Binning web advertisers and trackers

[Giles Orr]

The recent release of Mozilla's Collusion plug-in for Firefox has
inspired me to go after web advertisers and trackers.  I already use
both AdBlock Plus and NoScript, and yet after a couple days of
browsing Collusion is showing sites like imrworldwide, 2o7.net,
quantserve, and scorecardresearch tracking my movement on the web.
This is because there are several sites on which I have to enable
JavaScript to get reasonable functionality - Slashdot comes to mind
(and yes, they do use trackers).

I think the ideal solution would be privoxy, but I looked at it
recently and found both the initial configuration and the ongoing
maintenance cost (particularly as a replacement for AdBlock) quite
daunting.  So I thought about dumping all the offending servers into
/etc/hosts with pointers to a null host.  I seem to recall a recent
discussion on GTALUG (I couldn't find it) saying that that wasn't as
elegant or as effective a solution as is possible.  Which made me
think: I always have an Apache server running, I could set it up to
answer at 127.0.0.2 so any calls from advertiser scripts would get a
404 rather than waiting to time out.  Would that be more effective?
This would also mean that if I did something extreme like binning
facebook.com, when I thought "why isn't that working?" and put
"facebook.com" into my browser, it could come up with a default page
on 127.0.0.2 that said "this site has been binned" which would help
remind me of what the hell is going on.

Any thoughts?  Thanks.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists