time with push of the button or set CD to always clear cache at exit. Tip of the day: Create a ram drive and tell CD to store all files there by giving it's path to cache dir fiel. This gives insane speed boost because RAM memory is always faster than disk. As a bonus it's content will be sure to removed when you close your computer. If that's not what you want then stay with regular (but slower) disk cache. I might later add some functionality to handle all this automatically. Including saving cache back to disk from RAM at exit and back again at startup.
  • Added new "Downloads" tab. All the files you download will appear here as a simple list showing the filename, size, progressbar, start/stop button and status. Currently only starting and stopping (cancelling) downloads are supported. For download pausing and resuming where it was left will have to wait till CD 1.5.4. Double-clicking will try to open file with default application for that file type. If you forgot where you downloaded your file you can hover mouse over it's filename and it will show full file path. I will make it later easier to access downloaded files.
  • Added new "Notification" tab. CD has now notification support. Basically this will tell user when some task has been completed. For now it supports just three download related notifications but I will add more later. The notification label are small 288 x 94 pixel yellow labels, with notification Title about the task completed (or in case of error,failed) and any other relevant data. By default, the notification labels will stay for 10 seconds visible or untill closed by pushing close putton at labels top right corner. If you click anywhere else at the label, it will stop the timeout. If you keep the mouse button pressed and drag mouse you can change it's position freely to anywhere on the screen. Next notification labels will appear at the place you left last one and the same position will be saved at exit and used next time at startup. You can also disable showing timeout completely. To disable timeout completely give timeout value of zero.
  • Added proxy export support. You can now export any proxies you managed to get from proxy fetcher & checker to external file. File format is standard text file with each line in the form of proxy ip:port number.
  • Added proxy import support. Same format as above. After proxies have been imported from file CD will fetch some additional proxies from net, remove any duplicates and start checking their status. If you don't have any premade proxy file at hand there is an proxy file called proxies.txt under CD folder that you can use for importing. But be warned: That file has over 700 proxies and proxy fetcher & checker will probably get another 100 more! So it's over 800 proxies!!! You better have a *very* good computer and internet connection (and lot's of threads!!!) to check all those proxies for good ones :-)

New in CyberDragon 1.5.2 (Nov 19, 2013)

  • Minor improvements:
  • Reordered Proxy tab layout and tried to make it much more compact, logical and pretty.
  • Major improvements:
  • Added Proxy List filtring. With this you can decide what proxies are keeped in the list and what are dropped. The defaults are to keep all those proxies that have SSL field set as "Yes" or empty (meaning that SSL support could not be determined) and Anonymous field "Yes" or empty. These are good defaults but if you want stricted settings with your next proxy fetch you could leave only "SSL Yes" and "Anonoymous Yes" checked. This will of course produce less usable proxies. - Added random proxy hopping based either on preset timer or per page request. What this does is that after you have fetcher & checked your list of proxies you can then let CyberDragon to randomly hop between those proxies on the list, either on certain timeout or always with each page request. For timed proxy hopping, the default timeout is 10 seconds and max 3600 (1 hour). If this is too frequent be free to increase timeout. Most browsers, including CyberDragon, will wait for max of 30 seconds to connect. So if you are unlucky and have a lot of slow proxies on your list you might want to increase timeout at least that value. Every time a random proxy is selected it will be clearly shown at the status message area at the bottom right. When you are finished and don't want to use random proxy hopping anymore just select "No proxy hopping option". That will also clear any previously used proxy.
  • In addition to maybe increasing timeout value you should keep the following in mind when using this feature:
  • Use this only for normal Internet surfing. Using this feature while checking your webmail, doing online banking or any other service which needs authentication is a probably a bad idea. Most such services won't probably like it at all when they see you connecting suddendly from totally different IP-address than just few seconds ago.
  • There is no automatic proxy online checking yet implemented. This means that some proxies on your list might go offline at some point and currently the random proxy hopping does not detect it. For timed proxy hopping you must wait until next timeout but for proxy hopping per page request you can force proxy switching by pressing F5 or Reload button. With almost 100 proxies currently available, you should be very unlucky indeed for all the proxies to go offline :-)
  • Sometimes it might seem like that timed proxy hopping is using the same proxy all the time. Computer "random" generators are not very good at picking truly random numbers. Once I got the same proxy three times on the row with 10 second timeout and from a list that had about 20 proxies. - Some proxies are horribly slow. I am planning to add caching support on next 1.5.3 version and maybe make it always on when using random proxy hopping.

