[svlug] question about ad filtering

[Piotr T Zbiegiel]

On Wed, 2004-02-04 at 12:04, Gordon Vrololjak wrote:
> Hello,
> I was considering setting up ad filtering/popup blocking in our lab.  We
> have a linux box running redhat 6 or 7 (can't remember) that does IP
> masquerading to act as a firewall and distribute IP addresses to computers
> behind it.  What would you recommend to setup/install to limit ads and
> popups on the computers behind the linux box?  I don't have DNS running on
> the linux box.
> 
> I was looking up some items and found something like privoxy, or placing
> dummy entries in /etc/hosts.
> Any advice greatly appreciated!
> Gordon

Just put Mozilla Firebird on the clients:
http://mozilla.org/products/firebird/

Then check out the Ad-blocking local CSS tricks at floppymoose.  No
proxies, no plugins, just a simple static modification to your local
cascading style sheet:
http://floppymoose.com/

	I run both the browser and the css changes on both Linux and Windows
and pop-up blocking is impeccable.  Ad-blocking is probably in the range
of 50-60%.  Pretty good for a short list of stuff and no extra proxy
services to set up.

	Recently, I had the bad luck of going several rounds with Symantec's
Ad/Pop-up blocking technology which as far as I could tell was some sort
of transparent proxy which made several websites I went to stop working
altogether.  Block ads and pop-ups?  It sure did, but I found it came
down really hard on sites which didn't have pop-ups but relied on
javascript for their interfaces.  I would click buttons which provided
no response either from the website or from Symantec's NIS product.  I
finally just turned it off altogether and let Mozilla Firebird do it's
thing on its own.  It really made me appreciate how intuitive and
accurate the Mozilla Firebird pop-up blocking actually was. 

Later,
Peter