Slashdot Mirror

Let me introduce you to the awesome world of pac files

http://www.schooner.com/~lover...

Before ublock and adblock plus I used this little guy. It was pretty slick as it was cross browser and cross system.

Bit of script work and a bit of copying from hosts file lists and I had a very nicely working ad block system. These days if I were still using that I would do a file load out of the existing block scripts that ublock and adblock use.

That particular script suffers from a linear lookup issue so you would want to add in a binary search lookup.

I've been in your situation (I live in India, which I affectionately call "Hellholia", where I used to have a 1 GB/month cap, including both upload and download, and before that, was on dialup for about a year and a half), and I've found that the only browser that's worth using in low-bandwidth situations is Opera. Switch it to show cached images only, and use right click > Show Image to load up images in-place (something that seems to be foreign to Gecko-based browsers).

Block ads by using the no-ads proxy autoconfig script. If it blocks too much, you can use the convenient F12 quick-configuration menu to turn off proxies. Alternately, set up Privoxy, which will then block ads among other stuff.

As has been recommended elsewhere, use a caching proxy server such as Squid (you can modify one of the tunables in no-ads.pac to direct traffic to it, and you can configure Privoxy to chain to Squid as well); this should help a bit with YouTube videos that have loaded completely. (It will likely not help with partial downloads, however, and YouTube is a very good way to reach and exceed your cap, Internet video generally being expensive bandwidth-wise. Every second of YouTube's "normal-quality" video requires upwards of 25 kB, so a ten-minute video will expend 15 megabytes on its own.)

When you use rich Internet applications like GMail, opt for the cut-down "classic" versions rather than the AJAXy ones. This will save on the copious amount of JavaScript code and markup downloaded to make the slick interfaces happen. Similarly, when using sites such as BBC News, opt for text-only versions. When reading articles on websites, opt for the "Printer Friendy" versions of the pages (or, in the case of Reuters, "Single Page"). These substantially save on the excessive markup for automatic ad loading, navigation bars, sidebars, etc.

These things should both help the performance of your Internet connectivity and reduce the wastage of bandwidth, and you won't miss out on much.

This sort of junk is EXACTLY why I started using ad blocking. After getting hit 3 times by something like that. It was time to do something about it. 0 adware 0 spyware 0 viri in the last 18 months. My *windows* exp is actually nice. No crashes, no slowdowns. Its amazing.

Try this one to start with
http://www.schooner.com/~loverso/no-ads/
then combine it with (i put all the hosts into the pac file as a big hosts file is a bad idea and slow)
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
plus
http://adblockplus.mozdev.org/
plus
http://www.pierceive.com/

plus staying up to date on all patches.

and you have a truely AWSOME experiance.
Surprisingly this actually works semi well as 'advertisers' are cheap. So they tend to use the same web sites over and over to feed the data. Never mind most of the advert servers are *SLOW*. If you look most of the time its waiting on those servers to finish rendering the page.

I use the pac thing because I still use IE quite a bit for different things. Plus it gets a lot of things the other one does not. I could update Adblockk plus to just do it all but this gives me IE blocking as well.

I also recomend this also

http://www.schooner.com/~loverso/no-ads/

It snorks it before it even gets out of the browser. It even works on most browsers that support pac files. Allthough it recently broke in ie5.5. Which I am not crying about...

Like the greasmonkey one. Had not heard of that one. Never thought of using css to take care of it. Have to look into it.

Though at this point most of my time spent surfing is DNS lookup. So I am fairly at the diminishing returns point...

you may find this usefull as well.
pac file
I use it in addition to a decent hosts file. I even combined the two. That way the freeking browser doesnt even ASK to be nuked. Before popup blocker was put into Mozilla and IE this is what I used. I rarely saw a popup, and my spyware count went to 0. Sometimes it pukes on itself but someone was kind enough to put a 'turn it off for now' thing. Which is kind of cool as with a hosts file you have to move it out of the way then back when done. There is also a plugin for mozilla I belive that does something similar. But for someone who has to use both its pretty easy to keep running.

