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My answer: Privoxy.

Or install privoxy and write an appropriate filter

I have their whole site filtered in my Privoxy options. That way, even if I were to click on the Google link inadvertently, I'll be stopped before I see that maddening website.

I use Privoxy on my network. Presumably it could be configured to do a lot of the same things, although I've never really dug that far into it.

http://www.privoxy.org/

I've stopped using extensions a while ago and just use Privoxy.

You could always use Privoxy. It takes a bit of configuring at first, but if your network is configured properly, it would work well. Here's one way that COULD be bypassed, but I'm too lazy at the moment to think of how.. Set up a parent's PC with Privoxy. Deny all access to the public internet from child's PC. This would force the child's PC to only get internet access if they are using the parent's PC as the proxy. You could always deny only port 80 to the child's PC, but that's only going to stop so much. I'd recommend a minimum of 80 and 443 (https). Good luck!

Meh, I don't see the appeal of subscribing to someone's list... Privoxy has a near-perfect built-in filter, cleans out a lot more crap, and it's easy enough to add blocks for the few things that slip through.

sorry, forgot to add the link to Privoxy
http://www.privoxy.org/

Privoxy will rewrite the HTTP referrer of your requests. I think it uses the root of the server by default. Personally, I have stopped using it because Firefox with extensions is better/easier for adblocking... it seems like there should be a Firefox extension for referrer changes. Anyone know of one that I am missing?

Yeah, the huge cutesy illustrations are a bit much. But ads? What ads?

Ahh, Privoxy.

"Privoxy is a web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for protecting privacy, modifying web page data, managing cookies, controlling access, and removing ads, banners, pop-ups and other obnoxious Internet junk. Privoxy has a very flexible configuration and can be customized to suit individual needs and tastes."

A hosts file just isn't an effective way to block ads. You really want something more like Privoxy.

Why not just run your internet through your own proxy and remove the ads? Sure, it may be a bit slower, but surely it could be done with something like Privoxy on top of Squid.

We do not want to see pages full of advertisement. Especially not when they move around. This was already clear with the tag.

I even hate it when movies I want to see start playing before I pressed start.

I myself use several different methods to avoid seeing spam.
1) http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm (Update the hosts file once per month with a cron job)
2) Adblock
3) http://www.privoxy.org/
4) Adblock

and for some sites that I want to see without the stoopid ads all over or where I do not like the standard layout (like slashdot or Toms hardware) I use http://userstyles.org/

OK, perhaps I am overactive, but I am now unable to watch the internet on an other computer, because of all the ads that are trown to me.

All this should be a hint to companies that people do niot want this. Ebay should look at who its base customers are and serve them. Ignore the extra money you can make. It pisses people off.

But as it is a company, the management will be only there for three years, or so, so as long as they can milk it, who cares, right?

. I'd jump back to IE in a heartbeat if they gave me AdBlock or an equivalent thereof.

You might be interested in Privoxy. It is a Proxy that lets you do just that, block ads in a similar way to adblock. I have been using it and it and is really good.

wait a fucking minute. did i just make IE more attractive?

Really? I didn't have any problems at all.

Privoxy works well, although you should know that you have to point your web browser to it via proxy settings. I believe it comes with a large list of predefined filters that help clean up the web whilst using it.

Install internet junkbuster. or better yet , privoxy it will strip javascript baddies like that for you and lots more.

It is the single thing you can get to make the internet enjoyable again.. I love the hacks for it to make all ad's disappear into a single transparent image scaled right to keep formatting correct.

Situation:
I am proud subscriber of the services of a small, independent ISP (offering even UUCP and such*g*).
I want to avoid them and any local network administrator whose network I might use away from home from seeing my www surfing habits.
I have root access level control on a linux server.

How I deal with it:
I run http://www.privoxy.org/ on that server. It listens in 127.0.0.1:8118 only. Privoxy is a cool "filtering proxy server" that I also use to rewrite webpages to my liking.

I then connect to that server with a ssh tunnel:
ssh -L 8118:localhost:8118 user@remote.server.tld -t screen -RD
The screen -RD opens my irssi etc. screen session.
(The part "localhost" refers to the machine I use to surf, it is not the 127.0.0.1 from the privoxy configuration! See man ssh for details.)

