Wonderful experience with Privoxy

[jturning]

I just wanted to highlight a great project I've been using over the last couple weeks, Privoxy. It's a Privacy Proxy that protects your privacy and filters out advertising. With some sites getting carried away with ads and those annoying add boxes that pop up when you mouse over a word, it was time to do something. I'd prefer to let a site's advertisements display, but they've pushed it too far in making them so annoying. The most interesting thing is that I've noticed SPAM dropping to almost nothing with my ISP filter. So far I'm operating with the defaults, but it's highly configurable.

http://www.privoxy.org/

[Shanghai]

I use it to but only because I'm living in China. Unfortunately because of the nature of the system it renders so slow that most of the time it's useless.
Perhaps in less authorial systems it's more useful I hope

[jturning]

For me pages seem to load faster because it's not downloading the advertisements. I used to notice prior to Privoxy that many ads came from third party sites and they would actually slow down a page loading because they were slower than the website I was visiting. Overall, Privoxy makes my web browsing much more enjoyable.

And I'm starting to think there is a link between visiting websites and SPAM. Prior to using Privoxy I would have a lot more spam getting filtered by my ISP.

Bugz