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1. PuTTY (secure client)
2. Cygwin (Linux emulation layer)
3. Gaim (instant messaging)
4. Scite (editor)
5. Firefox (browser)
6. TortoiseCVS (version control)
7. Spybot S&D (malware detector)
   
8. Privoxy (filtering web proxy)
9. Gimp (graphics)
   
10. CacheSentry (to fix IE's cache, in case I use it)

On similar lines privoxy works better too.

• A portcullis. This software filters or alters the content of files or incoming Internet traffic. Web pages you see, for instance, might not represent the exact transmissions of the Web server or the intent of the author. Appropriate to anti-virus software, porn-filtering censorware, privacy software ... and adware that replaces ad banners with other ad banners.
• A police badge. This software runs by default under elevated or superuser ("root" or "Administrator") privilege. (Simply requiring superuser privilege to install the software doesn't count. Creating a dummy user with most of the privileges of the superuser does, though.) Therefore a bug in this software, including a security vulnerability, can affect anything on your computer -- not just the files owned by the user actively using it.
• A cable plugged into a wall socket. This software accepts incoming network connections in the default configuration. If you do not intend this software to accept traffic from the Internet, you will need to change the configuration or have a firewall.
• A computer with an arrow through the monitor. This software is designed to be remotely disabled by the publisher under certain circumstances (such as breach of license or expiration of subscription). The fact that it is installed and working today does not imply that it will continue to work without future intervention.
• A closed mouth with a finger making the "shush" gesture. This software's license forbids or encumbers the publication of reviews without the permission of the publisher. Reviews you may have read of this software may have been selected by the publisher to represent it in an unfairly positive light.
• A pair of handcuffs. Documents or other files you produce using this software are encumbered by its license, patents, or other proprietary rights of the publisher. Appropriate for a word processor whose file format is patented, or a compiler whose license forbids you to use it to write software that competes with the publisher's other software.

You could probably configure a personal proxy server like privoxy to filter out links within a body of text greater than X characters from certain sites, &c. In fact they already have this sort of functionality in an experimental feature that replaces buzzwords on the page with the word "bingo" (don't ask...) so ad texts, especially ones that differ from the context, shouldn't be insurmountable.

If you don't want to see ads in your Google results, use Privoxy and this AdWords filter.

Just use privoxy. It also adds very good add and flash-blocking, if you want.

Privoxy. It works on MacOS X, Windows, Linux, etc.

• Adds HTTP headers.
• Editing the settings for this option, or turning it on if it was off, is not yet supported using this web-based editor.
• Block the request
• Prevent the website from setting cookies on your system.
• Prevent the website from reading cookies from your system.
• Replace animated GIFs with their (first/last) frame.
• Use the first frame last frame
• Change HTTP/1.1 requests to HTTP/1.0. Only change if you know what you're doing!
• Bypass some click-tracking URLs.
• Filter the website through regular expression filters. You can use the radio buttons on this line to disable all filters applied by previous rules, and/or you can enable or disable the filters individually below.
  • Get rid of particularly annoying JavaScript abuse
  • Get rid of particularly annoying HTML abuse
  • Kill cookies that come in the HTML or JS content
  • Squish WebBugs (1x1 invisible GIFs used for user tracking)
  • Kill all popups in JS and HTML
  • Give frames a border and make them resizable
  • Kill automatic refresh tags (for dial-on-demand setups)
  • Reorder attributes in tags to make the banners-by-* filters more effective
  • Kill banners by size
  • Kill banners by their links to known clicktrackers
  • Text replacements for subversive browsing
  • Remove Nimda (virus) code
  • Kill embedded Shockwave Flash objects
  • Make Quicktime movies saveable
  • Kill all JS event bindings (Radically destructive! Only for extra nasty sites)
  • Crude parental filtering (demo only)
• Request is for an image (only useful in conjunction with the block and set-image-blocker actions).
• Block any existing X-Forwarded-for header, and do not add a new one.
• Stop old web browsers from sending the user's e-mail address with every request.
• Remove completely
• Fake e-mail address:
• Helps prevent tracking by not sending the URL of the previous web page.
• Remove completely (breaks images on some free web hosts).
• Fake as the root directory of the site (fools checks for in-site links.)
• Fake as this web address:
• Pretend to be using a different web browser. (Breaks many web sites).
• User Agent string to send:
• Filter the website through a built-in filter to disable many JavaScript pop-up windows.
• Specify which ports are allowed for SSL (HTTP CONNECT) access. Note that this allows arbitrary tunnelling, so opening all ports would be a security hole.
• Legal SSL ports (comma separated, ranges allowed):
• Disables compression. Compressed web pages are faster to download, but cannot be filtered with filter or kill-popups. This setting only affects the few web sites which support compression.
• Adds a special wafer (standard cookie) to all your requests.
• Adds user-specified cookies.
• Any cookies set by the website are changed to temporary ("per-session") ones, which only last until you close your web browser. This will allow you to use sites that require cookies, but sites will not be able to track you across sessions. For this to be useful, you should disable crunch-outgoing-cookies and crunch-incoming-cookies.
• Specifies how to block image

  I do not understand people who use their clients' integrated spam-filter or popup/advert-blocker, while there is specialized utilities (as Privoxy) which just do that way better

  Now mod me down, since I am off-topic, so no-one can see this and learn from it.

