Security: Ad Blocking
I don't know about you, but I find banner ads pretty darn
obnoxious. Now, I do understand that the foundation upon which
the internet is built is, pure and simple: advertising. That's
what makes the internet work, and that's why it was growing so
fast. It's interesting to see companies fold as advertising
falls short of expectations.
I hate those ugly banner ads (especially that "punch the monkey"
thing). They steal my bandwidth and they take room from content.
Think about it, you have a 10k banner, you lose a couple of
seconds of bandwidth and about an inch off the top of your
screen.
Even worse are those idiotic pop-up banner ads which free web
sites seem to love (at least now most of them offer the option
of using inline ads). There is very little worse than visiting a
web site and having that stupid panty hose ad pop up over and
over and over. It just won't stay closed.
There is now a product on the market which does a superb job of
eliminating not only advertisements, but also pop-up banners,
cookies, sounds, Java and JavaScripts.
Just to give you an idea of how well this product works, I
cleared the statistics, then surfed for 5 minutes to 8 web
sites. A total of 5 ads were removed! Wow.
On top of that, AdSubtract saved me from 4 annoying pop-up
windows. I purchased the Pro version, which is about $29 - worth
every penny. You can get your own copy from the AdSubtract web
site. There is also a free version available which is find for
most uses.
Another product which does just about the same thing is Norton
Internet Security 2001. In addition to performing all of the ad
blocking and cookie management, Norton Internet Security 2000
contains a firewall. The ad blocking and cookie manager of this
product is reasonably good, but the firewall has some flaws. I
would recommend AdSubtract over Norton Internet Security 2001.
Regardless of the product, you now have the power to remove
those annoying ads from your surfing experience.
As an added benefit, this has tremendous effects on safeguarding
your privacy. These products both remove web bugs, which are
nasty little things created to track your movements across the
internet. Now you can stop telling companies like DoubleClick
from following your surfing habits. By blocking the ad, you are
also blocking the report back to them of what you are viewing.
How do these programs work? It's very simple really. These
intercept web pages before they get to your browser and examine
the HTML code. If they find something that matches one of their
patterns for an advertisement, they simply remove the code.
This means you pay a small price in CPU performance (I
personally didn't notice any delay), but gain it back in
bandwidth performance as you do not have to load the banners.
Additional Resources:
You can find Adsubtract at:
http://www.internet-tips.net/cgi-bin/lnkinlte.cgi?l=.adsubtract
Learn more about firewalls:
http://www.internet-tips.net/Security/Firewalls.htm
Learn about web bugs:
http://www.internet-tips.net/Security/webbugs.htm