On Mon, 25 Dec 2017 18:12:11 +0000, mechanic wrote:

Of those, the only one that *looks* like what I am asking about is
privoxy, but I'm not yet quite sure what privoxy actually does
(despite reading the FAQ at https://www.privoxy.org/faq/general.html.

From what I remember from using it a while ago, it resides on your
machine (or on your LAN) so it won't hide your IP address if that's
important to you.

It's good at ad-blocking, but then so is Firefox (AdBlock) and
Opera.

Thank you for answering what Privoxy does, as I was reading it and I was
confused.

Many years ago, before the Tor Browser Bundle existed, I tried to set up
Firefox with Vidalia and Privoxy and Tor and it was a mess so I gave up,
unsuccessful. That was my only experience with Privoxy, so I thought it had
something to do with Tor.

When I look up the simplest things about Privoxy, I can't get a simple
description of it. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=what+is+privoxy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privoxy
"Privoxy is a "privacy enhancing proxy", filtering web pages and removing
advertisements."

So it's just a filter, but the MVP Hosts file is likely a better filter.
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

That means privoxy is not what I was asking about, and all the other URLs
we found were all web page portals.

So it may be that there are no existing free proxy settings to be found.