Now all I need to do is to configure my browser to use localhost:8118 as proxy, and ssh forwards all traffic encrypted. :D

Result:
Websites I surf to see the IP of my "root server", including a reverse resolving DNS entry and therefore my registration address.
But neither my provider nor a local admin sees my www traffic. This is a situation I very much prefer over a a direct connection, although it requires a ssh session open all the time. But I am a screen-guy anyways! ;)

"I like!"

I've posted my list back about a year ago, and I still use every single one of them every day... (I also describe how to get around a "bug" in FF that forbids non-standard port connections). Check it out here. I also spoke at my local LUG about the same thing in January.

Here's a list of the extensions I'm currently using in my Firefox build (you can see how I have it tricked out with all of my theming and extensions over here):

• Sage, a really slick and fast rss aggregator/reader for Firefox. It docks on the sidebar and is visible with a simple Alt-S keystroke. Very nice, and easy for me to catch up on some quick headlines when I need to.
• AdBlock Plus with the AdBlock Filterset G Updater to stop the flood of useless ads from coming at me. I did have to add one small rule for Google's ads, because I do actually like the recommendations they provide from time to time, and it helps out sites I visit with a little revenue. That regex looks like this: @@*.googlesyndication.com/*
• Web Developer, a very useful and slick toolbar/menu driven suite that allows me to do all kinds of things to websites I'm viewing, including validation, showing where their css classes are, manipulating forms, cookies, images, and dozens of other features. Hands-down, the most-useful extension I have as a developer/tweaker of web content.
• PrefBar, another powerful extension I use every single day. This one allows me to change the capabilities of my browser with a simple click of a checkbox. Want Java enabled? Click. Sick of popups? Click. I have Colors, Images, Javascript, Java, Flash, Popups, Proxies, Pipelining, Referers, Cache on my bar. Its completely customizable, and very well-done.
• SwitchProxy lets me manage and switch between multiple proxy configurations quickly and easily. I can also use it as an anonymizer to protect my system from prying eyes. I have Squid, Squid + Privoxy, Privoxy + Tor and i2p enabled in my configuration at the moment. Quick and easy, and one status-bar dropdown lets me change from one to another.
• FasterFox gives me a little boost by auto-configuring some parameters for faster browsing, such as link prefetching, pipelining, DNS cache, paint delay, and others.
• ForecastFox, weather.. in my status bar. I've changed the icons a bit with a separate icon pack called Lansing, which is nice adn small and out of the way. Minimal is the way to go on my toolbars and status bars.
• Linky lets me open or download all or selected links in a page, image links and even web addresses found in the text in separate or different tabs or windows. A simple right-click on any link or web address, and away I go.
• Google PageRank Status gives me a quick overview of the PR of a site in the current view. This is useful as I do a lot of web work, and knowing what kind of sites get a decent or poor PR is useful information.
• SearchStatus is another SEO toolbar fo

They are sending some of the ads through HTTPS which most ad blockers can't handle.
If you have a blocker that handles SSL ads, then let us know. I'd love to use that with Privoxy.

No

Consumers have always been fed up with ads - they just never had a way to avoid them before.

Umm, Privoxy (http://privoxy.org/) + no TV has really worked fo me for years.
 
Now if I only had a way to shoot down those planes with the huge banners that fly up and down the beach on a nice day...

The fact that the use of ad blocking software has doubled over the last few years really doesn't surprise me. In fact, as much as advertising has inundated the online world, I'm surprised that the use of blocking software hasn't grown faster than that. I've been using a combination of tools such as Adblock and Privoxy for years now, to the point that I'm pretty spoiled and can't imagine browsing any site "unprotected". Every so often I find myself at a public computer, say in a computer lab or library, and I can't imagine how people get anything done with all the obnoxious distractions from flashy animations to those floating windows that cover the small paragraph of meaningful text I'm trying to pick out of that sea of ads. Then again, I guess your average Joe User doesn't mind seeing all that advertising, or doesn't always know how to block it. That 81% mentioned in the article includes people who use spam filters (and probably their browsers' bulit-in popup blockers, too), so I imagine that the number of people who go farther to block ads on web pages is actually much lower.

It's not just online, either. Our society has become a culture saturated with advertising at every turn. You can hardly even use a gas pump or cook an egg anymore without marketers seeing another opportunity to make an "impression". Thankfully, there are some aspects of our lives where we can do something to help filter out some of that crap, and the internet is still one of them- at least until the marketers get creative and figure out new ways to bypass filtering software.

I didn't get any of that - simply a list of videos with direct links to watch them - and this is in IE7.

