neuronical.com

I never really disliked advertisements on the web. This was mainly due to the fact that I normally use Firefox as a browser, with the Adblock+ plugin installed. If I were still doing that, then this post would never have been written. Advertisements, the way I saw it, was a necessary evil on the web. The logic went something like this:
We all like content to be free.
There is no such thing as a free lunch
Therefore .. someone .. has to pay for it.
That someone.. better not be me

The problem comes in with banner ads. They completely ruined everything. Why people couldn't just stick with Google ads in the right bar I don't know. Maybe these ads weren't annoying enough. Maybe a certain percentage of people out there (the target audience perhaps?) LIKE these ads. Whatever the case, the straw that broke the proverbial camels back was on a blog the other day I encountered not one, but 3 identical banner ads for "Evony". Some or other stupid web game.

The reason I even SAW this advertisement was because I am using Chromium, the open source equivalent to Chrome. Chrome, being from Google, doesn't yet support ad blocking (at least as far as I could tell in the two,three minutes I searched on the web). This kinda makes sense, since Google is an Advertisement Agency. But there is a program that works beautifully. This program is called Privoxy and is available from www.privoxy.org for most platforms.

Once installed, it creates a proxy on the pc. You then basically open up your browser of choice and set your proxy to 127.0.0.1:8118. For Chrome/Chromium you accomplish this by first clicking on the wrench icon in the top right corner of the browser. Select options. Select the Under the Hood tab and then click on the Change Proxy Settings button. Click Manual Configuration, tick the box that says use the same proxy for all protocols and enter 127.0.0.1 and port 8118.

And you instantly have ad free surfing. Obviously if you installed privoxy to listen on some OTHER port.. say 8119 (why you would do this I don't know..) then adjust the settings accordingly. Also make sure that privoxy is started before you try surfing.

Now why did I go through all this trouble? Because of Evony. I mean I like Chromium enough to tolerate ads on most sites. But they crossed the line. And now they have ruined it for everybody, because now I don't see any ads whatsoever. What would happen to the internet if everybody installed Privoxy? I think a lot of sites would close down or start charging for access. Or they would start embedding the ads inside the content, making it more difficult for programs like Privoxy and AdBlock+ to filter out ads. It would be like the war between Spammers and SpamFilters. Great.