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I've been blocking ads for 20 years now, ever since I noticed that the banner ad would load first before the rest of the page had even started loading on a 28.8k dialup connection. It's multi-level for me now -

• Hosts file - used this initially, now it's just AdAway on my rooted Android
• AdMuncher, a commercial adblocker for Windows that blocks ads at the socket level, so even ads inside programs get filtered
• After Firefox appeared, started using Adblock Plus, and now Ublock Origin. On Android I still use ABP.
• Browser set to reject all cookies by default, except for sites that require you to login.

One good utility is "Ad Muncher", now even it's pro version is free. The site is: https://www.admuncher.com/ The owner is a respectful man, he gave me, years ago, a licence key for the pro version free of charge when told him I live in a place where bank transactions are difficult.

Since you're running on Windows (if don't mind paying a couple of dollars), I highly recommend AdMuncher. It Just Works(tm).

I have a licensed copy of Admuncher for Windows - it sits quietly in the system tray and silently filters all HTTP traffic on my PC. Back in the day, I could use an IE based browser like Maxthon and fearlessly surf the web because all crap got filtered. Then I switched to Firefox in 2004 when it was still called Phoenix.
Now I use Adblock Plus and Cookie Safe as the second layer of protection. My cookie permissions are set to deny all by default. Only sites that require authentication are allowed to set cookies.
And as a final resort, I use an adblocking hosts file for the rare item that does get through.

This setup has worked for me for the last 7 years- and the result is I have an extreme aversion to surfing the net on anyone else's PC - with banners and other crap crawling all over the pages.

Sadly, it's the only browser out there with Noscript and Adblock.

Yeah, yeah. Firefox is the only browser that supports Firefox extensions. That doesn't mean it's the only browser in which you have mature tools for controlling Javascript execution and ad blocking.

Here you go, here's an ad-blocking proxy that works with all of your browsers, and has been developed for 9 years (that's longer than Firefox has been around, BTW):

http://www.admuncher.com/

That only runs on Windows, but I really doubt you're going to have a hard time finding an open source ad-blocking proxy to run on any OS.

Ad Muncher blocks many parked domains by default.

Anyone running Ad Muncher was already protected this entire time.

best adblocker hands down.

http://www.admuncher.com/

It's 12 years since I first got onto the net, and 11 of those have been utterly, satisfyingly ad-free. First, here's why I have zero guilt about supposedly leeching off the revenue(?) stream of website operators:
1) Most of the English language websites I visit are American. I am Indian, from India.
2) The products advertised here are also American, or delivered within the US/Canada only.
3) There's no way in hell that I'm going to buy anything advertised here, thanks to lack of a little thing called purchasing power parity when it comes to pricing.(If you charge $20 for a Tshirt, that's about 1k INR, when I can get 5 good tshirts for the same price here, add another 50 dollars for international shipping..you get the idea). I'd rather rip off your design and make my own tshirt elsewhere.
4) Ergo, I am not going to ever click a single ad, and am fully justified in banishing them.

1998-99 - Argh, WTF are these banners doing choking up my already slow dialup line?
1999-2003 - AtGuard Personal Firewall. Awesome URL based adblocking included, it would auto load on detecting a dialup connection and exit when disconnected. Bought over by Symantec and turned into the bloatware called Symantec Personal Firewall. Sadly doesn't run on XP.

2003 to present - Ad Muncher - Socket level filtering, so can filter any program that can make a network connection. 7 GB bandwidth saved, 850,000 ads blocked (according to the built in counter) since then.
What Admuncher could not catch, Adblock Plus does, and what slips through that gets routed to 0.0.0.0 by my 15k+ entry hosts file.

The End.

Actually Opera has the perfect NoScript built-in. Disable global options for whatever you feel like (noscript example is javascript) and enable it in site preferences for the sites you want to. And you can control lots of other things than just javascript too.

As far as AdBlock goes, Opera has it's equivalent. But I've got used to Ad Muncher as it has updating block lists and it works in all browsers. Full version does cost, but I have no trouble paying for a software that does it's job good and that I use daily.

I always see people touting how Opera is so much better than Firefox, yet when ever I ask them about script blocking I get blank stares. This is my killer feature.

Seems your people don't know much :)

Just install Ad Muncher and all the ones you named and more are blocked by default.

It even works for all browsers including chrome and opera.

http://www.admuncher.com/

Lets me remain sane while browsing.

1) Opera Sync does basically the same
2) There's that build-in adblocker, but I like Ad Muncher more. And it works in other browsers too.
4) Not exactly a tooltip, but double-click word->click dictionary with shift down. Then just ctrl+w to get back. Works just as good after a few uses.

Oh, advertising on /.'s comments?

