Slashdot Mirror

Proxomitron and
Guidescope

Personally, I prefer the Proxomitron because it allows you to do other things, like turn off Flash and certain Javascript annoyances (like sites that stuff moving text in the status bar).

I think Slashdot should rethink its connection with DoubleClick.

Once x% of the Slashdot community subscribes, I'm sure Slashdot will do away with ads altogether.

However, until that point in time, we can go fuck ourselves -- we'll take what we're given, and we'll like it.

Personally, though, I haven't seen an ad on Slashdot for quite some time indeed. Oops.

Requires Macromedia Flash Player 6
on the little demo page. Too bad I removed FLASH due to it's abuse by web advertisers. I hope Macromedia will put out a player that can be set by default to not play flash. HINT HINT! I'm not going to install it to watch a demo and remove it for the rest of my browsing. Is a play button too much to ask?

Two quick questions:

(1) If you knew you didn't have the plugin installed, why did you bother clicking through? The demo was clearly described as being Flash.

(2) What the fuck good would a Flash plugin be that, by default, doesn't play Flash? Does your web browser, by default, not render HTML?! (I'm sure there's a Netscape joke in there somewhere, but I'm generally not one to make cheap shots.)

If you're so worried about ads, do yourself a favor and install Guidescope. It's a little proxy that sits in your system tray, bound to port 8000 of (only) your localhost interface, and you tell IE that localhost:8000 is your proxy for HTTP content. It then replaces known ads with a gray box the same size as the ad, so it won't break the layout of pages. (Optionally you can have it nuke them altogether.) It can optionally block some or all cookies, too.

GuideScope all the way, baby!

Guidescope is a great, free (beer) service that allows you to get rid of advertisements. It has some problems -- it gets rid of any image with the word 'banner' or 'advertisement' (possibly even 'ad' but I'm not sure) in it -- but 98.62973% of the time it hits the ads and leaves everything else intact. You download a small program (Linux and Mac users, you may be SOL with this one) that acts as a local proxy running on port 8000. Tell Mozilla (if you use anything else, you're an idiot *flame,flame*) to route through it and ta'da! No more ads. It can also kill cookies. From what the press says, it interacts with a central database to check whether or not something should be classified as an 'ad', but while I haven't checked to see what it converses with, I don't think it really does. You can however block specific images, which is kinda nifty.

I've said nifty twice in this post, which is a bad thing, so I'm going to stop talking at the end of this sentence. (period.)

Or, for that matter, Guidescope, an easier to use adbuster that Junkbuster helped get started. I'm oh so happy since I've switched over . . .

try a product like JunkBuster, or GuideScope

both are easy to use, and should take care of those pesky ads. why whine, when you don't even have to see them?

why are you paying for ad removal service when you can just use a proxy like guidescope

Well, I use Guidescope which is basically Junkbuster with a nice interface and an autoupdating block list. Proxomitron crashes my machine too often.

Lately I found for Windows a combination of Guidescope and PopUpKiller do a great job of blocking out:
Cookies, popup windows, regular ads, and moost other things I'd rather not see.
It takes some tweaking to get them to play nice together, but they do the job quite well.

Webwasher does not use regular expressions to filter images: it filters them by size.

Excellent! Does it block them based on the <IMG> tag attributes, or does it go ahead and load the image headers? Guidescope uses a central database of image URLs that users have chosen to block individually. Now if I can find a way to chain Webwasher and Guidescope together, my solution will be complete.

Junkbusters now recommends a newer, more user-friendly proxy called Guidescope. See Junkbusters' Guidescope FAQ. I've been using Guidescope betas for 6 months with few complaints. They say they will release the source code 8 months after the 1.0 binary release.

Guidescope is a blocking proxy similar to Junkbuster. In fact Junkbuster recommends Guidescope in preference to their own product. It has a web interface for changing your ad and cookie blocking settings.

Guidescope uses a central database. This lets you benefit from other users' blocking choices, but then your web activity goes into another database. Hopefully they manage it better than Doubleclick does theirs. They say they reshuffle the userids frequently.

It runs on both Linux and Windows, but it isn't open source yet. They say they'll open it 8 months after the 1.0 release.

I invite you to further the decline of such companies by visiting Guidescope. Some may remember the Junkbusters, who used to put out an adfiltering proxy called, cryptically, "Internet Junkbuster". Since then they've moved that operation to this new company. Ad blocking is much improved because all proxies now turn to a centrally maintained database of ad's instead of using simple RegExs. I've had great results with Windows & Linux using it. Also they are very good about privacy. Check it out.

