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October 28, 2006
It only takes two to ping-pong
I just saw Jeremy's blog post on IE-SPYAD. I could have replied to the post but hey, it is was Friday, I've had a hectic and tiring week, so here's my reply as another post. It's my way of unwinding.
When Tim Berners Lee thought of the webpage idea, with hyperlinks between documents, he was in CERN - a research body. He was inventing a way for document referencing and sharing of information across different machines and distant locations. Which is what the WWW is now.
But along the way, webpages, instead of containing only text and graphic information, have sprouted in-place-activated ActiveX components, Macromedia Flash widgets, Java applets, Pop-Ups and so on. These webpages don't have to be malicious or have malicious intent - even respectable businesses, news organisations, software companies litter their webpages with eyeball grabbing devices - in the interests of generating income.
The IT community is, as usual, rising to the challenge of keeping this torrent at bay. The easiest way to avoid ads is to make a list of things that you don't want to see.
As a first line of defense, you can install an intermediary, a proxy between your machine and the Internet. Many organisations do this. The proxy can be used for a variety of things - one of which is to maintain a blacklist of domain names and websites. If the website is in the blacklist, then no traffic / data is delivered to your PC from that website.
For home users, I've been keeping an eye out for cleverer made-for-home-use routers. Many routers have Parental Controls - limiting Internet access to specific machines on a schedule. But thus far, there doesn't seem to be a concerted effort by the all-in-one-kitchen-sink Internet security companies (Norton, McAffee,...) to work with the router companies (DLink, Linksys, Netgear,...) in producing routers that have dynamically updateable and subscribed lists of no-nos. Instead, the security companies have been spending time hammering Microsoft about not being let in to the Vista plumbing. Another story.
A second line of defense is to load your PC with a list of IP addresses of "bad" servers via the TCP/IP HOSTS file. This HOSTS file is a plain text file that contains a look up table your PC consults. If you put entries in this HOSTS file that null out a blacklist of servers, then your machine won't be able know where to go to fetch webpages from. Unfortunately, this is a little too drastic - you cannot specify the blacklist to the level of a webpage or a domain - if two domains share the same server, then innocent domains will also be black listed. Also, I've had prior experiences where a large HOSTS file stops the PC from working properly - that's because the HOSTS file not only serves browsing, it serves all TCP/IP networking for your PC.
Jeremy was referring to IE-SPYAD - a setup program that loads lots of blacklist entries into Internet Explorer's Restricted Zones. It protects IE and limits only IE. The problem is though, that the entries live in the Windows registry - that's where IE reads them. Although the IE-SPYAD mechanism used to consistently work for me, I feel nauseous when I push lots and lots of entries into Windows Registry.
IE-SPYAD and the HOSTS file technique are quite blunt tools though. If you are looking to block one file or file extension, rather than a server address or a domain, they are not a good fit for the task.
Some time ago, I came across Privoxy - it is a local proxy that runs on your PC. The documentation is certainly technical and nerdy but the blacklists it uses are plain text files, not Windows Registry. Lacking the ease of use and the user interface of Firefox's Adblock, you could add some of your own blacklist entries. The blacklist entries can describe file patterns as well as domain and address patterns.
Once done, you can nominate that Privoxy to be the intermediary for all Windows Internet Connection Proxy requests. You can ask Firefox or Opera to use Privoxy. Or not.
I'm trying to come up with a closing line to this blog entry. That's witty and entertaining. But can't. Getting some writer's block. Maybe I've been reading too much Darren Rouse.
Posted by Anandasim at October 28, 2006 10:27 AM
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