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webwasher

Interesting to note that Kuro5hin.org has started a "pay for no ads" version of their site. I doubt it is going to be very succesfull though: most people don't really mind banner ads that much.

...and those of us who are sufficiently annoyed by banner ads to do something about it have already taken measures to block them anyway

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Webwasher does that. Also it has a lot of useful options like killing popups and filtering iframes...

Browser-based solutions are a good idea. I would love to block images that match certain dimensions (1x1) or have a URL that matches some regexp (/ads/).

Time for another link to WebWasher. It's now available for Linux and Mac, as well as Windows. It's free for private use - and it's so damned nice that it's the only program I run on my home machine that doesn't come with source.

Funny coincidence to see this thread "pop up" right after doing that.
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Shayne (or am I?)

A little Webwasher, a little IE scripting security, and voila! Very few banner ads. As for TV, I've practically worn out my "Previous" button. It's not that hard to avoid unwanted commercials.

I have been wondering something with all this attention on adverts - am I the only person who finds most of the last 18 months of TV and print ads ENTERTAINING? There are some genuinely well-done ads that I LIKE to watch.

It's like with movies: My wife wants me to get a Coke and popcorn. OK, but wait until AFTER the previews.

GTRacer
- 20 days and counting...

I use webwasher. It works fairly well and is free for personal use.

Not open source, but free (as in beer) for personal use and the best and easiest to use that I've found so far. There's even a Linux version.

It doesn't break too many things, and is easily temporarily disabled when it does. Very handy for Geocities, Astalavista (the sites with the cracks and serials always have pr0n popups), Xoom, etc. pages.

If all else fails, there's always w3m, lynx and links - pure content, no frills :)

Ah yes, ad-less browsing. All you need is something like webwasher and you can block all the ads you want, and cookies, and pretty much anything you want.

There are free for personal use versions of webwasher both windows and linux, but it is not open source. But since mozilla is not beholden to giant corporate entities, *cough*AOL*cough* what's to stop our intrepid developers from decent garbage filtering into it? Inquiring minds want to know!

While we're talking about IBM's dirty tactics, Here is a nice advertisement. (For the goatse.cx weary, it's http://www.geocities.com/zekester1945/) I recommend WebWasher for Windows users and JunkBuster for Linux users to eliminate GeoCities popup ads.

For Win9x boxes, WebWasher is free, and does just that. Anyone know of one for Linux?

Why don't you just uninstall Shockware support from your browser? Or install a proxy server like WebWasher or the Internet JunkBuster? They both run under Win32 and Linux.

It's amazing how much more pleasant web browsing is when the ads are gone.

-Legion

As for the JavaScript issue, it pisses me off to say this, but I wouldn't expect anything soon, if ever. Users have been screaming for more fine-grained control over the JavaScript/DOM sandbox for years and years (particularly wrt window.open()), and Netscape/Mozilla and Microsoft haven't done jack to this date.

There's always WebWasher and iCab (iCab's a Mac browser, though).

I have been using webwasher since it was released for Linux. It removes banners, stops animations, filters cookies etc. etc. and it's free for personal use on Linux. So why should I pay 30$?

That is wicked cool! Took me a minute to figure out that WebWasher had blocked it at first, though.

Amen re: TomsHardware. I stopped visiting that site, and I let Tom know about it via an email. Then I found WebWasher, which blocks ads, popups, cookies, webbugs, javascript, etc. Very cool app and I can visit any site without a worry.

Hey, guys, you know about the Internet Junkbuster, right? It's a proxy server that will filter cookies, ads, referer information, and lots of other stuff. It's incredibly useful if you desire privacy on the net, not to mention saving your eyes from those aforementioned strobe-light ads.

The IJB is available for UNIX, Microsoft Windows, and Linux. Configuration is just a little bit complicated, but no more so than any other standard UNIX daemon.

