Re: Why no "Banner Ad Eaters"?

[Brad Threatt <bradt@ehq.com>]

Tim May wrote:
> 
> At 8:21 AM -0800 1/22/98, bill.stewart@pobox.com wrote:
> 
> >What I'd really like to see in a browser is an option to
> >turn off animated GIFs (other than by killing all images.)
> Yeah, I'm surprised that "banner ad eaters" have not been widely 
> deployed. (If they're available, I haven't about them.) 
> Something to remove the annoying banners, or stop them from 
> wasting valuable time loading in the first place.
There are several examples people have mentioned here:
Roxen, junkbuster, etc.

I happen to use one called WebFilter, a patched CERN httpd
(http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/NoShit) which allows
program filtering based on URL regexp matching.

Of course, now that Netscape's releasing their source code, what
would *really* help the practice take off would be integration of 
one of these systems into Netscape. 

On the downside, this is sure to trigger an ad Arms Race, with content
providers melding together content and ads.  Right now, I can view the
web with almost no ads, but if a million people are filtering ads off a
site, you can bet there will be countermeasures, and lots of them.  It's
difficult to imagine the filters winning, without more advanced support
(for example, cropping images to remove ads, and collaborative filtering
pools).  But if a million people are using the system, and 0.01% are
coders committed to making it work, well, you can do a lot with 100
brains.

> BTW, some of the notorious features of the new "anti-hacking" laws
> make  disassembly of programs, like browsers, illegal. While they 
> won't bother with folks who just fool around with disassembling 
> code, they might use these anti-hacking laws to throw the book at 
> anyone who made such a banner-eater available.
Proxies can do the same thing, and just as well, IMO, and it doesn't
require any ugly binary patching. 

-MT