The reason I like the pac thing a little better as it snags whole domains. Where as a hosts file only gets 1 site. Also sometimes you want to goto one site but not part of that site. Its pretty powerfull...

A Walk in the Sun by Geoffrey A. Landis.

===== =====

Another good short story about an astronaut on the moon being pulled into different possible same-Earths, and his life when he returned to 1950's Earth from Moon #6 (the sixth different Moon he had been warped onto)

Moon Six by Stephen Baxter

Here's another great but little known technique: the PAC file ad-blocker. Cross-browser, easy to install, and much more lightweight than a HOSTS file, plus it can match paths on servers like "/ads*/" rather than just server domains themselves.

Enjoy :).

One I used for awhile before squid and proxy scripts. Was in the host files. Most of that stuff is loaded right off the same servers everytime. vx2.cc/gator.com and its sub hosts is where most of the gator stuff came from at one time. Been using the proxy script thing for so long its not been a real problem. My hosts file is probably WAY out of date...

Using those 3 things I would say it snags 99.99% of it. You can even get the proxy thing to take it out on the client end so your sever isn't doing all the work... Works fairly well in IE and Mozilla.

Also there is no 'magic bullet'. Wish there was. You will always be chasing whatever they dream up next. Your scripts will always be mutating just as much as that industry mutates.

Like the email thing. Might have to give that a try.

Your users may not like it but you may want to scan the machines for newly instaled things too. That should help you keep up with your scripts. See something new go see where they were surfing...

Found a couple of nasty ones the other day in java. It was even using an expliot in the ms java to do its evil deeds. You may want to goto suns instead. Least its being maintainted...

You need a bit of host file plus proxy block. Havent seen one of those freeking things in months. They are usually javascript/java served off about 3 websites... Eyeblaster is the worst of em...

Takes care of popups too. And VERY easy to extend...

The only ones it gets in the way of are the ones where they put a advertisment between you and the website. Those you usually have to look at or they get blocked and you have to do a bit of hacking...

I use it, and don't see ads anywhere. Because it can look at the entire URL, you can block ads from a given subdirectory without killing off the entire site. You can also block web-tracking images.

You can get the same effect in IE. It even lets you filter other things you do not like. Even works in the netscape variants... no-ads I use IE every day and havent seen a popup ad in about a year and half since I started using this little script. If I do find one I just add it to the list and its gone forever. Most advertisments of this type come from the same places. Its even fairly good at preventing spyware in the first place coming from web pages. From other apps well you just have to watch for it... When I was using dialup and was using this script it made surffing the web actually fun. Instead of one giant billboard. Also once you remove most advertisments the web is actually very quick. Most of the main advertisment servers are swamped and it takes forever to get an image out of em.

While logging may not be too cool, controling what goes on may be. The gui does alot sure but you can do SO much more with rule based stuff. Like this machine can talk this way while that one can not...

How about a bind caching server ? How about a blackhole ad removal server? How about a time server? How about pushing the logs to another machine? While it may be slow these things do not have to be lightning fast, just fast enough. It is afterall just a simple router. Its not meant for 300 machines all trying to get the interenet. Its meant for like 4-5 computers. Also a 125mhz mips processor will do alot more than an equiv x86 machine. The mips processor is AWSOME in pumping data. The limiting factor here will be the 16mb of memory... I used to work on a 25mhz 4 way mips machine. It wasnt till i got to a 766 x86 that I found a computer that was AS good.

Also some logging may not be a bad idea. As it is wireless do you REALLY trust it? What if your leet 12yr old neighbor decides your wireless is cool. Do you really trust him? Sure he may be exploring but do you want him in your network? No you want to know what is going on. And I dont know about you but the logging on this router, as it currently is, SUCKS. It just shows who and what. But does not show when and does not resolve the name. IP A.B.C.D means nothing to me, but www.yahoo.com DOES. I for one will be playing with it...

