web

clean

doubleclick.net knows where you live. But they don't know where I live. As a matter of fact, they don't use any of my bandwidth at all. I see banner ads as transparent images.

Why would you want to do this? Do an AltaVista search. "View Image" on one of the banner ads and read the URL carefully. That's right. You're giving a copy of every query to a web advertising company. Other sites do this too -- AltaVista and doubleclick.net is just one example.

What are banner ads saying about us? is a list of transaction information sent to doubleclick.net -- including the user's name, address, travel itinerary, and the name of a medical condition.

The information presented here is for people who are familiar with Apache web server setup. If you don't know the basics, read through the docs on apache.org and come back.

Aaron Lehmann (aaronl@vitelus.com) has contributed some regex fixes to the patterns file and has written a very fast Squid plugin that works with the same "patterns" and "actions" files. If you get the new patterns file for mod_rewrite use, get the new webclean Perl script too, otherwise it won't work with Aaron's regexes

patterns.zgp file: local current list of annoyances

patterns.yoyo file: patterns from the yoyo.org list of ad server hostnames

actions file: what URL to use to replace each type of annoyance

rewrite.conf file for Apache with proxy and rewrite support

webclean script to make the rewrite.conf file from patterns and actions

Examples of what to replace annoyances with:
dot_clear.png: a transparent graphic
popdown.html: a JavaScript page that closes itself (make popup windows disappear instantly without disabling all JavaScript)
black.html: an all-black page to replace ad frames.

This is not vulnerable to this Security vulnerability in Apache mod_rewrite but you should run the latest version of everything to be on the safe side.

Label banner ads to show what is being filtered out, using this PHP-based method from Matt Williams.
actions-who file to use instead of actions, above.
rewrite-who.conf file, made from patterns and actions-who.
who.php3 is the PHP3 script that generates a black banner with the filtered URL in white.

How to use: Enable web proxying and URL rewriting in your Apache configuration. Once that works, use the Include directive to include the above rewrite.conf file. You don't need patterns, actions, or webclean unless you want to make your own rewrite.conf.

Apache note: Apache processes requests through modules in the reverse order of the order in which they were included in the server, either in Configuration or with LoadModule directives. Make sure that the proxy module is included in your Apache before the rewrite module, so that URLs are rewritten before the proxy module gets a hold of them and asks some silly web server for a banner ad you told it you didn't want.