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An obvious attempt to find a new channel that more closely couples the advertisements and the content. I can see how the marketer-droids at the Times would want this, since with normal webpages it's so easy to run proxies that strip all the ads out. But here you have to endure entire commercials before you can even get to the menu. I bet half the people who look at it are going to shitcan the thing right there, never to try it again.

It kind of defeats the purpose of finding new eyeballs for ads if the implementation is so cumbersome and painful that it drives people away. Will these people ever learn?

This will all be blindingly obvious to most readers of /., but just for the record:

Don't use your personal email address for anything online. Don't post to usenet with it, don't use it to register for anything, don't ever use it where there's any chance of it being sold to a third party or picked up by a web crawler. Use a free throwaway web-based account like hotmail or yahoo, that's what they're for. I have a verizon.net primary email address, and I've never received a single piece of spam from it.

However, I still have a forward-only email address from my university circa 1992. Back then, there was no spam and that address has to be on every spammer's list on the planet. I still get a legitimate email every year or two, but spam outnumbers these by at least 10,000 to 1. SpamAssassin does a surprisingly good job of identifying the garbage.

I also use a proxy to surf the web, as well as a large hosts file that reroutes requests to adservers to 127.0.0.1:80, combined with a utility that returns a transparent 1x1 gif to any request on port 80. And of course I use mozilla to block pop-ups and whatnot. I'm so used to surfing in this way that I always recoil in horror when I have to use IE on a naked, unprotected box. How on earth can anyone stand it?

As for more traditional types of spam such as telemarketers, there's the national do not call list. It's free, so there's nothing to lose. You'll also want to check out the many excellent resources at the Junkbusters website. One of the most useful features is a Junkbusters Declare page, which builds custom form letters for you that you can use to opt out of Direct Marketing Association junkmail, as well as telling your financial institutions, etc., not to sell your name to third parties. I used it, it's painless, and my privacy is protected.

Of course, it would be much better if we didn't have to jump through hoop after hoop just to get through the day without being pestered by morons.

The privacy software Privoxy lets you spoof the Referer header. You may either set it manually, like "http://NoneOfYourFucking.Business" or let Privoxy spoof by setting the Refererer to the site you visit.

If a new "privacy enhancer" or whatever appears that does spoof the referrer with a false URI, simply exempt those from your checks.

Spoofed. See above.

Does anyone here actually use Netscape as their default browser?

Netscape 4.75 on OpenBSD and SGI IRIX here. It's not the most feature crammed browser but we pipe through a Privoxy filter which loops back through a Squid cache so junk is filtered.

On the only Windows machine I use (a game box at home) I have Firebird (nee: Phoenix) running. Again, through a Privoxy/Squid dynamic duo.

So you actually ALLOW the popup ads?

Of course not. Not only do I block pop-up ads, I use Privoxy to block banner ads, flash ads, and all sorts of other obnoxious content. The only thing that actually gets through is text ads, which I really don't mind.

My point was, pop-ups (and banners) are the only thing about NYT's current articles that could possibly be considered a cost.

Privoxy has already taken care of this.

To you, and the guy above you: Privoxy.

Yeah, they should have made the keyboard 5 feet wide so the keys would be farther apart. :)

But seriously, I've also seen no popunders in Safari. But then, I'm running a transparent proxy with Privoxy as one stage, so maybe that's filtering them out first.

...wont work unless you remove "Privoxy" from that line.

It also means that this wont be a security problem for anyone with Privoxy installed.

But anyway, doesn't this mean that all those pr0n sites with popups can hack your computer? Oh, doh, we already knew that ;)

http://www.privoxy.org/

Gator? Ohhh.. you mean one of those things my Privoxy and Squid combo block?

One more thing I wish they would fix, however, and that is links that open in a new window.

I got tired of this too, a long time ago. As a result, I have both Proxomitron (Windows) and Privoxy (Linux) filters to fix it. Conversely, one site that I use insists on opening new pages in the current window even if you try shift-click/control-click/whatever to open them in a new one. My Proxomitron/Privoxy filters fix that too. :-) Don't leave $HOME without one or the other.

Sure. Take a look at privoxy. It has picked up where Junkbuster v2 left off. It supports blocking based on regexes and dynamic filtering. The filtering is really cool: say you want to strip certain tags on-the-fly or selectively block images that match standard banner dimensions. Privoxy makes it trivial to block javascript (or flash or whatever) from particular sites. In fact, I do this routinely.

