On December 1, Timothy C. May wrote:
One patch I'd pay money to have is one which intercept the "commercials" Netscape blasts out at us and replace them with something else (maybe nothing, maybe a "quote for the day," maybe something from a user-selectable file of items).
I understand that Netscape is collecting money for these "commercials," and that they control what is sent out. So, any such patch to intercept/remove these commercials would have to be done locally. Can this be done?
This is from a post to cypherpunks back in September. Given the current situation, maybe a re-posting is in order. (If not, flames to my address please, the list has enough to worry about.) I just checked, it's still at the ucsb.edu site. - - - Begin forwarded message - - - On the subject of HTTP proxies, [SEVERAL FWD'S DELETED, ENTERTAINING SUBJECTS RETAINED] Subject: The agents/advertising arms race heats up Subject: OH YEAH BABY, FILTER ME HARDER
From: Axel Boldt <boldt@math.ucsb.edu> Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www.announce Subject: SOFTWARE: Filtering ads out of popular web sites Organization: Univ of California at Santa Barbara, Dept of Mathematics Approved: www-announce@boutell.com Message-ID: <44ercn$nhl@holly.aa.net>
Several popular web sites have recently turned to putting advertising gifs on their pages. NoShit is a tool that filters these out so that you don't see them - in fact, you don't even download them in the first place, thus saving time, money and brain capacity. NoShit is implemented as a set of patches against Cern httpd to turn it into a "filtering proxy server". This means that the proxy maintains a list of URL templates together with corresponding filter scripts. When a document is requested form the proxy that matches one of the templates, then the page is piped through the corresponding script before being presented to the client. This works together with caching, if desired. The idea is to run your own personalized NoShit proxy server and point your browser to it. The proxy does the filtering; the browser doesn't even know about it. This scheme works with every browser. I have written a ready-to-use library of filter scripts for a couple of well known, ad-infected sites, including Yahoo, Lycos, Netscape, HotWired, CNN, Infoseek and NandO Times. You can change these or add your own very easily. Locations: <URL:http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/NoShit/> (Germany) <URL:http://emile.math.ucsb.edu:8000/~boldt/NoShit/> (California) Enjoy, Axel - - - End forwarded message - - - -- Jeff Simmons jsimmons@goblin.punk.net