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Junkbuster comes in a Windows flavor, too. I use it on my home dual boot system in both its Windows and Linux versions.

It is only a problem if there are no means for the average person to defend themself against it. Personally, I have been using Junkbuster for quite some time now, and the banner ads never show up (difficult to concentrate with them blinking). In fact, the connection to doubleclick or whoever is never even made, so no tracking is possible. Better yet, the proxy is free under Linux, is configurable, and is pretty powerful. It has a number of options when it comes to cookies, in addition to other filtering. Personally, I just like it because it helps my 14.4K modem load pages faster, since (without fail) no content will load until the banners have been fully loaded. The only aspects that are sometimes annoying is that unloaded images always appear as broken pictures (instead of being replaced by an invisible single-pixel-image or something) and it takes some tweaking to keep it from blocking "download" and other harmless links with "ad" in the URL. The feature I like best? I added microsoft.com to the blockfile, and if I try to connect to their site, it simply fails to load :)

Squid is a full-featured, free cacheing web proxy that is most certainly what you want to look at. It is available in RPM and DEB pre-packaged form.

You might also want to look into filtering web proxies that might be what users set up to "hit," to do things like filtering out cookies and/or annoying banner ads. (Not the Slashdot ones, of course!). The "standard" one to mention is Junkbuster but there are other possibly more sophisticated ones as listed at HTTP Links.

I'd hazard the guess that you'd be able to get most of the web cacheing benefits from a 386 box with 8MB of RAM and 500MB of disk; moving up to 14.4GB isn't likely to increase performance vastly over that...

Junkbusters

It's pretty amazingly flexible, and runs on all (?) platforms. You've gotta feed it a huge regex file for it to work on ads, but I those are easy to find.

I haven't done exactly what you're asking for, but I expect it's possible and even trivial.

I had it set up to reject all cookies except those from /. and the New York Time's website.

The documentation is pretty self-explanatory, but if you have problems, drop me a line.

Let me know how this sounds. We establish a proxy mesh, so that all unencrypted requests for controversial material hit the originating server from non-sensitive territory. We encrypt the connection from our browser to the proxy for untraceability.
SSL improves upon PGP/GPG for this purpose. If you are used to PGP terminology, read 'certificate' as 'public key', and 'certification authority' as 'someone the browser trusts.'

1. GPG/PGP is not a stream cipher. The proxy couldn't pass any part of the file on until it had received the whole thing. In contrast, a streaming cipher like SSL can work on data - and pass it along - as it flows in.
2. It is already in browsers. In Netscape 2+ and MSIE 3+, you even can add new Certificate Authorities; having Verisign sign your certificate is not strictly necessary, but still useful.
3. An implementation (with source) is available both inside and outside the United States. SSLeay is a freely available implementation of SSL.
4. It can handle other protocols. SSLeay has been used in a secure telnet application. See section 16.2 of the FAQ pointed at above for info; the link may fail due to spaces in the anchor name.

The Internet Junkbuster Proxy, Muffin and RabbIT are all filtering proxies, well-adapted to block PICS quickly. These could also anonymize well, to avoid signalling the browser locale to the webserver. Squid is adapted for speed and caching, but not-at-all for filtering; I doubt it has any hooks in the code for that.

The Junkbusters proxy can block or even fake up cookies for you. C code, U build it, for Un*x or W*****s.

Uhm.

Click on the monkey and win!?? I went out and got Internet Junkbuster after seeing YAABA (yet another annoying animated banner ad) last week. It's been browsing bliss for me and my roommates since then. I HATED that freaking stupid monkey...

Leave the advertising to those who don't know any better. There are now and will be for a good while many of those people, and when the banner ad scheme finally does implode, I'm sure there'll be something to replace it. Hopefully there will be something to counteract it, as well.

--
A host is a host from coast to coast...

Use either lynx or Internet Junkbuster and you will never see another evil (patented or otherwise) banner ad again! BTW, I invented AND patented dirt, grass, and cheese. Pay up, folks! :) --Ben

Might be nice to have a YRO links slashbox, too, with links to things like EFF and Junkbusters.

Two words: Internet Junkbuster.
--
Yes, that *is* a real email address...

In most instances, calling people's homes with prerecorded advertising messages is illegal.

In an effort to make a profit, god has decided to advertise on all newborn human beings. The ads will start appearing on children as soon as next month. More details later. Heh.

Anyway, this doesn't sound like such a bad thing. It is only on their webpage, which I can't say I've ever used anyway. Just don't visit. Or if you must, use junkbuster.

my $cents = $penny x 2;

Use the Internet Junkbuster proxy.

JunkBuster. I haven't seen a banner ad in years.

Now, delving slightly off-topic, I am of the school of thought that feels ad filters hurt the site. If a site like Slashdot has ads, it's because it needs the money to run. Companies pay for those ads based on how many times they think the ad is going to be viewed. If, say, 75% of the viewers of a page are filtering out that ad, then companies are going to question the value of buying that ad.