Alos, there's a truly wonderful program by the name of WebWasher that will do that same thing under Microsoft Windows. It's got a very slick interface, awesome features, and some very friendly guys working on it. If you have any Microsoft Windows clients, I would highly recommend installing WebWasher on them.

Definitely check out Squid as well. It's a caching proxy server that runs under UNIX and Linux. I've used it for years.

I won't be surprised if the client is a banner-ad-ware...

Sure, this gets into some ethical issues ("How will slashdot be supported?") but on the other hand, I didn't see all those Anti-Trust ads the rest of you poor folk sat through.

Oh, and WebWasher's free for students :)

If you want something that is free and filters webbugs, among other things, from your browser, check out webwasher.

Webwasher owns.

=)

i have been very impressed with its capabilities since i dropped it onto my office workstation.

i feel that there will be nothing but advancements in this type of technology.

and what about sites like slashdot? i severly doubt that legitimate sites will go to such lengths just testing how much garbage they can throw at users.

It's a free download for students and other non-commercial users.

Any open source project udergoing ? Didn't find anything on SourceForge...

I hate pop-ups and ads when I'm surfing at home. That's why I use webwasher . It stops the banners but not most of the pop-ups (sigh).

But to pay for my computer and other things, like food and rent, I work for a website that makes money through advertising. These advertisers pay my bills. I want them to be happy. I have no wish to be so altruistic as to starve myself. I read that NYT article with an eye to increase advertiser satisfaction, while not annoying visitors to our site.

Now that funny-money stock options and IPOs are proving to be ineffective, websites have to find ways to generate revenues. The good ones use advertiser revenues to provide good content that brings in visitors that bring in page views that encourage more advertising. It is a virtuous circle. Sies that get greedy and make it hard to get to the content throught the advertising, like crazy pop-ups, lose visitors and thus revenue and go out of business, another virtuous circle.

I detest self-righteous asses, hiding in their basements and expecting the rest of us to give up our prosperity so that we can all be doctrinaire losers with no money.

Advertising is a pain in the ass. I try to avoid it when possible. But I can live with it. I'm all for any techniques that make advertising more effective in generating revenue while keeping them unobtrusive.

And yeah, Doubleclick scares the hell out of me.

I like this product, and it's free for personal use, so I'll rant a minute:

One of the best tools for removing web advertising is Webwasher. Unfortunately, it's a Windows-only program, however it can serve as a proxy server, so you can still serve your Linux box.

Webwasher does some nice things which none of the 'nix tools yet do. It can filter out Javascript cued on opening/closing windows, remove pop-ups entirely, and reclaim space which would have been used by banner ads. It can even remove entire frames if it suspects that advertising was their only use. It also periodically updates its own block list if you allow it to.

As a plus, if you have a bizarre Microsoft Proxy Server in your office that isn't configured in a Linux-friendly manner, this is an excellent way of helping yourself out.

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Personally, I use Webwasher to filter my ads. It uses a proxy based system and catches 90% of banner ads.

Cheers!

yeah, I got the same thing, had to turn webwasher off, I don't like sites like that !

webwasher is a nice little program, check it out. It does a good job of filtering ./ banners.

revenue???
Seriously, I believe for most /.ers it was easier to look in to source then deactivate junkbuster/webwasher, whatever.

Now you can't even turn those off..

Unless you install something like WebWasher and get it to filter out 1x1 gifs. Of course, you lose a little functionality on sites which have a legitimate use for them, so you could always script up your own. I'd suggest filtering 1x1 gifs which (a) have an argument string or (b) come from a different domain.

I've been using Proxomitron in Windows for some time know. It can parse HTTP headers as well as content. I prefer it to firewall-based solutions since I can bypass the filtering with just a click in the system tray.

For Mac, you can use iCab (as mentioned but not named in the article). To add filtering to any Mac browser, there's WebFree(68k) or WebWasher(PPC)

But if you really want to kill 100% of annoying banner ads, use Lynx, w3m, links, or (Mac only) WannaBe^2.

Micropayments are just another way for people to turn the Internet into a more common cash-cow media like selling commercials on TV and radio.