Why do sites insist on splitting articles into separate pages?

[next page]

It's even worse when the pages are short.

Hell, they often have only a few paragraphs per page.

[next page]

Some sites are kind enough to at least offer a "print article" link.

[next page]

Others don't.

[next page]

It's obvious what they're trying to do.

[next page]

They want to generate ad revenue.

[next page]

[next page]

But really, the joke's on them.

[next page]

Because I use Privoxy.

[next page]

And so they don't get any ad money.

[next page]

But still have to spend money on the extra bandwidth it costs...

[next page]

...to split up the article into separate pages.

Privoxy makes it pretty easy to boycott ads...

Now, if it was easy/cheap to set up a transparent proxy (so that your grandma could do it) then ad/commercial boycotting could be so effective that you'd have to start swiping your credit card to surf a site (pay-per-page).

Like many others, I use Privoxy along with Squid so that I cache everything that is static non-ads.

But what's that big ugly image on the top..oh, riight... a banner ad. Haven't seen them in four years so I've just forgotten what they look like.

I use, of course, Privoxy (GPLd). (A big thank you to the developers!)

Good for advertising revenue!

Bad for advertising revenue!

(But great for web surfing and getting things done without flashing ads in your face.)

This thing is so useful that I wish to high heaven that it was part of the base Firefox distribution. It's like the difference between having the ability to disable animated GIFs and not, or having the ability to block popups or not.

I mean, I'm sure that it would drive Macromedia bonkers, but dammit, the user comes first, and Flash *is* heavily used by ads.

Oh, and if I can throw in another suggestion: Use Privoxy. Some folks may have used Junkbuster a while back and noticed that development has slowed down to nothing -- Privoxy is the continuation. And...it's wonderful. I've turned off all image blocking in my browser, because Privoxy does a better job than my manual blocks. It blocks on image sizes and locations, and when it blocks an image, inserts a bit of HTML that lets you click to view the image (an irritation with Junkbuster is that false positives were extremely aggravating). There's an easy-to-use web configuration interface on Privoxy that can be easily accessed whenever anything is blocked. I just love this program. Aside from Google's non-irritating-and-frequently-useful ads, between Firefox's features, Flash Click to View, and Privoxy, I can't remember the last time I had to see an ad.

Possibly too late in the thread to be read, but things I would like to see to make it an IE killer:
* SVG support
* Privoxy available as a plug-in

For Thunderbird:
* spam-assasin and dspam available as plug-in options

Phillip.

Cheap Windows shots aside, there are many ways to get crap on your non-Windows machines. Cookies, web-bugs cross-site banners etc etc are ways to track a user. My OpenBSD boxes are secure from known hacks but I still surf with a Privoxy filter and a Squid cache at the head of my home LAN..

Security and privacy are like an onion, no need to repeat the whole analogy here.

You also might want to check out Privoxy. A new version, including one for OS X was released two days ago. I've been running it on my home network ever since it replaced the Junkbuster project. Install it on one network machine (perhaps a web, or mail server) and all your network's compuers have ad/pop up filtering, plus it can do caching with Squid.

Privoxy is a web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for protecting privacy, filtering web page content, 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. Privoxy has application for both stand-alone systems and multi-user networks. Privoxy is based on Internet Junkbuster (tm).

Try Privoxy. It's based on the junkbuster code, and is relatively simple, if you don't mind editing a simple config file.

True, the original Junkbuster is not HTTP 1.1-compliant, but there's also Privoxy, which is based on the original (GPL'd) Junkbuster code and offers 1.1-compatibility, among other enhancements. Definitely worth a look.

Junkbuster went unmaintained years ago. But other took up the code and renamed it Privoxy. It supports http 1.1 as well as many other features that junkbuster didn't have.

"Speaking of annoying ads, a co-worker used my computer once and installed Flash 6. Suggestions?"

a) Remove your co-worker's hard disk, reverse the connections, and shut the case again.

b) Install privoxy to restore the zen to your advertisement spaces

I recommend setting up a Privoxy proxy. I've been using it and it does an excellent job of blocking ads, even with its default filters. Combined with Mozilla and Konqueror's popup blocking I rarely see any ads on the web now. As for TV, that's what my Replay is for. It does a decent job of automatically skipping over ads, or when it doesn't, the 30 second skip works nicely.

