Blocking Pop-ups at the ISP Level?

roXet asks: "I work for a small ISP that offers dial-up and DSL in Louisiana. In the wake of the big boys' new wave of pop-up and spam blocking advertisements, I am looking into providing these services for our customers. I hate the thought of filling my customers machines with proprietary software, if for no other reason than I see it creating a support nightmare for our call center. I have found several options for blocking spam at the network level, but I have yet to find a good solution for getting rid of pop ups. Has anyone found a good method of doing this at the ISP level?"

Comments

Offer a well-maintained proxy to your users

[Cecil]

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.