Tim's (still) not blogging

AdBlock

After several weeks of running my own local Privoxy at work and at home as a system-wide ad blocker, I’ve reinstalled Windows at work, and haven’t reinstalled Privoxy. It wasn’t a huge pain, and it was really flexible (not just block rules, but content-replacement rules to completely remove various sections/elements from sites), but it was probably overkill. With AdBlock extensions now available for all the browsers I use, I think I’ll switch back to just using that.

I had always been using EasyList (sometimes with EasyElement, I think), and today I found EasyPrivacy, which claims to block a lot of the non-ad annoyances like trackers and those double-underline or clipboard-modifying scripts.

EasyPrivacy has rules for Apture (the like/share bars that appear on sites like MacNN), but not one that actually blocks the initial script that creates the bar. I added to my custom AdBlock filters:

||apture.com

I’m mostly doing this for my recordkeeping, since nobody reads this blog. Maybe I’ll create my own ABP subscription to share these custom filters across my browsers/machines.

Update: Adding meebo.com also handles the popup/share bar/iframe on allthingsd.com. I also have a couple dozen custom AdBlock rules in Firefox, so maybe I will get those converted to my own filter file.