I guess http://www.privoxy.org// is doing its job

http://www.privoxy.org/ is the best way. I use it on my router.

For starters, yes, i would be fine with it if MS had the same feature enabled by default in IE. But it all depends on how the data is handled. I think you're assuming all the data will be logged somewhere. The URL, IP addess, time stamp etc would surely prove to be useful information for someone like the DOJ, but it wouldn't exactly be useful for preventing users from visiting black-listed sites. Having the user download their own list every so often would be fine with me too. But there's already software that can do this, such as Privoxy. At the end of the day, I think it's a bit of a pointless endavour and i'd prefer if Opera didn't have it. But i'm not going to complain if i can turn it off.

Cat. Mouse. Cat. Mouse.

So now we just counter this illegal wiretapping (yes, its still illegal, even though they've passed a law that makes it "legal") with extra strong encryption and Civil Disobedience.

Use TrueCrypt with the AES-Twofish-Serpent algorithm on your PC (Linux, Mac or Windows). If you want to use something simliar on BSD, look into GELI encryption for those partitions.

For phones, you could look into encryption handsets or telephone scramblers. There's this one too, or the Cryptophone GSM Phone Encryption solution. Google around, there's quite a few hundred solutions in this space... stack them together for even more security.

Disclaimer: I don't personally know how strong these algorithms are on these handsets, so use at your own risk.

With VoIP, you could easily layer whatever encryption you want on top of it. Bounce your call through a few foreign routers, run it through Privoxy, Tor and i2p and you should be good to go. Yes, it will incur some latency.. but I'd rather sacrifice speed for security or privacy, wouldn't you? Here is an article on securing VoIP. Worthwhile reading if you're using it or considering it.

Cat. Mouse. Cat. Mouse.

Now its OUR turn.

You take from us, we take back.

indeed, assholes all, especially us for giving them so much revenue through ads!

What ads?

Or you could use Privoxy, which does the same thing, but is open source and cross-platform. I still use Proxomitron because I have a lot of filters written for it that specifically affect ads on the sites that I use. Also, Privoxy's GUI is a bit harder to use.

And the MicroSoft implementation seems to be a limited sub-set. It won't even block ads.

Wow, Microsoft has "invented" privoxy!

My Linksys WRT54G (not GS) is a transparent Squid proxy already. I don't see why this ASUS machine can't do the same.

It points to a secondary FreeBSD machine for that, because I have a 5GiB cache on the Squid side. Everything is anonymized through Privoxy + Tor, with no configuration changes on the client side.

Users don't even know (or care) that their traffic is being proxied or anonymized at all.

For user data stored on the FreeBSD machine, I also use rsnapshot to do backups of another disk slice that is GELI encrypted as well, which works out very nicely for the overall solution.

Everything that goes out port 80 (or comes back in on the response) through the Linksys is redirected through the Squid server on the FreeBSD machine. iptables(1) on the Linksys does all the magic for me, as follows:

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i br0 -s ! 10.0.1.6 -p tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to 10.0.1.6:3128
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o br0 -s 10.0.1.0/24 -d 10.0.1.6 -j SNAT --to 10.0.1.2
iptables -A FORWARD -s 10.0.1.0/24 -d 10.0.1.6 -i br0 -o br0 -p tcp --dport 3128 -j ACCEPT

There's more to it, but that should get you started. Its really easy to implement, and I'd trust my FreeBSD machine to process those packets faster than the processor on the Linksys ever could (not even considering the storage requirements for such a caching mechanism).

The Squid cache on the FreeBSD side resides on a partition that is GELI encrypted. Do I have anything to hide? No, but I do have a right to protect the identity of my users, their browsing habits and their data.

Everyone else should do the same (or similar).

I've been happily using Privoxy + Tor + i2p together for quite some time now to browse the web, Google and other sites of interest.

I also have 2 transparent Squid proxies in front of my LAN here (on my side) running with squid-prefetch, and they too use the same privoxy and tor and i2p setups for prefetching. This way, duplicate requests from anyone inside my network don't HAVE TO go to the live site, if it already exists in the Squid cache. Since its transparent (done at the router with iptables), the users don't have to configure anything at all on their end.

And I much prefer SwitchProxy over FoxyProxy any day.

Privoxy. Install, set whitelist and restart. Done. All for free.

Yes, and if you have an always-on computer, please consider running a TOR server. TOR includes mechanisms for limiting bandwidth usage and blocking certain connections at your choice.