Partnership Program

The Ad Muncher partnership program allows you to refer people to an address like:

            http://youraccountname.admuncher.com/

and receive 20% of all purchases later made by those people. For more information please visit the partnership program website.

"foropera" is just his partner alias. Sad.

You cant do the same kind of URL filtering on DNS level since the only thing you can filter is the domain/subdomain part. Theres lots of cases where you need to be able to filter more specifically (like if the website is hosting the ads itself, or just to make some more general rules), and Opera+Ad Muncher is perfect for that.

While Opera has the full-scale ad blocking tools in itself, I've found Ad Muncher to be a lot better on it, and it works with all the other browsers you have installed and gives more options too.

Actually the only thing Opera still kind of needs is as good ad blocker as adblock. While it does have its feature for blocking content, it doesn't have lists and it doesn't always work as good. I know you could find lists for it and put them in the config files, but it's not as comfortable and still doesn't work as good.

Thats why I've always used Ad Muncher tho, it does the ad blocking perfectly (and not just in Opera, but all browsers). But Opera should really fine tune their ad blocking features. Otherwise there's no really features I can come up thats missing in Opera.

Yes, Opera does have build-in blocking, but I've always preferred Ad Muncher myself. It comes with good lists and works easily - I've basically never seen ads anymore.

For a one-time fee of 25$ USD, you will get the best Win32 ad blocking software out there. I haven't seen an ad, popup or any other type of advertisement since AdMuncher first came out. If only they made it for OSX...

However, the lack of an easy-to-use extension system (and the presence of ads -- ads? I had forgotten the web had ads!) keep bringing me back to Firefox.

That is AFAIC the biggest downside to Opera. OTOH, there are plenty of tools to remove ads without using an extension. http://www.admuncher.com/ is what I've been using for years, even with Firefox (performs better than AdBlock IMHO).

http://www.admuncher.com/. Works with every browser, including Chrome.

Actually, for IE (in fact for anything on Windows) there's AdMuncher - its the one piece of software I've yet to find a good replacement for on the Mac, and I still miss it. Since it taps in at the network layer, it even filters things like MSN messenger just fine. Its also excellent at knowing which ads to just delete, which to replace with blank space, &c, in order to keep the page looking good.

Ad Muncher isn't free, but is is written in assembler, and it's super fast. It doesn't care what browser you're using. It's got a million features. Good luck!

Here's a few counter arguments:

• What if I live in a country where your advertised products/services are not available, or are too expensive because of the exchange rate?
• The way I understand online advertising, mere clicking on ads does not help; one has to buy the product for the website to get credit from its advertisers.
  What if I don't ever buy any stuff online?(In my case, I don't own an international credit card)

For the rest, there's always the Adblock Plus extension for Firefox. I've been filtering ads for years because they're all US centric and I don't buy stuff online anyway.
There's no point linking the 'do no evil' slogan to their ad policy. They showed text ads till now as a differentiation from other engines, at some point they gave in to the lure of the cash and decided to go all out with video ads. Or they must have deduced that showing video ads is profitable. As a publicly owned company, whose primary goal is to maximize shareholder value, what are they doing wrong? (Too bad if you thought of them any other way)

Ad Muncher is quite possibly the best advertising blocker out there, hands down. I haven't seen an ad in years and it eliminates the need for an anti-spyware application as you'll never come across those annoying smiley banners again. It has a continuously updated filtering system that stops all the pop-ups and ads out there while not breaking websites. For a one-time fee of 25$, it's a steal.

Oh, it doesn't steal any of your precious megahertz or RAM either. It's a well written program. Try the demo out for 30 days, you won't be disappointed.

Yes there is, Ad Muncher http://www.admuncher.com/ . It works in all windows browsers.
It's better than AdBlock, and cheap. Just yesterday bought 2 copies.
It's currently for 32bit windows, but version for Linux and 64bit windows is in progress.

I guess nobody's showed them AdBlock for Opera (or even Opera's built-in "content blocker", admittedly not quite as good as the real thing since it lacks regexps, though), or Ad Muncher for IE.

Maybe when they find out about those, they'll do the world a favor and just block everybody from their site?

Also ... does anyone think this may just be a troll / hoax? I've learned never to question the stupidity of people, particularly people on the Internet, but this seems like it's just a bit of a stretch. It kind of reminds me of an Adequacy.org post.

The blocking that they seem to be advocating that others use is pretty standard "HTTP_USER_AGENT" querying using a PHP script, so it's not like it would be hard to get around. (Incidentally, I've always felt that the USER_AGENT header was something of a bad idea; maybe it's time to kill it, or at least disable replying to it by default?)

