[ANN] no-https.perl 0.11: redirects-eating plain-HTTP to HTTPS proxy

[Ivan Shmakov]

[Cross-posting to news:comp.os.linux.misc, and news:comp.misc,
as the topic was recently discussed there. I kindly request
for the discussion of this software to take place at
news:comp.infosystems.www.misc; Followup-To: set accordingly.]

I'm pleased to announce the availability of No-HTTPS plain-HTTP
to HTTPS proxy version 0.11 (2018.laX_1Q2f) [1], which can now
be obtained from the news:alt.sources newsgroup.

This version represents an early beta stage of the code
development and comes with an extensive list of known bugs and
limitations. In particular, POST requests can now only be
transparently forwarded to HTTPS servers if 100 Continue
response is emitted by the server (which excludes HTTP/1.0
clients, such as Lynx.)

Also, references to https: resources in the forwarded documents
are not replaced accordingly. The code, however, is believed to
provide all the necessary hooks to allow for implementing
arbitrary content modifications as external Perl modules. An
example client-side JavaScript program for GreaseMonkey/Firefox
to remove leading https: from HTML href attributes (resulting in
protocol-relative //example.com/ URIs) is provided in the
documentation as well.

The proxy is written in Perl 5 and apart of a reasonably recent
version thereof also requires the following packages:
common::sense, Data::Dump (primarily for --debug), the recently
released HTTP1::MessageStream 0.4 (2018.9F_zSLb1) [2], and URI.

The code optionally makes use of the IO::Socket::IP and
IO::Socket::SSL modules to make outgoing connections. If not
available, or to otherwise augment the operation of No-HTTPS,
IO::Socket::UNIX and POSIX can be used instead, alongside an
external command, such as socat(1).

The no-https.perl file is available under the terms of
GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your
option) any later version; see http://gnu.org/licenses/.

The accompanying README (including several examples) is
available under CC0 Public Domain Dedication 1.0; see
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.

[1] no-https.perl 0.11: redirects-eating plain-HTTP to HTTPS proxy
news:87r2h5t...@siamics.net (source)
[2] HTTP1/MessageStream.pm 0.4: HTTP/1.{1,0} message parser
news:878t3ou...@siamics.net (source)
news:87zhw4t...@siamics.net (announce)

--
FSF associate member #7257 http://am-1.org/~ivan/