You'll also find that it really mangles WebDAV requests, too. So the simplest solution is to open the toggler and flip it off.

Note: This URL will only make sense if you have Privoxy installed.

I do the same thing with privoxy. I strip the flash embed tags.

Plenty of other fun stuff as well. Change Microsoft to Microsuck, remove image sizes (so any blocked adds will only take up 1-pixel on the page), block URLs with certain paterns, based on any regex you can think-up (eg. block: /*.*ads).

1. Install Privoxy (available for Mac, Windows, many flavors of Linux, and lots of other OSes)

Privoxy acts as a local proxy and filters web sites to let through only what you want. No more pop-ups, no more banner ads, no more abusive javascripts. It's completely browser-independent, too. And it regularly updates its action files to catch new ads.

"Unfortunately all the IE users are going to be stuck in the meantime. Another plus for mozilla."

Actually I use Privoxy for my whole network. So my roommates can use whatever browser they want and my computer will still block ads for them.

This just makes me more thankful for Privoxy. As an example, here are some fun rules I created. (Note, the regexps should be all on one line, regardless of what your browser displays.)

Remove IGN interstitials: this skips them for the most part. I'm sure it can be modified for other places. (I pay for IGN Insider and shouldn't be subjected to this. Granted recently they've introduced a feature to switch off ads for insiders, but this is still a useful example.)

FILTER: ign Remove IGN ads, including interstitials
s%<!--Injecting.*%<html><head><META HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT="0; URL="></head><body> <P>Skipping interstitial...</P></body></html>%gims

Just add +filter{ign} to your default.action.

Here's another one that makes a certain site you might be reading look considerably nicer:

FILTER: thissite Remove thissite's ad code
s/<!-- advertisement code. -->.*?<!-- end ad code -->/<!-- Privoxy Filtered -->/gims

Of course, you should support any sites that you like. As I said, I subscribe to IGN, as they provide a great deal of extra content for insiders, in addition to an already great site.

But ads still suck.

I've noticed while browsing Slashdot that all the text ads seem to get through my ad filter Privoxy(the ad filter formely known as Junkbuster). Is there any way to filter them?

Try privoxy.

www.privoxy.org

http://www.privoxy.org/

It's actually a bug in PHP.

http://www.privoxy.org/faq/trouble.html#BLANKPAGE

take a look at Privoxy (from the guys that brought you junkbuster. There is a setting to strip flash. It also has configuration via a web page, very nice.

Redhat 8.0 (finally) has nice-looking fonts. It is true that the fonts sucked in previous versions, and doing anything about it was a X/fonts configuration nightmare. It seems highly unlikely that the old font problems will ever return (though the "linux" reputation for poor fonts will persist, just like Microsoft's reputation for the blue screen of death that plauged 95/97/Me/NT4)

I know that IE renders things "wrong", but because of those percentages, that makes it right, and everyone else wrong.

No, it's still wrong. Widespread, but wrong.

If gecko gains significant market share (eg, AOL ships it to millions of unsophisticated users) and khtml gets most of the macintosh market, Microsoft will eventually be pressured into fixing those wrong renderings. Increasingly, windows users are using the automatic updates (as well they should, given microsoft's inability to publish secure software), so fixes will probably be deployed quickly, and newer sites will say "best viewed with MSIE 7.0" (or whatever version fixed the bugs).... and guess who's going to be scrambling? All those non-standard websites!

So why can't Netscape/Gecko/Mozilla/etc render things the way I want them to? And until they do, I'm using IE.

Mozilla/Gecko emulates IE's wrong behavior quite well, and of course newer versions of Netscape are based on Gecko (not 4.7x as you would have tried in Redhat 7.2).

I want my browsing experience to be simple and powerful, but simple is more important.

Suit yourself.

I personally want my browsing experience to be free of flashy, annoying advertising... and I'm willing to spend some effort to dig into the "edit-preferences-advanced" settings to block those damn popups and turn off animations. I'm also willing to go to the trouble to install privoxy, which really kills advertising!

I would have thought /.'s audience was more intelligent than that. Give us some more credit :)

I mean, when every major Linux distribution comes with Privoxy preinstalled.

I guess /. is only as good as its editors, not its readers.

Why pay to block ads? They are dead on the web! Simply run Privoxy. Combine it with Transproxy and you'll be able to block all ads on the web. Especially combined with the regex know how of Regular Expressions Tutorial.