What I'm slightly more interested in is how they're blocking the main page. It's not the same as the script that they're pushing; the page actually loads (you can view the source in FF), but it seems to take advantage of some rendering quirk in IE to produce a blank screen when rendered on Firefox. That actually strikes me as a little more subtle, although it's still dumb.

http://admuncher.com/

Ad Muncher Usage Statistics for v4.7 Build 19331/1225 *BETA*
Adverts removed by Ad Muncher: 101,443
Approximate bandwidth saved: 792 MB
Counter started: May 7, 2005

http://www.admuncher.com/ - $20 for a life time license (including new versions), well worth it.

They just copied half the story from this site:

http://www.security.ithub.com

The Proof of Concept didn't load calc.exe for me. Instead, it crashed my IE windows on WindowsXP SP1.

I run Ad Muncher, so that might have caught and foiled the malicious javascript.

"Why" is obvious, like someone up there said. Because I don't friggin' want to see them. Because they take up space on my desktop I'd rather use for, you know, actual productive stuff. Because I don't like the info harvesting and spyware installation attempts (not that they ever succeed, go Opera!).

So, I use Opera and Ad Muncher. They work very well together--Ad Muncher even has some special settings for Opera--and I haven't seen a non-Google ad in years, except when I've deliberately turned of Ad Muncher filtering. Even then, Opera's non-selected popup blocking means I never ever see a popup add.

And while we're at it, I read Consumer Reports (no ads), 2600 (no ads) and MAKE (few ads), and love my DirecTiVo (30-second commercial skip) and XM Radio (72 channels of commercial-free music)

I installed it. It seems to work, though there's an AskJeeves search bar you can't get rid of without dropping the address bar as well. There doesn't appear to be a way to configure search provider, either. The tab implementation is faster and more integrated with IE than the MSN toolbar's.

I'd also prefer the option to install without the weird Privacy Sweeper crap; my IE security settings, firewall, and AdMuncher take care of that, thank you. All I really need is tabs on IE for those rare times I can't get whatever site I'm on to work in Opera.

What ads?

I show them the power of adblock and a decent set of preferences. This is something that IE will *never* have.

Really? I have no problem using Ad Muncher with IE. As an added bonus, it works with any browser on the system, not just one.

I'm sure everyone who has read the article noticed a gaggle of double-underlined words.

On windows I use AdMuncher to eliminate banners, popups, flash ads, iframes, replacement context menus, etc. It is completely transparent, no proxy configuration required. It filters *ANY* http application, so I dont even see ads in non-browser programs that fetch ads from a web server (like divx player).

On linux squid and privoxy are good options, but AdMuncher is releasing a linux version soon. I eagerly await it.

Frankly, I haven't seen ads in a VERY long time, even those that are said to get around most ad blockers, including those that plague Firefox.

I've been a beta tester for more than a year now, and it is under active development, with a v5.0 release coming soon, which will add Linux support.

No spyware, install file under 150k, fast, unobtrusive, and chock full of options, including a custom filter list on the off chance that an option you'd like isn't included, or its sometime aggressive filtering breaks a page.

Also, it has the ability to install without the 'email developers' or 'live chat support' options, as well as the fact that it can be locked down with a password, making it well suited to your grandmother's machine or company systems.

I would like to counter this with a link to http://www.admuncher.com which is transparent and more featureful, imho.

Get Ad Mucher http://www.admuncher.com/ It not only blocks all pop ups, but it gives you very customizable options as to what is blocked, and at what sites, including popups AND banner and text ads, to the point where I hardly see any ads anymore, not to mention the saved bandwidth. Plus it gives you a log of everything that is blocked! Probably is my favorite program ever.

I never have to worry about spyware/ads/popups since getting Ad Muncher, so it makes no difference whether I use barebones IE, Firefox with Adblock, or the SP@ IE with its pop up and activex blocking doodads. None of these things even get a chance to work, since AdMuncher blows everything out of the way before it can even reach these apps! (divs, spans,tables, iframes, scripts-u name it-can be blocked)
Upshot is-if you want to play safe-don't blindly install it over your existing system, go for a clean new install and it should work without hassles. It's worth the trouble, since several flaws and even a few new exploits have been fixed by it. (Of course, newer holes will popup sure as the sun shines, but thats' another story :) )

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>ping -n 1 0.0.0.0

Pinging 0.0.0.0 with 32 bytes of data:

Destination specified is invalid.

Ping statistics for 0.0.0.0:
Packets: Sent = 1, Received = 0, Lost = 1 (100% loss),

if you RTFA, they want a whoppin 150$/year for ad-free 100GB.
To me that only makes sense for businesses, but then again, which business would need 100GB without being able to afford their own/co-located/hosted mailserver ?
I'd personally rather stick with gmail and use AdMuncher. Works like a charme.

Mozilla is shit. Adblock is shit. They can't hold a candle to IE running AdMuncher

Go download AdMuncher. Best $30 I've ever spent.

