Local Browsing Patch for Dillo

Main
Status | About | Download

Status

Dillo version 0.7.0 integrated a modified version of this patch. The patch provided by this page is not needed anymore.

The approach taken in Dillo version 0.7.0 is the following: if the "-l" command line option is given then not a single link inside the provided URL is followed. When the user needs the complete rendering of the URL, pressing reload will enable a full request of the URL. Note that if you provide an http URL that results in a redirection (HTML error code 3x), the redirection is followed and the new location is rendered normally without any blocking.

About

This patch adds the -l command line option to Dillo to block any attempt to connect to an external host: every host lookup that does not resolve to a 127.*.*.* IP address (which means localhost) will result in an ERROR: can't not solve HOST in Dillo's status line. You can still browse http: URLs if they are served by the localhost (IP 127.*.*.*). So unsecure HTML files can be browsed with a higher security. I'm not an expert in HTML security, so do not take this for granted.

NEW: 2002-10-14: It is now possible to switch local browsing while Dillo is running via the File → Work offline (Meta-L) menu option.

IMPORTANT: 2002-11-01: I found in some mailing list message that spammers could use DNS lookups to check if their message was read or not by supplying a unique non-existent address, e.g. 123456.the.spam.com, and by checking their DNS server log. The Dillo patch does not provide a protection against this, because the DNS lookup is done even when "offline" browsing is enabled to test if the eventual link resolves into a localhost address (127.*.*.*). I currently don't know of any simple way to test without DNS lookup whether an address is the address of the localhost.

Download

2002-11-01

The patch for Dillo v0.7.0pre-v1 is here: dillo-0.7.0-pre-v1-cli-local.patch. You'll need at least to run automake.

2002-10-14

The new patch allows switching the offline mode during a session. Get the patch from here: dillo-cvs-2002-10-14-cli-local2.patch. In contrast to older patches, this one adds two new files and modifies src/Makefile.am, so you have to run at least automake.

2002-08-13

Get the patch from here: dillo-cvs-2002-08-13-local.patch.

This patch is to be applied after applying the command line patch.

2002-08-06

Get the patch from here: dillo-cvs-2002-08-06-cli-local.patch.

This patch is to be applied after applying the command line patch. In contrast to the older patch below, the URL/FILE must be given after the command line options.

2002-05-18

Get the patch from here: dillo-cvs-2002-05-18-local.patch

From within dillo directory, apply with patch -p0 < dillo-cvs-2002-05-18-local.patch. Then build dillo as usual. The new option is -l. Dillo will browse only locally if and only if provided with this option. If relevant, the URL to browse must be given as the first argument.

Valid HTML 4.01!