It is possible to be mostly ad free with a bit of effort.

-Aaron

A popular solution is Privoxy's popup blocking chained with Squid's caching. In my opinion, that's the way to go. Privoxy by default also blocks ads and webbugs and nasty javascript and other things, but you can disable those features.

These could probably be configured as a transparent proxy if you don't want to set it up manually on users' computers, but speaking as a power user, I would never sign up with an ISP that stuck me with a proxy I couldn't avoid.

I am using privoxy for quite a while now. It gets rid of almost anything. And if some annoyance gets past it, you can modify the filters it applies or even write a new one. (Heavy regex hackery, so beware!)

Movies: RottenTomatoes, imdb, and MetaCritic have saved me dozens of hours of time I might have wasted on crap (like Matrix Revolutions, or TimeLine).

Books: Amazon, despite its evils (patents/privacy), is a very nice filter (with a few shills and idiot-reviewers). I [ab]use amazon as a filter, and then buy them cheaper new or used.

News: Popular Daily News Tidbits, Blogdex, Daypop, and slashdot.

Music: iRATE radio, and word of mouth. Need more Collaborative Filtering in this area to root out the Clearchannels/RIAAs function as a giant pusher of "cool"

Ads (aka: mental engineering): I use PopFile to filter SPAM, and Privoxy to filter out slow-loading, privacy-invading, all-around-annoying ADS. I'm still missing a proxy for my eyeballs in the real world. Soooon. :)

Cheap Products: Not a quality filter exactly, but a quantity filter: PriceWatch, PriceGrabber, Froogle, Anand's Hot Deals ...

Phew, that's a lot of linkage. Anyway, I couldn't function without these and other filters; I'd really be info overloaded.

Collaborative filtering in general has a very bright future IMO.

--

4) "base" URL of the site being accessed -- ie if you were acccessing http://www.yahoo.com/some/path/some/file.html the referer would be "http://www.yahoo.com/"

It doesn't affect me either (Safari 1.0 v85). I'm assuming this is because I have Privoxy running.

I've been using JunkBusters and now Privoxy for so long I don't even know what ads you all complain about are.

I highly recommend Privoxy as you can configure it to allow ads at sites you want to support while suppressing ads for everything else.

I guess you've never heard of Privoxy (a fork of the long-unmaintained Internet Junkbuster proxy). It blocks ad banners, ad popups, ad tracking cookies, ad iframes, referrer strings and keeps the site intact and viewable. Although sometimes it messes around with webpages' javascript code a little too much for my liking. It is completely configurable using regular expressions and filtering rules.

Thanks to it, I only rarely see ads of any sort. Including here. To those of you who are going to suggest this is stealing: shut up, I don't care about your tirade.

Yeah but its windows only. Check out Privoxy. Its open source and runs on all these OSs

I like it better than Proxomitron.

The absolute worst kind of advertising, IMNSHO, is stealth marketing (aka: viral marketing). It's not as overtly annoying, but it makes my skin crawl and my blood boil to know that the growth of "subertising" is inevitable - the only defense being trust networks, which aren't really used well yet.

Right now, the only thing that gets through my adfilter (privoxy) are stealth shills and those floating DHTML ads (like this one). I'm sure if this trend continues these will be filtered out by default as well.

--

This looks like a move MS was forced to make because like always, it has to copy its competitors ideas if it wants to keep market share. Better remove the code that opens pop-up at msn.com as well, Bill! It surprised me that a website that's affiliated with them would do that. No the popups didn't come from Gator/Claria or friends.
It's a surprising move, I'd thought hell would break loose when MS started blocking ads. Maybe Mozilla/Opera should come with Proxomitron bundled. Or the next wave of Linux Distros should ship with Privoxy running (but with enough warning on how to use it, when a user opens a browser window they should have a "welcome!" page with a link that tells them how to enable it.)..

Then again, there are websites with killer content that need a way of financing themselves.

Privoxy is an open-source web proxy that blocks ads of all kinds, and is highly customizable. It'll run on Linux, Windows, OS X, and god-knows-what-else, and will block all those annoying banners with a high degree of effectiveness. Better yet, it's been available since 2001; once again Microsoft is offering too little, too late.

Ignorant people look at advertising. 1 word privoxy.

This in not new.

I have Privoxy set up on my Mac. I've configured it to block some well-known ad sites, although ads.osdn.com, along with some other ones that support sites I like, is specifically whitelisted (want /. to be supported).

More importantly, I have it set to de-animate GIF images. While I don't mind banner ads much, I really hate the ones that flash in lots of colors. Especially the ones about "If this banner is flashing, you've won!" and the jittery fake Windows message boxes. The sites still get paid for the deanimated ads so long as they're not blocked, since they still get sent to my computer anyway.