For starters-Yahoo offered POP access till April 2002, for free. You could have downloaded all your mails at any time. Even after POP went paid, YahooPOPs will let you download all your yahoo mails to your POP client. I've been using this combination for over 5 years now-where's the problem? They can continue with 6 MB, goto 1 GB, hell, 1 TB-I get all my mail into my POP client when I want to. I have mails archived all the way from 1999 on my PC. For ads-use AdMuncher Again-where's the problem? I haven't EVER been subjected to a single ad, popup, driveby activex or anything in the last five years. Use Admuncher-and you won't have to care about seeing any ad ever again. Yahoo's pages are absolutely clean and ad free for me-they've always been.

I don't see whats so great about being able to store all your emails ever received on some company's servers. What happens if, years later, Google gets taken over, or closes down? Would you rather have all your mails sitting pretty there? Recall when Google took over Dejanews and made it Google Groups-many people were upset that all the dumb posts,profanities and flames they'd made years earlier would now go public. Do you still trust someone else to store every single mail you've ever sent?
Then again-that's me.
Now that we've addressed two major issues-mailbox size and type of ads-what's left? Oh, yeah, 'I trust google but not $COMPANY'-a view expressed by many people here. Just what's so great about them? Any company is in business for one thing and one thing only-PROFIT. Google is not a charity. There's NO telling how their current user friendly stance may change after the IPO. Look at Apple-people held out Steve Jobs as some great evangelist who's come to save the world from evil Microsoft and IBM-he's another bird of the same feather. Recall the Playfair vs iTunes controversy a couple of months back (should be somewhere here on /.) In the end-Google is a great company no doubt-but they're not infallible. They've provided excellent service till now, there's no reason however to expect that they won't serve up something unpleasant in the future.

1. Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition
   
2. Symantec Norton Internet Security
   
3. 7-zip
   
4. Miranda
   
5. The Bat!
   
6. Mozilla
   
7. EmEditor
   
8. MagicTweak
   
9. Ad Muncher (Never surf without it.)
   
10. foobar2000
    

7zip lacks multi-part archiving with error recovery volumes, or any other kind of error recovery information, so I use WinRAR instead. You get what you pay for with WinRAR.

WinRAR
Ad Muncher
Opera
Foobar2000
Paint Shop Pro
the current Kazaa Lite variant of my choice
OO.o

That's all I ask of my Windows machine.

wow, i didn't even know /. had ads at all! LOL!!
Firefox w/flash blocked is the pimp. Also look out for Ad Muncher. In ten months this baby has saved me from hundreds of megabytes of advertisements :D

and you're right, i shouldn't have been modded troll. dumb fucks.

On the slim chance that your ISP is using a windows-based proxy, you could use Ad Muncher.

It is of course windows-only but is able to filter popups (and other adverts) from html/javascript as they pass through the proxy. It has also received top marks from popup-killer-review.com, beating all reviewed conventional popup stoppers (like google toolbar etc), except for one, which it scored equally with.

A linux port is currently being worked on, if you'd like to be notified when it's available just use the contact page on admuncher.com.

On the slim chance that your ISP is using a windows-based proxy, you could use Ad Muncher.

It is of course windows-only but is able to filter popups (and other adverts) from html/javascript as they pass through the proxy. It has also received top marks from popup-killer-review.com, beating all reviewed conventional popup stoppers (like google toolbar etc), except for one, which it scored equally with.

A linux port is currently being worked on, if you'd like to be notified when it's available just use the contact page on admuncher.com.

I totally forgot what kinda list this is, so I'm listing my favourite things. I doubt that most people ever need VirtualDub, but it sure is handy. But even more essential: a real web browser! Try Firebird (free) or Opera (speedy).
If you're running Windows you're doubly in luck, because Ad Muncher is the best thing going. I can't even force myself to internet on my Linux install anymore after installing this little gem. For $15 it's the best deal in the world. I'm serious, it even makes IE almost tolerable unless you're a tabs fiend.

My list:
1 Ad Muncher probably deserves all five spots, but gets the first one instead
2 Firebird. Best free app extant.
3 Any text editor. I like UltraEdit (except for hexediting), but OmniEdit's free and has syntax highlighting and has a lot of cool features
4 Nero Burning ROM kicks much ass.
5 VirtualDub is possibly the coolest encoding tool I've got, even though I use Vegas for sequencing my video. Fast, solid, with some nice filters.

DIShonourable mention goes to ZoneAlarm for diddling more machines than I can count.

I use a program which allows me to change the referer header to appear to be from the same site I'm browsing. Not only does that protect my privacy but it works with the vast majority of sites that clamp down on content linking / bandwidth stealing. Sometimes simply removing the referer will kick you back out to an index page, which is a pain.