[userbinator]

That still requires somewhat less from the user than my solution: a filtering proxy. On the other hand, the latter enables a far more customised browsing experience and one that isn't restricted to a single browser on a single computer.

...which brings me to another great point this illustrates: if you want to customise your experience, if you want to be able to control how you see the Web, then you need to make an effort, and the amount you exert is essentially proportional to how much you can change.

Yet the majority of users have shown that they are willing to take whatever Google throws at them with little opposition. I find that a little sad and ironic in this era of "everyone can code" propaganda (I've seen even Google advertises something like that on its homepage); or perhaps the latter is just an attempt to increase the population of intelligent yet docile and obedient corporate drones... I know developers --- web developers --- who really hated the changes yet made no effort to fix it themselves, despite almost certainly having the skills to.

[hiram112]

What kind of filtering proxy are you using?

[userbinator]

Proxomitron.

[nextvectorsec]

Good call, I think you hit it right on the money. We have all seen these problems (basically Google attempting to MITM the entire Internet) getting worse for years along with all of the very real malvertising threats. We have partnered with the Privoxy project to do exactly what you are doing with Proxomitron but a system that will scale to enterprise environments. We have it running in corporate and educational environments already w/out SSL inspection. What we will be able to do with SSL inspection will be a game changer. Check out the virtual appliance! Any feedback or ideas are appreciated. https://www.nextvectorsecurity.com

[tripzilch]

wow does that ... still exist? is it maintained? (I thought the creator stopped 15+ years ago?) does the user interface still look weird and green? :)

[userbinator]

The creator died 16 years ago... but the (rather small) community has made a lot of patches and continues to work on filters. Given that it's basically the equivalent of running all the sites you visit through sed, with a syntax that's more suited for filtering HTML than plaintext, the strength lies in its flexibility and generality.

Yes, the UI is still skinnable, and the default skin is rather... psychedelic.

[tripzilch]

Ohhhh, right! I remember when that happened, forgot ... Amazing that the software is still in use. And that it's still useful given the temporary nature of these filters. Its syntax was pretty neat; writing your own cosmetic filters was pretty easy. And I suppose that the community wrote some code to auto convert public block lists maybe?

There's something to be said about the adblocker being a filtering proxy, it can really get anything before it hits the browser.

Do you know how it compares to Privoxy nowadays? Way back then it was the open source but harder to configure alternative, that didn't quite work as well as Proxomitron. But maybe Privoxy continued development and got better, I don't know what direction that project took.

Oh and I personally always really liked the default skin :D

[hiram112]

Haha I just took a look, expecting a cool Github project page.

Nope - its green, and hasn't been updated since June... of 2003. I have no idea how it is able to be effective against the modern web, considering in 2003 the biggest issue was annoying pop-up Flash ads which no longer exist. Maybe there are updated plugins or something.