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Privoxy removes ads from pages. It's much needed on iPhone where waste of bandwidth, CPU and battery is really annoying and Flash banners wouldn't work anyway.

To use this on iPhone you have to have VPN server running on the same machine! I also assume that you've installed and configured Ziproxy already.

Install

If you have PowerPC Mac download privoxyosx_­setup_­3.0.6.zip, because dmg version is Intel-only.

  1. Download Privoxy for OS X and run installer.
  2. Leopard needs an additional tweak: 
    sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/privoxy
sudo chown -R privoxy /Library/Privoxy/
sudo chmod -R u+rwX /Library/Privoxy/
  3. Run it using Terminal: 
    sudo SystemStarter start Privoxy

Chain with Ziproxy

It's a good idea to chain Privoxy with Ziproxy. Privoxy will remove ads first and then Ziproxy will compress chopped HTML. To do this, edit /etc/ziproxy.conf and uncomment/change:

NextProxy="localhost"
NextPort=8118

And restart Ziproxy. In Terminal:

sudo killall ziproxy
ziproxy -d

but if you don't have Ziproxy running, change iPhone's VPN config as described in Ziproxy instructions, except use port 8118.

That's it. You don't have to add any extra security, because by default Privoxy accepts only local connections. You don't need to change iPhone's configuration either.

You can use Privoxy with browsers on your Mac as well. In preferences set proxy host to localhost and port 8118.