Re: Why no "Banner Ad Eaters"?

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

nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous) writes:
> 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.

Of course, the person putting up the web page might well argue that you're
violating his copyright in some bizarre way.  The image on your screen with
the ad banners stripped is not what the author intended; especially if you're
helping third parties to strip ads. IANAL... thoughts?

I occasinally use the Altavista search engine in text mode
(www.altavista.digital.com) and it has ads (for amazon.com) right in the
middle of the text, in the same html file as the search results.
I suppose the next logical step in the anti-ad proxy is to edit the dynamically
edit the incoming html and to delete or replaces specified strings; perhaps
a while "intelligent agent" that will filter in only the information you've
requested, keeping out *all* the graphics and other crud.

While I was researching this subject, I came across a web page of some
student at Rutgers. It displays 4 advertizing banners and uses java/javascript
(obnoxious technologies that I disable) to make sure that you've clicked
all 4 (presumably he gets some credit for it); only after the javascript is
convinced that you've clicked the ad banners can you get in. Yeah, right.
But if ad filtering becomes more commonplace in the future, i can imagine
crypto being (mis)used to enforce ad viewing: "You no clicky my sponsor ads,
you no see my content."

I disagree with whoever said that the technology for deleting ads is the
same as the technology for deleting porn. Porn publishers very much don't
want their content to reach minors or anyone who's offended by it, and
mostly coopereate with rating agencies.  Porn isn't generally mixed with
desirable content on the same pages. You can just block the entire page
containing some porn (or, with vancouver-webpages' pics ratings you can
block pages containing "disparaging remarks about the environment", kewl).
Advertisers don't give a damn if their ads are seen by those who aren't
interested in them, and will use technology to make it harder for you to
filter out their ads (or to get to the content without seeing sponsor ads).

When MS IE 3.0 first came out, it supported pics ratings. So I got very
excited and wrote my own little pics ratings server (a better ones is
available from wc3, by the way) to filter out banner ads. Unfortunately,
after I wrote it and started testing t, I doscovered that IE 3.0 only
asks the pics server about eh top-level page; it does NOT ask the pics
server about the urls references in "IMG SRC=" and the like. I guess
the reasoning is that if the top-level page is acceptable, than anything
embedded on it is acceptable, which may be true about porn but not true
about ads.

Overall, this whole advertiser-sponsored model sucks. I'd rather be paying
(electronic cash, of course) for the resources I use.

> 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.

It runs udner OS/2 too!! I've got it to work under NT. it may work under
Win95 as well. (Anyone wants an executable for M$ platforms?)

> 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.

I've been using junkbstr and am pretty happy with it. One disadvantage of
using any proxy server, as opposed to filtering in the browser, is that the
browse is one step removed from the TCP/IP.  E.g. if you try to connect
to a non-existent domain without a proxy, the browser goes to DNS and tells
you that it can't resolve it. Going via a proxy, the proxy server goes to
DNS and sends a page back to the browser sayng it couldn't resolve it, which
isn't as clean.

Although I'm not doing it much, the following worked out fine for me:
junkbuster running on an NT box connected to the internet via ppp; browsers
running on 4 win95 boxes connected to the NT box via ethernet, using
the NT box as the proxy server.

I've exchanged e-mail with someone about the list of URL patterns to block...
I have no time for this myself, but someone ought to put up a web page
tracking what ad urls people block. That would be a nice public service.

> It also does proxy chaining.

It would be nice to have it chain automatically through more than one proxy.

Another nice little feature of junkbstr is it ability to send "wafers" -
your own cookies, which will hopefully confuse whatever tracking software
exists on the server.  I send noise with the following wafers:

NOTICE=Please send no cookies
AnonTrack=X
Apache=X
ASPSESSIONID=X
CFID=X
CFTOKEN=X
DOL=X
DTRACK=X
EGSOFT_ID=X
GeoId=X
GeoStitial=X
group_discount_cookie=T
GTUID=00.00000.0.0.0000.0000
ink=X
JEB2=X
MC1=ID=X
p_uniqid=X
PFUID=X
registered=YES
RMID=X
s_uniqid=X
session-id-time=X
session-id=X
SWID=X
UID=X
Urid=X
userid=X

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

ratbert at nym dot alias dot net wrote:

> 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

Yep, I've got it running on www.myriad.ml.org:8000.  It works great - the
only site I've had problems with so far is nytimes (it tries to set a
cookie when you log in as cypherpunks/cypherpunks)

ghio@temp0197.myriad.ml.org (Matthew Ghio) writes:

> ratbert at nym dot alias dot net wrote:
>
> > 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
>
> Yep, I've got it running on www.myriad.ml.org:8000.  It works great - the
> only site I've had problems with so far is nytimes (it tries to set a
> cookie when you log in as cypherpunks/cypherpunks)

Junkbusters works very nicely for me. I highly recommend it.

A warning about cookies: no proxy server I know can
stop the server from trying to set the cookie by

a) putting a <META HTTP-EQUIV="Cookie:" CONTENT="foo=bar;expires...">
in the header;

b) if you have JavaScript enabled (not a good idea), running something like
<SCRIPT SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript"><!--
document.cookie="foo=bar;expires=Sunday, 04-Jul-2010 00:00:00 GMT;path=/";//--></SCRIPT>

You need to tell the browser to turn off the cookies even if you have
an anti-cookie prixy server.


Cookies and the NYTIMES subscription: NYTIMES.COM tries to store your
userid and password in the cookie with keywords PW= and ID=. Problem is,
it tries to encode them using 8-bit characters. Lucky for us, at this time
NYTIMES.COM does not check if userid/password are valid, just that they're
a part of the cookie!! So, just add these two lines to your junkbuster config:

wafer PW=0
wafer ID=0

and nytimes.com will greet you as "0" and let you right in.

Sure junkbuster feeds every wafer to every server, but I don't care.

If you really want to send "cypherpunks", replace both 0s by the character
representation of the hex string a1252e36392c2e2930332bdf. I'm not even
trying to mail it verbatim because I know it would get mangled.


Another site that uses weakly encrypted cookies is DEJANEWS.COM.
For them, I've added these two lines to junkbuster config:

wafer GTUID=03.35644.0.0.1145.00000
wafer DNUID=02717fb0f47d3544510927a15805ab3640987332e4ed6e58e78660744bc8320d260963691c27f34ef4b292e93258a7c7a6ea6b78200c6ade8f378833d6d5

This lets you post as cypherpunks@anonymous.crypto.conspirators.int and if and
when dejanews locks it out, drop me a line and I'll cook up another one. :-)

(Warning: when you post to usenet via dejanews, it adds your ip address
to the header; use a proxy.)

Hang Chris Lewis by his empty scrotum (he has no balls, or we'd hang him
by his balls)!

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps