[ILUG] Banning sites

[Conor McCarthy]

> > This has probably been asked before but what is the easiest way to stop
> > linux connecting to particular sites. For instance, if I want to block
> > ad.doubleclick.net to stop me downloading their dumb advertisments from
> > pages that link them, how would I do it?
> 
> Get JunkBuster from freshmeat. I haven't used it in a long time though
> but it worked.

or http://www.junkbusters.com/
For those who don't know, it basically works exactly like a standard proxy,
_but_ it accepts a list of patterns for URLs that it will "break".
For example:
ad.doubleclick.net/ad
(It also does things like anonymise you, your browser, and delete cookies.)

The downside to this is that if you block all the graphics ads from some site,
you get the default "broken image" icon in Netscape. If you rummage around the
FAQ on the Junkbuster site, you'll find that they don't release versions which 
do anything other than break certain URLs. 

But they can't stop others, and proceed to provide a some URLs.
(http://www.waldherr.org/junkbuster/)
There's a 20 line patch that replaces broken URLs with a 1x1 transparent GIF. 
That's the one I use, but I have problems sometimes. Ads are always pumped out
first on the commercial sites, some sites seem to send something like multipart
MIME content containing the banner ads and redirects or HTML (I'm guessing here,
I never really investigated this). The end result is if you don't accept the 
banner ad, you don't get the site... Not accepting cookies also causes problems.

Oh, and it also works fine with other proxies... I have my junkbuster proxy 
first, which points at my squid proxy.

Conor.
--
Conor McCarthy               Grabel's Law: 2 is not equal to 3, not even
Computing Services                           for very large values of 2.
University College Dublin            <URL:http://lurch.ucd.ie/~conormc/>
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