From: nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous)
Date: Sat, 24 Jan 1998 12:25:27 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Why no "Banner Ad Eaters"?
Message-ID: <199801240418.FAA17881@basement.replay.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Tim May wrote:

>Yeah, I'm surprised that "banner ad eaters" have not been widely deployed.
>(If they're available, I haven't about them.) Something to remove the
>annoying banners, or stop them from wasting valuable time loading in the
>first place.

Tim, I'm surprised. WebFree for the Macintosh does this very thing. It
matches on URL substrings and simply removes these things wholesale from
your browser window. No broken image boxes, nothing. It also kills cookies
and stops animated GIFs from leaking through, if you want to nuke either of
those things.

The URL is: http://www.falken.net/webfree/

Junkbusters (http://www.junkbusters.com/) offers a personal proxy server
kind of thing that lets you mash just about everything: HTTP headers, user
agent info, referer URL, cookies, etc. It runs on either NT or Unix variants.
One could also use it to get around a firewall configured to reject 
non-standard browsers, but That Would Be Wrong, as Nixon once said. It lets
you specify which sites or substrings to look for, and which ones you trust.
It also does proxy chaining.

Ratbert
ratbert at nym dot alias dot net