Now I hardly ever see ads, and the ads I don't see never get loaded in the first place, saving my bandwidth. Of course, that means that the web sites I visit never record a hits on their ad servers from me, whereas using the style sheet alone is completely transparent to the server.

Oh, and both the Proxy Auto Config and the Style Sheet hacks should work just fine with most web browsers, not just Mozilla and Safari.

what popups?

I dont know what your talking about. Just dont see them. :)

Now all I need is something to fill those broken link spots in.

You can find documentation and an example configuration at http://www.schooner.com/~loverso/no-ads/

Mozilla does support regexp-based filtering through Automatic Proxy Configuration. See http://www.schooner.com/~loverso/no-ads/ for information on how to do this. (It's not what the feature was designed for, but it works perfectly.)

I use this with both IE and Mozilla. I have Mozilla ask before accepting cookies, so I've added a bunch of usage tracking sites to my proxy script.

You can find a sample of how to do this at a friend's site: no-ads

user_pref("capability.policy.default.Window.onunlo ad", "noAccess");

Saw that. I then ignored the link and just amuse myself with the replies. bfast will contiue to be blocked by me. btw this is a decent way combined with a hosts file to block ad's pac file blocker It doesnt work too well if you work somewhere that uses it to setup their proxy but at home, and with some companies saying they want caps on downloads its just that much more stuff I can snork! :)

There are lots of "developers" out there that take other people's work and include it in their own project, without keeping the license and/or without giving due credit. This happens all the time.

The only way to police this -- and stop it -- is to go public with the problem. But that has it's own problem -- most no one will care about the problem.

Notice that Fink went public with these infringements 3 weeks ago.

It takes making the "public" is glaring away -- via a front page posting at /. That will get the infringement dealt with.

This will work for big projects like Fink. That means that little projects will get their work stolen from without any real means to fight back.

I know all too well.

I worked up what I consider a really clever kludge for blocking banner ads via the Proxy Auto Config mechanism built into Netscape (since 2.0) and IE (since 4.0). http://www.schooner.com/~loverso/no-ads/ I made this kludge right around Netscape 2.02, Spring 1996. (That was my JavaScript hacking days)

The PAC file I make available has been mentioned by me /. and by others on memepool and metafilter. I release it under a simple license: you may use it or distribute it as much as you like, as long as you don't charge, keep my copyright, the notice that I wrote it stays intact.

I do this for the fun of it, after all.

Last year I read in the 5/28 "Gearhead" column in Network World Fusion where he talks about this a spyware blocking software. He mentions that it can also generate proxy auto config files to block web sites with ads.

Hmmmm, I think.

I download the software. Yup, there's my stuff inside his package. I go to the author's webpage. His documentation on Proxy Auto Config files turns out to be identical to the my documentation in my PAC file.

My copyright notice is gone. There is no mention that the PAC file was (originally) written by me. There is no indication the package in question contains works by anyone other than the author of the package.

I mentioned this in email to the author of the package. I mentioned this in his forum. I mentioned this to the author of the "Gearhead" column.

This person is still using my ideas, my code, and my documentation in his tool, and still isn't giving credit (or my copyright notice).

His attitude is: "I got it off some web site, so I can do whatever I want with it.".

Here's my post to his message board: http://www.morelerbe.com/cgi-bin/ubb-cgi/ultimateb b.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=36&t=000140

(psst: don't use his software: he's a plagerist!)

I can't go to the "opt out" page because I've told my browser to never load any URL that comes from doubleclick. 8-} It's easy and works on UNIX,

Windows, and Macs with IE5 or NS2-5. yes, and right now I can't go to your no-ads page because Junkbuster sees "ads" in the url and tosses it :-)

Junkbuster works like a dream, it's a really tight little program, and it even seems to cure Netscapes horrible DNS hangs. It comes as a rpm, exe, whatever, and also compiles from source in a few seconds, with a raw makefile that doesn't need configuring. One obvious improvement: instead of just giving you a link to the reason why it tossed a page, it should give you a "go there anyway" link as well. I'll see what I can do...