Privoxy could handle that (but you might need to write your own filter rule). http://www.privoxy.org/

Or switch to Mozilla.

On Windows you can use Proxomitron
On most OS's (including Linux, Windows, and OS X) you can use Privoxy.

Both act as a proxy and filter web pages and headers. They come with many useful built-in filters for getting a rid of ads including one to change the referer.

Another way to do this is to install and run Privoxy, which lets you choose how to handle GIFs (either no animation, animate once, or full animate), and gives you ad and popup blocking at the same time.

I know I'm on a privoxy kick, but I recently had my cable modem lapse (unemployment is a bitch) and I've noticed little slowdown thanks to not downloading ads (particularly flash) and other junk.

(ok, ok, I've been playing with PHP lately ;)

Maybe it's under my threshold or something, but if you haven't installed Privoxy as a local proxy yet, you're n-v-t-s nuts..

Works great in Linux, and OS X from personal experience, and it's supported on just about anything.. Though I have a bug with Mac IE on OSX and Privoxy, which doesn't really bug me (Chimera works perfectly)..

You'd be wasting your money, since excellent email and web filtering software are available for free.

These are the two I personally use, and they are very effective. There are many others available. There's even some that apparantly work pretty well for windows users.

I have but one thing to say, Privoxy.

Ralph Wiggum once said the immortal lines "What's a battle?". Seeing stuff like this makes me say "What's a banner ad?".

I see the site fine. I use Mozilla. I have popups blocked. I also use privoxy to block advertisements. I have a default policy to deny all cookies. I can still see it fine (I suspect it uses some cookie trick).

However, this entire thing is a hack. You can't ever have any assumption be 100% true about clients that may or may not execute code you send them.

Privoxy: http://www.privoxy.org/

You might consider getting a better (more robust) ad blocker (like Privoxy, JunkBuster, or Proximitron) that can block ads in subdirectories, and (even better) by regexp!

Or... you could just peruse Google's list of ad blockers.

Bon appetite!

In just a few short minutes I now have a new filter rule for Privoxy:

s|<script.*src=.*anti-leech.*</noscript>||is gU

Imagine that this company probably spent tens-of-thousands of dollars to develop this software and it we defeated with a simple regexp.

I find that privoxy works better for me than the mechanisms built in to any browser. It's based on the old junkbusters codebase with many more features. It's available for both windows and very nearly any form of UNIX (or UNIX-like) OS you might reasonably use to browse the net. (Of course, I have it set to allow ads for slashdot :-)) In combination with phoenix's popup blocking (which takes care of SSL sites such as hushmail that privoxy can't) I find that it gives me near-perfect control over my browsing experience.

That said, if I really suspect that a particular site may be malicious, as opposed to simply obnoxious, I look it over in lynx first.

Privoxy is based on Junkbuster, but adds the following. Under Windows it really is just click and go, and comes with all the rules you need built in (though you can easily add regex filtering). I use it in conjunction with Phoenix and don't suffer from any ads/pop-ups/cookie/Javascript annoyances. Another great plus is that you can enable it and disable it directly from the taskbar.

Phillip.

Privoxy is based on Junkbuster, but adds the following. Under Windows it really is just click and go, and comes with all the rules you need built in (though you can easily add regex filtering). I use it in conjunction with Phoenix and don't suffer from any ads/pop-ups/cookie/Javascript annoyances. Another great plus is that you can enable it and disable it directly from the taskbar.

Phillip.

The last official release from Junkbusters Co. was in 1998. You may want to take a look at Privoxy . It's Junkbuster rebuilt, with many new features, at version 3.0 and a release date of Aug 28 2002. It's available in most of the favorite flavors

Junkbuster has been moribund for a long time -- the code was taken over and developed as privoxy.

Just download and install privoxy It's available for both Linux and Windows, and it's based on junkbuster but is much more powerful. The default settings will clear out 90+% of the banner ads and other distractions and you can fine-tune it to catch even more.

checking the referer is pretty much guaranteed to prevent deep linking because no one is going to go around forging referer strings just in case they go to a site that does deep links.

The only way to do it right is to generate pages on the fly, with all URLs in it being re-written to be cryptographically signed and timestamped. A link would look something like

/foo/bar.gif?t=current-time&ttl=small-interval&sig =986HJytoJ7u67k7eR

Yes, referrer information makes an excellent authentication scheme for highly confidential system dealing with transfer of mission critical information. ... Just also check for a magic string in the user agent and voila! trusted computing reinvented.