Also, keep the cookies down. I personally block google cookies and those of a bunch of other ad vendors - these are the data that would give the most away about me. I really ought to run something like Privoxy

Noscript might fix that. That and Privoxy. If running privoxy is not practical then adblock as suggested by others.

Or if you can't use AdBlock, at least get Privoxy.

Additionally, I can have one instance of privoxy running on a server, and cover my entire home network. One single point of configuration, with the config files easily transferred to my notebook when I travel.

Well, there still is the old fashioned adblock via Privoxy, but that's kinda overkill sometimes...

:j

This is not my idea; a fellow slashdotter brought it up before when mandatory storing of e-mails was discussed. He said something like "If this goes through, I'll spread my adress to every spammer on Earth. Then they can store my thousands of v1agr4-mails all they want." You could whitelist your friends adresses, or any adress you're expecting mail from, and send the rest straight to the trash.

Taking this further, if they were to start storing visited sites, etc., I'd set up some kind of script to randomly visit sites (only "safe" ones of course, like news sites, and not retrieve images to reduce bandwidth load), and run it 24/7. A week worth of my infrequent surfing gave me about 10 MB of Privoxy logs - imagine what one site every 5 seconds, 24/7, will do.

This is just an idea, and it might not work - we can filter spam, so can "they" filter out news sites, but creating vast amounts of data for them to store indefinitely is something worth thinking of. If something becomes too much of a hassle/cost for companies, they quit doing it.

Have to agree there. It's an amazing little tool once you can get the hang of it.

It's amazing how much crap you can filter out. Plus you can create custom rules for specific sites, so you can 'repair' broken or badly-behaved sites. As parent points out, the creator of The Proxomitron has since died, so alas the source code is closed AFAIK. Not that it needed improving as it has always been rock-solid.

I've tried the open source Privoxy which is very similar and unlike The Proxomitron available in non-Windows versiions, but IMHO it is not as flexible or powerful.

That reminds me - since it is Shonenware I really ought to get a Shonen Knife CD someday...

It's a bit of a late reply I'm afraid - I had a busy afternoon and was then over at the Astronomy Centre getting good views of Saturn and M42, but it seems that the reason that the Washington Post was asking me to register was something to do with my Privoxy settings - possibly "hide-user-agent".

man, from beijing, trying to access http://www.freebsd.org/ I got "The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading." from firefox...

go and have tor (http://tor.eff.org/) and privoxy (http://www.privoxy.org/) set up, that's the perfect tools combination for web surfing...

and if you have gentoo linux (http://www.gentoo.org/ just type:

# emerge tor privoxy

to install and play with them :)

Nothing can stop Google from loggin everything you do over their servers. What you can do is make it pointless:
- use Gaim with
- OTR for all your chat, routing it via
- TOR by TORifying Gaim

Furthermore you better create a fresh account for this, using an invite that you got through a non-traceable route (for instance using Firefox with the Switchproxy plugin according to Tor's guidelines.) Don't forget to install Privoxy for this and configure your browser correctly or your DNS requests are still going over open channels. For more information you can refer to the documentation on the TOR website.

Yes you miss out on the new coolness, yes you have to have alternative channels to verify fingerprints to really be certain there's no man-in-the-middle and yes I'm really paranoid.

Questions?

Below a small script that makes a dynamic (SOCKS) tunnel that automagically reconnects when your connection goes down for whatever reason... when you re-invoke the script while the tunnel is already up, then it gets killed and re-created.

Using this script my tunnel stays up for days in a row and I don't have to do anything when I move my machine from our coporate wired network to my personal wireless home network.

I use this script in combination with privoxy to ensure that dns requests are also done over the tunnel (as most browsers would otherwise leak dns requests).

Finally, the speed of the solution is about 50% of what I have with the proxy off... in my case my server is not the bottle neck, but it seems that connections are less parallelized when using this solution.

Cheers,
Chris.

My homepage.

---
#!/bin/sh
if ps aux | grep -q autossh;
                then sudo -u me killall autossh
fi
if !(sudo -u me ssh-add -l | grep 82:54:1b:9e:47:b6:96:5f:52:e7:a9:fd:18:0a:c2:3b); # fingerprint
                then sudo -u me ssh-add
fi
sudo -u me autossh -f -D 10000 -CN me@myserver.org

Try using Privoxy.

It is a *great* ad blocker. It works as a transparent proxy, so it will work with any browser. It is available for OS X, Windows (which I use) and various Linux distributions.