People aren't going to search for alternative means of monitary support for content unless the present system stops working. If ad filters become common then the issue can be forced. I don't see any other practical way to bring the issue forward.

Maybe then we can stop whoring out our minds.

Junkbuster forever!

Get something like IJB that you can use to filter out Referrer: headers. It breaks most counters, but do you really miss those? It can cut out banner ads too.

And no, I don't work for Junkbusters. I just like (well, mostly) their software. Mail me for patches to make it mangle pages less badly.

"I want to use software that doesn't suck." - ESR
"All software that isn't free sucks." - RMS

You can keep REFERER headers from being sent by using the "Internet Junkbuster" proxy.

Then you should try out IJB, from junkbusters.com---it's a GPLd filtering proxy server which will cut out 95% of banner ads given some tweaking. Mail me if you want a suitable config file and my patches to make it mangle pages more efficiently.

"I want to use software that doesn't suck." - ESR
"All software that isn't free sucks." - RMS

Another way to avoid having NS block on DNS lookups is to use the Junkbuster proxy, and you get to filter out banner ads as a bonus.

One word of caution, though, manually bind Junkbuster to 127.0.0.1 - this may have changed, but previously the default setup you get by following README binds junkbuster to any IP address, resulting in an open proxy invitation to script kiddies.

I find that the Internet Junkbuster works great for getting rid of annoying banner ads wherever they are, be it search engines or Slashdot. Just think of all the bandwidth you'd save.

The Site is called JunkBusters. They offer a proxy server that will enables a person to disallow access to certain sites -- like ad.doubleclick.net, thus the advertising, banners, and cookies don't get in! Nice feature.

This links to the proxy server page. It is distributed as freeware under the GNU GPL. C source and documentation are available.

In fact, their whole website (copyrighted though it is) is stated to be covered under the GNU GPL. I think they understand what they're saying, unlike VP Gore.

They also have a campaign going against the PIII ProcessorID 'feature'. (Radio collars! Step right up and get your ear tag and radio collar!!)

The Site is called JunkBusters. They offer a proxy server that will enables a person to disallow access to certain sites -- like ad.doubleclick.net, thus the advertising, banners, and cookies don't get in! Nice feature.

This links to the proxy server page. It is distributed as freeware under the GNU GPL. C source and documentation are available.

In fact, their whole website (copyrighted though it is) is stated to be covered under the GNU GPL. I think they understand what they're saying, unlike VP Gore.

They also have a campaign going against the PIII ProcessorID 'feature'. (Radio collars! Step right up and get your ear tag and radio collar!!)

You might want to try the Internet
JunkBuster (IJB), which (also) does exactly
this.

I'm not so sure about my name and address being sold as trafficking in human souls--there are simply things so much more serious than that taking place that need to be addressed and aren't.

The issues of address lists, and more generally advertising as a whole, is a serious one. It's a matter of selling our minds. Now, this is not oppression on the scale that it is happening in most places. But it is insidious and dangerous (that banner at the top of the page included!)

We are the ones who are the receivers of many of the benefits of oppression. Most slashdotters are clearly members of the international elite (even if a number of us chose not to partake fully in it). If we cannot be clear-minded -- cannot understand what we are doing and why -- than our ethics cannot save us. Advertising is all about muddling our thoughts. From the mundane nature of a banner add that looks like a Win95 window to the spin-doctors that make us think a medicine factory is some chemical weapons production.

(p.s., Junkbuster will get rid of the banner ads -- fight the Man one banner at a time! I'm not sure if I'm kidding)

I am getting really bad download times here in the UK, not because /. is slow but purely because the server for the adverts is holding the rest of the page up

Then turn off the ads. See http://www.junkbusters.com for more details. Substituting a 1x1 transparent GIF for each ad does wonders for download speeds :-)

There is no 1st Amendment protection for spamming, and whether or not you have to pay for your email and/or connect time has NOTHING to do with it!

As far as the First Amendment argument goes, a major difference between this law and ALA v Pataki is that Pataki would prevent *ACCESS* to information - if I went to the library, the government would prevent me from accessing information that I was actively seeking. The Virginia law prevents certain methods of marketing.

Spammers do not have a First Amendment protection for their activities. The Supreme Court said as much in a 1970 appeal of a junkmail restriction law. The Court said:

&gt&gt We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even ``good'' ideas on an unwilling recipient. &lt&lt

Note that the fact that a vendor does not have the right to send unwanted material has NOTHING to do with whether or not there is a cost to the recipient! The right simply DOES NOT EXIST!

See http://www.junkbusters.com/ht/en/dmlaw s.html.

However, if the ACLU chooses to use the arguments you presented, the law might well be ruled unconsitutional because of the interstate commerce argument. If so, that would mean that only the US Congress could pass a law of this nature.

I don't understand why people don't just block banner ads. You save bandwith while at the same time not allowing yourself to be targeted with advertisements... check out www.junkbuster.com or mail me for a copy of my squid redirector that block banner adds...