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For those not using Windows, Privoxy is also capable of blocking ads based on both location and other characteristics (eg. size). I also successfully used it to block Opera's ads and replace them with a grey bar the same colour as the rest of the window, back when it was ad-supported.

I'm curious. Would Tor and Privoxy help in this situation? Locating and downloading the software might be difficult, but installing the pre-configured package for Windows takes less then 5 minutes.

Or break your ties to a specific browser and just use a proxy like Privoxy.

Use privoxy. There is no reason to tie your ad-blocking to your browser.

Sure web pages are getting larger but telecoms costs are decreasing too (at least in my part of the world), albeit not in direct proportion.
Invest in a proxy adblocker, such as http://www.privoxy.org/. This is easy to justify to management, it really doesn't interfere with legitimate web usage in my experience.
Create a group policy for Outlook that disables the ability to change the automatic picture downloading in Outlook2003.
Adjust you user's Exchange delivery restrictions to something sensible. Does anyone need to send something larger than 5Mb? If so then they can use the FTP server that you've kindly provided, they may decide they didn't need to send it after all when its not as simple as sending a mail.
This will drop your bandwith usage by a significant margin.
--
Freedom in a rivalrous commons brings ruin to all.
Lawrence Lessig

Okay, I'm not familiar with all the extensions available for FF. However, the last one can be handled with a filtering proxy of some sort. As mentioned elsewhere you can "F12 u ctrl-R" in Opera to en/dis-able the plugins as well.

While everyone has their own tastes, Opera suits me fine. The only drawback it had for me is the lack of an ftp upload tool, but there are actually ftp clients, so I'm told ;-)

Privoxy?

anyone know a good way to avoid the annoying linkified ads in firefox? I just used links2.

http://www.privoxy.org/

I'm using privoxy instead of adblock(FF extension), cause it works on any app. I'm very happy with it so far. On gnome, go Preferences->Network Proxy and direct it to Privoxy. All your gnome apps (like epiphany, liferea etc will use it automatically - you need to setup Firefox manually though. Edit->Preferences->General->Connection Settings). On links2 go Setup->Network options to set your HTTP proxy.

A number of reasons:

• To save bandwidth that could be used for more useful things (particularly when I was on dialup)
• Because they're annoying
• Because sometimes they forcibly violate my privacy
• Because I view adverts as essentially 'mental pollution' (particularly TV ads and billboards)

And with what?

Privoxy

Do you view internet ads as different from say, TV ads?

Yes, because a) I pay for web ads (and spam) with a fraction of my bandwidth b) they're easily blocked

What about in a magazine? Do you not buy a magazine because it has too many?

I generally skip over magazine ads, but I don't mind 'pure factual' ads that much (e.g. "We're selling widget W that does X, Y, and Z and costs you P GBP" as used by boxshifters). I have no desire to buy so-called 'lifestyle' magazines (e.g. GQ, Arena, Loaded, whatever) which are heavy on 'non-factual' ads.

I'm specifically talking about the ads in a webpage, but even popup blockers can cause problems with me using a site.

Privoxy doesn't cause me significant problems (indeed, it can help out some pages that otherwise have problems in non-IE browsers!), and for the few sites that it does break, you can selectively disable certain aspects of its blocking functionality.

You should use a browser-independent proxy filter like Privoxy or Proxomitron (on Windows), with the JD5000 filter set, as it is a client-side HTTP proxy and will work well with any browser.

I haven't tried to change this, but one thing some people might find annoying is that is leaves white blocks where ads were removed that notify you that the ad was removed by privoxy. I'm not sure if it is configurable to simply remove the ads altogether the way adblock does.
 
  It is.

I haven't tried to change this, but one thing some people might find annoying is that is leaves white blocks where ads were removed that notify you that the ad was removed by privoxy. I'm not sure if it is configurable to simply remove the ads altogether the way adblock does.

Anyway, I've never had an ad get through when I was using privoxy. Give it a shot and see if you like it.

privoxy.org

Another option, just route all traffic through Privoxy. It does a much better job that AdBlock and its not browser dependent.

You could try Privoxy with reg. exp. and all :-)

s/Dvorak/Qwerty/ig

I simply don't accept them in the first place. (Except for Slashdot and a few others, of course.)

for fuck's sake you host-file-abusing idiots start to piss me off.

look here, idiot: http://www.privoxy.org/

I'm sorry, what's a banner ad?

I use Privoxy - it does much more than just block ads.

If I were to use Tor and Privoxy together like I normally do for browsing (works great), will I be anonymous as I download torrents with Opera if I have my proxy configuration set up correctly? Being a privacy advocate, this is rather exciting for me. I have heard using Tor with Azureus overloads the servers making them less useful. I wonder if the Opera imbedded bittorrent will be better...

http://www.privoxy.org/

I've also set up sshd on port 443 so that I can punch through the corporate firewall where I work, and port forward the http proxy - hence browsing without being monitored...