I don't care so much about cookie-crunching and the like, but Privoxy also supports them, and it supports custom regexp filters. It's a very nice, fast, free personal proxy and works with any browser that supports proxies.

That link again for people who missed it is: Privoxy

Can't recommend it strongly enough... nor agree with Improv more. 8)

Privoxy is a web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for protecting privacy, filtering web page content, 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.

Proxomitron is a great proxy, and I use for regular surfing. Privoxy is a Linux proxy server with very much alike features. Privoxy is probably slightly more powerful, the best feature is probably the ablity to go to the url p.p or config.privoxy.org and change the settings (if that's enabled in the config file). Unforunately, I don't think there's any simple way to transfer filter settings between them, partially since they have slightly different regular expressions.

Yeah, sorry, I guess that was a little too subtle for me. I thought the smiley was for patronization.
btw - you might want to change the size of the images on your blog. Privoxy identifies them as ads by their size and blocks them.

3.16. How can I make Privoxy work with other proxies like Squid?

This can be done and is often useful to combine the benefits of Privoxy with those of a caching proxy. See the forwarding chapter in the user manual which describes how to do this.

3.18. Can Privoxy run as a "transparent" proxy?

No, Privoxy currently does not have this ability, though it is planned for a future release. Transparent proxies require special handling of the request headers beyond what Privoxy is now capable of.

Chaining Privoxy behind another proxy that has this ability should work though.

3.16. How can I make Privoxy work with other proxies like Squid?

This can be done and is often useful to combine the benefits of Privoxy with those of a caching proxy. See the forwarding chapter in the user manual which describes how to do this.

3.18. Can Privoxy run as a "transparent" proxy?

No, Privoxy currently does not have this ability, though it is planned for a future release. Transparent proxies require special handling of the request headers beyond what Privoxy is now capable of.

Chaining Privoxy behind another proxy that has this ability should work though.

Typical reasons for doing such substitutions are to eliminate common annoyances in HTML and JavaScript, such as pop-up windows, exit consoles, crippled windows without navigation tools, the infamous tag etc, to suppress images with certain width and height attributes (standard banner sizes or web-bugs), or just to have fun. The possibilities are endless.

Filtering works on any text-based document type, including plain text, HTML, JavaScript, CSS etc. (all text/* MIME types). Substitutions are made at the source level, so if you want to "roll your own" filters, you should be familiar with HTML syntax.

I don't know about the domain problem. To be frank, I didn't do extensive tests (and I'm totally lost in the Mozilla codebase. Yes, shame on me, I'm a truly lousy coder). And yes, you're right, I'd forgotten that little icon. In fact, I think I'd dismissed the window the first time it appeared (like all those `` by submitting this form, you will be sending data on the Evil Internet. Honest. Do you really want to do that ? '' windows) and I rapidly overlooked the icon. Note that I cited this issue mostly for the record : my popup/banner ads/stupid js code problems are handled by Privoxy. These times, whatever browser I happen to use, I wouldn't dare using it without a filtering proxy to shield it. Still, this icon could be another reason to convince my friends to switch to a free browser. Thus, thanks to everyone for reminding me of that feature ;-)

Well, Proxomitron (and other filtering proxy servers) can do other tricks too... like removing ALL ads (not just popups), killing specific javascripts, stopping cookies, blocking some domains completely, killing iframes / ilayers... pretty much anything you can think of doing when you're running a regex on the incoming HTML.

However, Proxomitron has now been "discontinued" so anyone looking for a new filtering proxy might be best served with one of the alternatives. I've never used it myself, but apparently Privoxy is pretty good.

That's nothing. I use Privoxy and it blocks animations by default. So all I see are the eyes. Rather creepy but seems appropriate what with that Druish holiday coming up at the end of the month.

Use Privoxy to tell all websites you visit that goatse.cx referred you.

Better still, they should give the users the option of installing ad-filters, spam-filters, and flash-filters to filter out all those

Eh? Users have those options now. Just download something like privoxy, install, and have at it.

I thought this was going to be something that was cool, like eink. Maybe there's more to this they don't talk about, but I've seen displays that look like this at the local theater.

The ones I've seen look like real-life versions of vertical banner ads (coincidentally enough). Just a big LCD-ish display, whatever the actual technology. They're somewhat eyecatching in that they move, but... when it comes down to it, it's just an ad. Big deal.

Of course, I can think of more interesting uses for the system, if you put them absolutely everywhere and integrated touchscreen capabilities. But animated advertisements in real life are just about as interesting as the sort you find on the web. And you can't filter them either.

One word: Privoxy.

between the devil we know and the devil we don't.

Okay, fine, popups are legal. That particular devil we know very well, and I gots my armor of righteousness loaded up at boot. But if popups (even competitive ones) become illegal, then who knows what the poodlefuckers will come up with next.