Incidentally, I don't know why anyone bothers with logging referrer information. The only use sounds like what the bloggers do. If you're not a blogger, why do you even care who the referrer is? Half the time it's bogus or one of your own pages.

Certainly not all...

By right-clicking on an image, you can select "block images from this server" and further images will not be loaded from this site, saving you annoying advertisements and download-times.

I would love to be able to try out this feature, unfortunately using Privoxy I've not been able to see any banner ads to block. Also blocks the banner ad at the top of /. without removing all the other graphics. Deals with tracking cookies for you too. Highly recommended.

Phillip.

Neither is saying, "Please put me on your do not call list." While they're both effective, the only way to drive annoying commercial marketing into the ground is to make it more expensive than it is profitable.

1. Phone marketing: Feign interest, then ask the telemarketer to please hold for a minute (someone's at the door, etc...). By yourself, you can cut into their profit margin a little and have the satisfaction of getting back at the people that are bothering you so much. If enough people did this, it would be DEVASTATING to the telemarketing industry. Why? When a telemarketer is on the phone with you, their machine stops dialing new numbers. This seems like a smart idea - there's no reason to call someone if the telemarketer is busy talking to someone else. Usually, those machines dial 10 numbers at the same time and the telemarketer clicks over to the one that gets a live person. That's where those hangup calls come from: out of the 10 numbers the machine dialed at once, yours was one of the two that yielded a live person, and the telemarketer decided to go with the other one. What does this tell us about the telemarketing industry? They just hate it when their telemarketers are sitting around waiting to make a sale (i.e. while the machine is dialing). If they're waiting for you to get the door, guess what? They're sitting around waiting to make a sale.

2. Junk mail: This is really easy. I have no idea why nobody has started advocating this so far. Whenever you get junk mail, open it up, find the "postage paid - business reply mail" envelope, stuff everything else into it, seal it, and put it back in the mailbox. You're charging them postage to throw away their garbage. If you want to remain completely anonymous, just tear out the parts that have your name and address and mail the rest back.

3. Spam: Ok coders, this one is for you. Implement selective whitelisting as described here in your favorite open-source SMTP server. Yeah, server-side. Just make it a flag that can be turned on for individual email accounts so that the server will automatically start building a whitelist from confirmation emails. As long as this remains a *nix-only client-side spam-blocker it will never see widespread use. Why? Well, a server-side implementation has many benefits:

* It only has to be installed once. Every time a piece of software is installed on a computer, it's an opportunity for something to go wrong. A client-side program could install itself incorrectly, the user could become frustrated with an interface shortcoming, or it could trash some part of the user's system (possibly turning them off to spam blocking tech forever). If it's installed (carefully and by the ISP's lead tech) on a single mail server, suddenly thousands of people have the ability to block spam with no more effort than a call to the ISP to turn on the feature.

* ISPs would provide it as a competitive service to their customers. Most ISPs (in my limited experience) use open-source *nix mail servers, so implementation in existing systems would be easy. Perfect spam-filtering (that guarantees no false positives - meaning no lost important mail) would definitely influence a consumer's ISP choice now that most are competing based on cost. Considering how easy it would be to implement, it's a no-brainer for another ISP to offer the same service once the ISP across the street does.

* The principles are easy enough to explain to most people. Granted, most ISPs don't explain the details of their spam-blocking tech to new customers, but when they make a claim like, "No false positives, guaranteed!" it will be easy to explain if a customer gets curious.

Eventually, when no spam gets through, or just not enough to pay the bandwidth bills, spam will stop. What if selective whitelisting doesn't work? Well, it does, go read the web site. ;) The worst case scenario would be that spammers would have to buy three times the bandwidth to send the amount of spam they do now, as well as maintain a working and valid From: address.

4. Banners: Go download privoxy right now. Combined with mozilla's popup blocking feature, I've seen maybe 3 ads in the past 3 months, and I spend hours surfing the web every day. It's absolutely amazing. Same deal with selective whitelisting as above, too. If ISPs ran privoxy, they'd be able to offer a service to their customers that, well, once addicted they couldn't live without. It's also the perfect way to implement caching and cut down on ISP backbone bandwidth costs.

Think these are good ideas? Help me spread them around. Think they suck? Tell me why so I can improve my explanation.