Anyway, you can use the content filter to strip Dvorak drivel.

Get Privoxy. You know you want to.

I've been surfing the web, advertisement free, since 1998.

Anonymouse surfing: http://www.anonymization.net/ http://www.anonymizer.com/ http://osiris.978.org/~brianr/ians/ http://www.guardster.com/ http://www.antiproxy.com/ http://www.attackcensorship.com/ http://proxify.com/ http://www.anonymous.as/ http://www.mezzy.com/s-index.php http://anonymouse.ws/anonwww.html http://unipeak.com/ http://www.urlencoded.com/ http://www.behidden.com/ Full system proxy systems: http://tor.eff.org/ http://freenet.sourceforge.net/ http://internet.flashback.se/ http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html http://www.privoxy.org/ http://www.silentsurf.com/ http://www.peacefire.org/circumventor/simple-circu mventor-instructions.html Ordinary proxies: http://www.atomintersoft.com/products/firewall/cou ntry.aspx/Sweden-se http://www.proxy4free.com/page1.html http://www.publicproxyservers.com/page1.html http://www.proxz.com/ http://www.digitalcybersoft.com/ProxyList/ http://www.freeproxy.ru/ http://www.samair.ru/proxy/ http://www.multiproxy.org/anon_proxy.htm http://www.rrdb.org/ http://www.free-proxy-servers.com/ http://www.proxylists.net/ http://www.proxywhois.com/anonymous-proxy-list.htm http://www.openproxies.com/ Plenty, as said.

Does Privoxy allow the user to prevent downloading JS/Flash? (ie, by modifying the HTML to remove the malicious/annoying portions)?

Use Proxomitron (on Windows) or Privoxy (Unix/Windows too) to block ads.. They work great -- configure one of them once, point all your browsers to use their localhost proxy port (or your router if you're on a home network), and you get ad-blocking for any browser you use.

"Tor is simply an anonymous p2p proxy:
http://tor.eff.org/"

With privoxy it doesn't work.

Yes I followed the directions.

"This is Privoxy 3.0.3 on unknown (127.0.0.1), port 8118, enabled
No such domain

Your request for http://www.privoxy.org/user-manual/quickstart.html could not be fulfilled, because the domain name www.privoxy.org could not be resolved.

This is often a temporary failure, so you might just try again."

Same with others.

privoxy main objective is to filter ads and anoying things, but we can easilly setup a filter for one site that change its behavior, look and layaout...

check the slashdot theme changer

i already use it for a long time to correct some bad html code from some pages (mostly for dillo, a very small and fast web browser)

as it use regexp and we can setup to only apply to some urls, the possiblities are endless

Too bad development on it has ceased, and it's windows-only as you mentioned.

For the same functionality, but a bit tricker to configure, on *nix, check out Privoxy

Good point, maybe the best solution would be to spoof referrers so that I always appear to be coming from the site I'm retrieving.

Privoxy can do this, as well as filtering ads and blocking popups and various other cool stuff.

I can't live without it.

Privoxy (http://www.privoxy.org/ is the best web accelerator. It accelerates by removing ads which probably comprise about 50% of data on the page. It improves any connection and has added benefit of improving privacy. It is also cross platform.

Pretty well documented, too.

I repalced Astaro with m0n0wall, and have most of the features I used - minus some of the application proxies.
I have a tor installation on the box - easy to set-up with privoxy, after i added Perl to the m0n0 mix (big as the rest of the distribution!)

There are some add-ons, too.

As a plus, this service finally provides an easy way to keep count of just how many Google searches you do by way of a counter on the "My Search History" page. Previously, my homespun solution involved creating a PHP script on my personal site which generated a counter graphic that I stuck onto the search result pages using a custom filter for Privoxy. It would even include a list of my searches in my site stats, but I eventually filtered it out because it added alot of noise to the list of google searches that led other people to my site.

One interesting thing I noticed is the number of times throughout the course of an average day that I toss something into Google. Not sure about the definition or correct spelling of a word? Just Google it. I found that it isn't unusual for me to use Google 20+ times in just a few hours.

yup....

privoxy

it gives you GOBS of control and will block lots of popups that some popup blockers cant, strips all 1.1 gif files kills the info your browser uses to rat on you, and gives you control over cookies.

I use it here at work for everyone and it's very speedy even though it runs on a slow P-III600 for 100 users.

Try Privoxy, a GPL'ed lightweight proxy server that runs on OS X, linux, *nix & Windows. Besides installing and pointing your browser to 127.0.0.1:8118, there is nothing else to be configured/done. I actually prefer it over adblock, since it gives me a choice of browsers and the default filters are better than some of the filters available for adblock and you can override ads that you want to visit, handy when I am using Gmail and find something interesting.