If you really want to get rid of banner ads, use an agent like Junkbuster (http://www.junkbuster.com/) or Webwasher (http://www.webwasher.com/).

eudas

Don't get me wrong, I'm sensitive about privacy too, which is why I have doubleclick.net cookies blocked.

Merely denying cookies, I suspect, isn't going to hit anybody's wallet. It's still a good idea from a standpoint of them not being able to follow you as you move about the Web, but the people who make money from banner ads are probably counting the number of downloads of a particular banner. As long as your browser is still grabbing the ads, all they need to do is crunch their server logs to determine who gets paid.

To stop this, you'll need an ad filter. Squid-redir works well under anything that can run Squid. If you're looking for something a little easier to set up and you're running Win9x, there's WebWasher.

(I have a more comprehensive list of sites for squid-redir to block here.)

_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/

Webwasher filters all incoming HTML and will remove annoying Javascript as well as ads, and will on request deanimate all animated gifs.

A good way to get around this for some users is a great windows program I heard about in a comment attatched to a story about DoubleClick WebBugs a while back. It's called WebWasher, and along with filtering out banner ads, you can (very easily) set it up to filter popup windows, scripts run when a page loads or closes, modify how much an animated image is shown or remove it entirely, prevent pages from modifying the browser status bar (one of my pet peeves), filter images, applets, and plugins based on their dimensions, and create your own url filters (though I don't think you can disable the built-in ones). For the pages that direct you back to themselves when you try to close them, the on-close script filter works great.

Now, what I'm really waiting for is for
someone to write a proxy that can dynamically
rewrite pages as they come through an http
tunnel.

But Siemens Webwasher already does that.

© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp

Now, what I'm really waiting for is for someone to write a proxy that can dynamically rewrite pages as they come through an http tunnel

I'm not seeing this--I use WebWasher under Win32 and Junkbuster under Linux and just loaded Yahoo. Do you know of any other pages that actually refuse to load with images turned off or ads blocked? I heard of one (in Wired, I think) site that had lame short stories that it wouldn't show the user if s/he blocked the ads, but that's it.

Google may, or may not use banners (I honestly don't know, I normally run under webwasher so I wont see them anyway. But the Google factsheet certainly leaves the option open (see the 2nd paragraph in the 'Business Model' section).

EZ
-'Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in..'

Oh yeah, it's free non-commercially!

so if you're a windozer or you have windows running on a box near you, check it out. Version 2.0 should be available soon.

From their website: WebWasher is a powerful filter program for Web pages, originally developed by Siemens: it is installed on your PC or server as an add-on to your browser. Unwanted content - such as advertising - is not even loaded via the network. WebWasher also avoids unnecessary reloading of web objects and de-animates images. This saves you up to 45% of the data which are transmitted. Your browser displays Web pages practically free of advertising.

www.webwasher.com

wonderful little piece of software

www.webwasher.com wonderful little piece of software

• A guerrilla-type grassroots high-speed wireless network, open for everyone, which would work without the intervention of governments, telecom operators and the like

• A bunch of innovative and independent content creators who don't give a f#ck about selling their soul for money

• To educate the masses that there really is more to life than being just a temporary storage for money transferred from their employers to some other company

Better yet, use Junkbuster to accept cookies only from sites you choose. And you remove annoying banner ads too - whadda deal.

I tried it once...it had the annoying habit of announcing to the world that you were using Netscrape as your browser, regardless of what you were actually using (IE, Lynx, kfm, etc.) Several websites I frequent didn't work right through it, probably because of this.

Another ad-filtering proxy you might want to investigate is WebWasher. I've used it for a few months now, and it's worked pretty well. AFAIK, it's Win9x-only (maybe NT as well), but if you have only one Win9x box on your network, you can install WebWasher on it and make it available to your entire LAN. It also doesn't mangle the browser information, so websites know that I'm using IE and not Netscrape. It's free (in the "free beer" sense) if you're not using it for business purposes.