New in CyberDragon 1.5.1 (Nov 19, 2013)

  • Minor improvements:
  • Final proxy results are now sorted so that those proxies with "SSL" and "Anonymous" fields both set as "Yes" will appear first in the list.
  • Added optional proxy color coding. If the "SSL" and "Anonymous" fields are both "Yes" then it means that it is a very good proxy and it is colored green. If "Anonymous" field is "No" then proxy is not recommended and it is colored red. Everything else is colored with yellow to sign as a warning that proxy checker could not for some reason determine either SSL or Anonymous support.
  • Major improvements:
  • Fixed a bad bug with Get proxy button. If you did a proxy fetching and after letting it finish you fetched again it would print ""Stopping proxy checking. Waiting for remaining threads to finish ...", disable Stop button and then do absolutely nothing. That was because of incorrect button logic. Sometimes it would also crash. That was because the thread deleting was in completely wrong place. Both bugs should be now fixed.
  • Proxy fetcher is now able to fetch about 100 proxies.

New in CyberDragon 1.5 (Nov 19, 2013)

  • Minor improvements:
  • Added new Zoom in and Zoom out toolbar buttons. Old key shortcuts, (Ctrl Plus for Zoom in & Ctrl Minus for Zoom Out) naturally continue to work.
  • Added new Printer toolbar button. Key shortcut for it is Ctrl + P. Unfortunately, there is a little bug that is related to Qt (https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-30621) and that I cannot do nothing about untill a new version of Qt appears at the end of November or start of December 2013. The effect of this little printing bug is that the first page layout is broken and the printed text might be cutted out or otherwise look funny or weird.
  • Major improvements:
  • Finally made the proxy fetching multithreaded (Yay!). Now the main GUI thread won't freeze and you can keep on surfing the Net while the proxy fetcher does it's work at background. After the fetcher has gotted it's list of proxies it will start the actual proxy checking process which is very intense.
  • Here's what happens at the background:
  • Proxy checker threads are started. The default number of proxy checker threads is either the number of CPU cores in your computer or 4. Which ever is greater. Naturally, if you feel that it is too much or too little you can change it and the changes will be saved at exit. However, the more threads you set the more system resources (CPU load, RAM,network bandwith) CyberDragon will use. Finally at some point, increasing the number of threads actually begins to hurt your system performance and makes things slower. You have to experiments to see what is best thread number for your machine and connection.
  • Each thread takes in its turn one of the proxies from the list and tries to ping it to determine connection speed (aka latency). The smaller the latency number the faster that particular proxy will respond and connect. If the ping attempt does not get respond then it either means that the proxy is activately blocking (firewall) the ping request or it is offline. In that case an extra step is taken and an actual connection attempt to proxy server is tried to see if it's online. If the proxy server still does not answer or the connection timeout has been reached then it is assumed that this particular proxy is offline and it will be removed from the list and the thread continues with the next available proxy in the list.
  • After it has been determined that the proxy is alive the proxy checker thread will continue doing geoip lookup to see which country it belongs. This is usefull because some proxies can't access some Internet sites depending of the country the proxy is located. For example, if the proxy is located in China you could have a hard time of accessing YouTube or Facebook. If you don't want country lookup it can be disable but it really does not slow the proxy checking process that much.
  • Next the proxy SSL support is determined. It's very important that you use only proxies that support SSL. Even tought there has been weaknesses and attacks against SSL, some encryption is still better than no encryption. Besides, without proxy that supports SSL you can't access any https:// sites like https://startpage.com, https://duckduckgo.com or https://encrypted.google.com. If the thread can't for some reason (timeout for example) check if the SSL support is on then that field will have empty value.
  • Lastly the anonymity level of proxy is determined. Most so called high-anonymous proxies do what they promise and hide your true IP-address. But there is always bad proxies that inject extra http headers on client request. Obviously, you should only use proxies that print "Yes" in that field. So as you can see there is a lot happening behind background. After all the proxies have been checked it will print "Finished!" and show a short summary of the number of proxies checked, number of proxies online and number of proxies offline. There is also timeout value that you can play with if you want to try make the whole process faster. The default value is 30000 milleseconds (30 secs.) for each proxy connection timeout. One final very very important note: Always use proxies that are fast (low latency), support encryption (SSL set to 'Yes') and are anonymous and hide your IP-address (Anonymous field set to 'Yes'). And never, ever(!) use proxy when accessing your webmail, online bank or e-store! For these services always use direct connection. There is a very good writing by Steve Gibson why even HTTPS proxy might not be secure (https://www.grc.com/fingerprints.htm). For everyday surfing proxies are ok but for important things (webmail, online bank etc..) direct connection is only option.

