I use the Privoxy ad blocker which relies on proxy settings in Internet Explorer. When the proxy is turned on, GW misses many of my applications connections to the Internet. Do you know of any settings changes I can make to the IE proxy server configuration that will allow GW to see and report all of my network activity while Privoxy is running? It uses port 8118 by default but that can be changed if necessary.
Thank you.
dfg
I have heard of Privoxy before and it sounds interesting, but I have not yet tried it myself. If all your traffic is supposed to go through a Proxy, kind of like a VPN app then GlassWire should technically be unable to see it properly. It should look like all your traffic is going through the Proxy/VPN, so that would be correct behavior. Otherwise the VPN/Proxy is not working correctly.
Let me know if I’m mistaken about that. I could be wrong, but I think that’s how it should work on Windows.
Hi Ken,
Thank you for that comparison (proxy/VPN). I spent the last few minutes looking at my usage for the past month grouped by traffic type. I see that the HTTP/S traffic (Internet-bound HTTP/S is the only traffic through Privoxy, local HTTP/S skips Privoxy altogether) was the overwhelmingly largest usage. And as expected, Privoxy was the top app for those protocols. When I tried turning off Privoxy last night, suddenly several programs asked for first time Internet access and that confused me a bit. So, now what I think is happening is that GW is tracking all the traffic it sees correctly. It sees Privoxy and tracks it correctly, however that winds up masking the usage of (say) the Internet Explorer, Silverlight or VLC Player apps specifically. When Privoxy is turned off, suddenly the Internet-bound HTTP/S traffic from those apps is seen by GW as coming from them and GW responds. Would you agree with my thoughts about this?
There is one thing that still mystifies me a little. After I watched around four hours of streaming video on Saturday afternoon, the graph (which I have showing 24 hours/all types) correctly showed 3-4 GB usage during that time. Upon checking the graph a few hours later, that 3-4 GB seems to have disappeared altogether, as if I had not used it. Privoxy was not hidden during that streaming time. Do you have any thoughts about why that might be happening? (Perhaps I’m overlooking a graph setting that is hiding in plain sight?)
Saturday evening update: After stopping and then restarting again the GlassWire Control Service, the graph once again is showing the 3.5 GB of movie usage I consumed this afternoon.
Thank you again for your assistance.
dfg
Are you sure the 3-4GB disappeared? Perhaps you switched from external to local traffic in your view settings or something like that?
If you go back to the GlassWire graph and move the sliders during that period, is it 100% gone from the graph? If so perhaps your GlassWire database was corrupted somehow. In that case I’d recommend uninstalling GlassWire, rebooting then reinstalling with our “clean” install option (which will unfortunately lose your data).
Hi Ken,
Thank you for that good suggestion about a clean install. I think it is always a useful thing to start with a clean slate. I will likely do a clean install after I try watching some more videos and then paying closer attention to my graph settings afterwards. I’m thinking I probably overlooked something earlier, especially since yesterday’s data usage “reappeared” after several hours last evening.
Thank you for your assistance.
dfg