--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)

Junkbuster allows people to shut off banner ads, get fine control over cookies, deliberately misreport their browser, and otherwise eliminate minor annoyances and stop handing out privacy information. It works by being a proxy server that redirects specified kinds of pages, blocks certain requests, and rewrites your header information as desired.

Note that eliminating banner ads has the side-effect of making many web pages come up a lot faster. I know people who use it for the speed alone. However on the flip side you reduce vroom's ability to make money.

I don't currently use it, but I have in the past.

Ah, but the control is so fine that you can browse quickly and still allow vroom to stay employed. You can limit which banner ads you see, at least by the server they come from. I specifically allow in banners from adfu/perlmonks. I also block all cookies except for a few sites, one of which is perlmonks. It all works very, very nicely. The only drawback is when a site changes servers and hence has a temporary IP - not that it's *ever* happened around here. More than once or twice :)

And if you still are feeling guilty about shutting out the lovely Perlmonks banner ads, head on over to Ye Old Monastery Gift Shoppe and stimulate the US economy a bit, specifically the parts of it that keep this place running.

I'm a big fan of J. Marshall's cgi-proxy myself.

It's perl, It's free (in both senses) and you can fiddle about with it yourself to do things like collect adfu stuff without hurting vroom wallet. <g>