New in CyberDragon 1.4.7 (Nov 14, 2013)

  • Further fixes to "Block mixed content":
  • Not only do encrypted search engines need to allow unencrypted http:// links. Also some webmails (like gmail & yahoo) need at least some of their https:// URLs to allow unencrypted content for prober working.
  • If this is desirable or not I won't speculate.
  • However, instead of hard coding all these (and maybe some future others?) URLs I decided to do the same as with "Cookie Manager", mainly to allow saving those specific urls (or whole domains in search engine cases) that need to skip mixed content blocking.
  • You can find it at "Encryption" tab. As with "Custom Cookie Rules" the rules are regular expressions and it supports adding, removing, enabling and in place editing of those rules (just double click to edit). And they will be automatically saved on exit.
  • Added yahoo webmail custom cookie rules. Might be too lax. Experiment and report if they need changing.

New in CyberDragon 1.4.6 (Nov 14, 2013)

  • Fixed "Block mixed content":
  • When you use encrypted search engine like https://startpage.com (default), https://duckduckgo.com or https://encrypted.google.com then there is no way we can keep on blocking mixed content, in this case, search results for http:// links. So obviously those have to be allowed.
  • So, if "Block mixed content" is enabled I made an exception for these three search engines.

New in CyberDragon 1.4.5 (Nov 14, 2013)

  • Added new tab called "Encryption" and experimental mixed content blocking.
  • Mixed content is any unencrypted http content that is server from https encrypted page.
  • That has potential of compromising your privacy and security. Blocked by default.
  • More stuff to come to this "Encryption" tab later.

New in CyberDragon 1.4 (Nov 14, 2013)

  • Removed all the references that I could find to Visual Studio. This should now fix the runtime error at startup.

New in CyberDragon 1.3 (Nov 14, 2013)

  • Fixed little bug of automatic http:// handling in URL bar.
  • Fixed little bug between URL bar and page content switching.
  • google.com custom cookie rule was too lax. Changed it from .* to .*SID. This will still allow using gmail.
  • Added zoom in (key shortcut Ctrl Plus) and zoom out (Ctrl Minus)'

New in CyberDragon 1.2 (Nov 14, 2013)

  • Minor improvements:
  • Cleaned up and rearranged Cookie control. Removed reduntant URL field from "Cookie sent by server" view.
  • URL bar now accepts Enter-key.
  • If you forgot to add http:// or https:// from the URL it will now automatically prefix http:// as default.
  • Major improvements:
  • Finally added settings saving (Yay!). Any change you made will be automatically saved when you exit the browser. And all the saved settings are automatically loaded at startup.
  • Settins are saved in config.ini file.
  • Improved "Custom Cookie Rules" view: Now you can add your own domain specific cookie rules that will override global cookie settings.
  • Added new "Total Cookies" view.

New in CyberDragon 1.1 (Nov 14, 2013)

  • Added reload button
  • Added tooltips for back, home, reload, forward & encrypted button.
  • Added Backspace key shortcut to go back in history.
  • Added Shift + Backspace key shortcut to go forward in history.
  • Added F5 key shortcut for reload.
  • Added F6 key shortcut for easy switching between URL bar and web page content.
  • Made URL bar size longer.
  • Shows link now on statusbar when mouse over.