Igor Chudov @ home writes:
to tell the browser that if the page tried to load an image from a URL that looks like
valueclick.com bannermall.com adforce.*.com/ bannerweb.com eads.com/ /*/sponsors/*.gif *banner*.gif /image/ads/
etc etc, I want the browse to ignore this request. Clearly Microsoft and Netscape both don't give a damn about the desires of their NON-PAYING users and would rather bend over for the advertisers.
I suggest writing a proxy server that does such filtering, running it on the local machine, and using it as proxy server from your netscape browser.
There is a proxy server in form of a 20 line perl script, you can take it and modify it.
I've already done the work: http://www.lne.com/ericm/cookie_jar/ It'll block cookies, accepting them from a specific list of sites. It blocks the outgoing requests for ads, on a (regex-controlled) host or URL basis. So you don't bother to download ads, saving you from seeing them and wasting the bandwidth downloading them. As an example, my .cookiejarrc file currently holds: denyhost *.doubleclick.net advertising.quote.com commonwealth.riddler.com denyhost *.linkexchange.com *.pagecount.com images.yahoo.com www.missingkids.org denyhost ads.*.com ad.*.com adforce.imgis.com www.bannerswap.com denyhost *.flycast.com/ songline.com:1971/ denyurl /ads/* /ads/images/* *sponsors/redirect/* */bin/statthru* */AdID=* denyurl /adv/* /sponsors2/* */ad-bin/ad* /advertising/* */livetopics_anim.gif* denyurl /Banners/* /shared/images/ad/* /sponsors3/* /adverts/* /free/FarSight/* denyurl /ad/ /*ad*.focalink.com/ It'll let you selectively block sending the User-agent line in the HTTP request, and will let you randomly select from a list of User-agents that you supply if you want to mess up site's data collection schemes. And you can choose to block sending anything but the Accept and Pragma lines in the HTTP request for more privacy. -- Eric Murray Chief Security Scientist N*Able Technologies www.nabletech.com (email: ericm at lne.com or nabletech.com) PGP keyid:E03F65E5