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Yeah. Ad proxies like Guidescope (it's free!) look for any image that is served from a different domain and block it. It's a great way to kill bugs without screwing up most layouts.

Go use Guidescope. It's by the Junkbuster people, but they keep the block list online and the proxy looks there before downloading the ad. Works great. (In case you ask, the time it takes to look up the ad is far shorter than the time it would have taken to download the ad, so there's still a net gain, and you get to see gray boxes where the ads were! I haven't seen a CNet ad yet.)


...phil

As a Guidescope user, all I have to say is "Boo hoo, and so long" to such companies.

I don't think that just because someone paid to put a banner ad on a site I read that I have the obligation to look at it. When you record a TV show (on Tivo, or your VCR, or whatever) do you not skip the commercials? Do you change radio stations during the station/commercial breaks? Why should online ads be any different?

If someone wants to make money through ads, that's great, super, excellent. More power to them. But I feel no obligation to click through anything, ever.

The big problem is the attitude that the Internet is Free Content. For the most part, it's true. If you suddenly had to pay a monthly fee for /., would you? How much? $1? $3? $10? Problem is, people enjoy things until they no longer become free.

Either way, banners bug the shit out of me, and I'll avoid them, and whatever comes along to replace them, however I can and feel just dandy about it.

For ad blocking, I heartily recommend Guidescope. Here's a company that respects people's privacy, provides a great service, and has a program that actually works--cross platform, cross browser.

Incidentally, one of the great ironies of being in the ad blocking market is that you're assured that when you advertise it targets only those people who don't already have your product.
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Filtering/blocking based on Domain names is fatally flawed.

That's why there are software like Internet Junkbuster, or Guidescope.
No matter what the domain name is, it's still blocks ads. (Oh, hello /. admin... sorry for blocking your ads :P)

So, the same thing can be used to block porn sites. (Ok, at least Junkbuster will try to block every domain's ads. Don't know about Guidescope...)
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Uh, gee, the fact that they have a link that doesn't require a password?

You know full well that link is not intended for you, or most likely anyone else reading this board.

Why don't you tell us who it is for? If this is only for certain people, why is it completely accessible to everyone on the Internet, with no statement about who can or can't use it?

I suppose now you're going to rant about how I'm stealing from all these web sites because I run a proxy server and block their ads and cookies? And sometimes I tape shows and skip over the commercials!

OK, lock me up. I've seen the error of my ways.

Lego, not only is your cookie block stupid, IT DOESN'T EVEN WORK! Oh, and you would happen to be using this cookie stuff to be monitoring kids under 13, would you?
==
This post sponsored by the American Obstetrics Society:

Uhm, slightly OT, but uhm, you have to be an idiot to be willing to pay to remove ads from websites when you can visit several places and download software that does this for FREE...

http://www.junkbuster.com/
and
http://www.guidescope.com

Both act as a proxy that allows you to enable or disable ad filtering. Banners, ad boxes, etc, just show up as a little broken image icon on your screen. I use Guidescope, and personally, I think it rocks.

I'm actually using Netscape right now, and I can expect it to crash any second if I open up any more windows. That's why I continually save posts like these. I've lost too many to keep track of, but it was enough for me to eventually dump Netscape.

It took about six months for the inertia of using Netscape over IE to slow down and for me to finally realize that the change was imminent. Outlook's Import utility clinched it, as I could now use Outlook to import all my email. I have Netscape 6 Preview 1 installed, but it looks more like a nearly completed building with the scaffolding still up than any kind of useable browser.

As Stroustrup said, "C makes it easy to shoot yourelf in the foot, whereas C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off." Yes, IE crashes every now and then, and it usually takes the whole system with it, but I don't have to deal with the maddening experience of several crashes per day. Which is worse: the boulder in my path?--or the grain of sand in my shoe. I'm not quite sure, but I've chosen the boulder.

About the only thing I miss is Netscape's status bar. They did a great job with keep the user informed about how the page was loading, while IE happifly reassures me that the page is "opening..." And IE's dumbed-down error messages aren't exactly helpful, but I've been using Guidescope as a local ad-blocking proxy and it seems to help some with DNS errors and the like.

So I'm sorry that I don't use Netscape anymore. I'm sorry that I use a browser that doesn't adhere very well to Net standards, and in some cases even flaunts them. But I'm not sorry that Microsoft built a better browser. And Netscape didn't.
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This one is even better than junkbuster.

Here

You want to try Guidescope. I think it is better than junkbuster.