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<para>
 A long time ago, there was the <application>Internet Junkbuster</application>,
 by Anonymous Coders and Junkbusters Corporation. This saved many users a lot of
 pain in the early days of  web advertising and user tracking.
</para>

<para>
 But the web, its protocols and standards, and with it, the techniques for
 forcing ads on users, give up autonomy over their browsing, and
 for tracking them, keeps evolving. Unfortunately, the <application>Internet
 Junkbuster</application> did not. Version 2.0.2, published in 1998, was
 the last official release, available from Junkbusters Corporation.
 Fortunately, it had been released under the GNU
 <ulink url="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html">GPL</ulink>,
 which allowed further development by others.
</para>

<para>
 So Stefan Waldherr started maintaining an improved version of the
 software, to which eventually a number of people contributed patches.
 It could already replace banners with a transparent image, and had a first
 version of pop-up killing, but it was still very closely based on the
 original, with all its limitations, such as the lack of HTTP/1.1 support,
 flexible per-site configuration, or content modification. The last release
 from this effort was version 2.0.2-10, published in 2000.
</para>

<para>
 Then, some
 <ulink url="https://www.privoxy.org/user-manual/copyright.html#AUTHORS">developers</ulink>
 picked up the thread, and started turning the software inside out, upside down,
 and then reassembled it, adding many
 <ulink url="https://www.privoxy.org/user-manual/introduction.html#FEATURES">new
 features</ulink> along the way.
</para>

<para>
 The result of this is <application>Privoxy</application>, whose first
 stable version, 3.0, was released August, 2002.
 <!-- Cautious!!!!!!!!! ;) -->
</para>

<para>
 As of 2012 the Junkbusters Corporation's website (http://www.junkbusters.com/)
 has been shut down, but Privoxy is still actively maintained.
</para>