For adblocking, you should try Proxomitron. I've found this to be a god-send for browsing - blocks ads, popups, etc, etc. Plus, the blocklists are constantly being updated by dedicated users, and can be found at CastleCops. For Linux, try Privoxy.

In any case, the default rules it comes with seem to work quite well, only rarley have I found them too restrictive.

It does mean running another server daemon process on your machine, but by default it only allows localhost connections and on the upside, you can use it with any browser.

They are one stop shopping for blocking the junk that clutters the web.

Huh, I just get four imaged letters G N A A and then a little FLASH BLOCK click to play logo.

If I click-to-play it opens up a bunch of windows, but I can close them faster than it can open them, and can close the tab. Annoying, but it can be dealt with. Some of the javascript behavior was also disabled by privoxy, which scrubs my html for javascript annoyances.

No sound though.

FlashBlock: http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
Privoxy: http://www.privoxy.org/

Bit Off-topic. Have look at privoxy - http://www.privoxy.org/ - if you like mess with HTTP messages you send... :)

Ah, you're talking about the text... I didn't know that. Does adblock even support that? I've never tried, since I already back up adblock with Privoxy

I also use Konqueror, but it's far more usable combined with http://www.privoxy.org/ ;)

Privoxy

Works great with Squid. Hasn't been maintained in a while, however.

The FreeFi Toolbar provides a persistent presence on the user's desktop only while logged into an affliated public hotspot and is entirely removed when they log out. IT USES NO ADWARE OR SPYWARE. The Toolbar displays useful content including local directory services, downloadable games, premium media content and display advertising.

In the beginning, there was the Internet Junkbuster, by Anonymous Coders and Junkbusters Corporation. It saved many users a lot of pain in the early days of web advertising and user tracking. But the web, its protocols and standards, and with it, the techniques for forcing users to consume ads, give up autonomy over their browsing, and for spying on them, kept evolving. Unfortunately, the Internet Junkbuster did not. Version 2.0.2, published in 1998, was (and is) the last official release available from Junkbusters Corporation. Fortunately, it had been released under the GNU GPL, which allowed further development by others. So Stefan Waldherr started maintaining an improved version of the software, to which eventually a number of people contributed patches. It could already replace banners with a transparent image, and had a first version of pop-up killing, but it was still very closely based on the original, with all its limitations, such as the lack of HTTP/1.1 support, flexible per-site configuration, or content modification. The last release from this effort was version 2.0.2-10, published in 2000. Then, some developers picked up the thread, and started turning the software inside out, upside down, and then reassembled it, adding many new features along the way. The result of this is Privoxy, whose first stable version, 3.0, was released August, 2002.

In the beginning, there was the Internet Junkbuster, by Anonymous Coders and Junkbusters Corporation. It saved many users a lot of pain in the early days of web advertising and user tracking. But the web, its protocols and standards, and with it, the techniques for forcing users to consume ads, give up autonomy over their browsing, and for spying on them, kept evolving. Unfortunately, the Internet Junkbuster did not. Version 2.0.2, published in 1998, was (and is) the last official release available from Junkbusters Corporation. Fortunately, it had been released under the GNU GPL, which allowed further development by others. So Stefan Waldherr started maintaining an improved version of the software, to which eventually a number of people contributed patches. It could already replace banners with a transparent image, and had a first version of pop-up killing, but it was still very closely based on the original, with all its limitations, such as the lack of HTTP/1.1 support, flexible per-site configuration, or content modification. The last release from this effort was version 2.0.2-10, published in 2000. Then, some developers picked up the thread, and started turning the software inside out, upside down, and then reassembled it, adding many new features along the way. The result of this is Privoxy, whose first stable version, 3.0, was released August, 2002.

And the same with Privoxy which is cross-platform and uses Perl compatible regexp rather than a custom language.
I do think that Proxomitron has a larger following though and might be a bit more flexible.
Also note that Proxomitron is no longer being actively developed since it was not open source and the developer tragically passed away. There is however a new open source project Proximodo which is trying to re-implement the functionality and claims to be cross-platform.

I use Privoxy along with a "hosts" file and I hardly see any ads (popup or embedded).

Even easier:

1. emerge privoxy
2. in firefox, set proxy server to: localhost 8118

No more pop-ups. Worked for me with both Scienceblog and DrudgeReport. See Privoxy page for other distros/platforms.

Phillip.

I have been using Privoxy http://www.privoxy.org/ for about 2 years now. That, in addition to firefox does an excellent job of blocking popups in addition to filtering most ads. I've become so used to ad-free browsing that whenever I use someone else's computer I'm amazed at all the crap that I've been missing. or not missing

I've been using Privoxy for some time now. None of the sites listed as having a means to get past popup blockers have managed to get one up on me with Privoxy. It's still not perfect, but it's far better than the built-in browser ones.

It's not a plug-in, but for protecting/removing annoyances from a number of users at a time, it's even handier.
Take a look at Privoxy.