All of my years of experience with proxies doesn’t much help those who want the benefits of a proxy, yet don’t have the technical wherewithal to accomplish it. As such, I set out in search of a sure thing, a foolproof proxy that anyone could use with minimal setup. I was surprised to find Vidalia.

Vidalia has proven by far the simplest (free) proxy solution. By GUI-ing Tor & combining a Torbutton for Firefox, it couldn’t be simpler. Here’s how to anonymize your Internet activity in just a few minutes.

- Go to www.whatismyip.com and take note of your IP address.

- Go to the download page.

- Select the Installation Bundle for Windows.

- Install with default options. Install the Torbutton extension for Firefox. Restart Firefox.

- Let Vidalia connect — it should connect in about 10-15 seconds.

- In Firefox, go to View > Toolbars > Customize; find the Torbutton icon, click and drag it somewhere to the right or left of the address bar. Single click it to enable Tor. At the bottom right it’ll say “Tor Enabled” in green.

- Go to www.whatismyip.com again to verify that you are indeed browsing via another IP address. All done.

In my experience, performance has been acceptable — not blazing fast, but not entirely sluggish either. I’ve read that it is horrendously slow for some, your experience may vary.

admin@variableghz.com

The Symantec Corporation, makers of the decades-old Norton Security/Productivity suite, has been around a long, long time. I happened across an advertisement for Norton 2009 in Time magazine.

What struck me about this ad, was that Symantec seems to have finally admitted that their Norton suites wreaks of bloat. By stating: “Norton Internet Security 2009 is the fastest security suite anywhere…delivering fewer, faster, shorter scans” tells me that maybe Symantec has learned from their mistakes.

I’d like to think so, in reading a review, I came across two quotes of interest:

NIS 2009 [Norton Internet Security] may be focused on being lighter weight than previous versions, but it is just as pervasive as ever. In addition to the main software, you will get both Norton IPS 1.0  plugin and Norton ToolBar 3.0 in Firefox, a persistent icon in the Windows taskbar, and a toolbar in IE7 as well.

That right there sounds like the Symantec I know. However, this sounds like promise:

…might win over some of the people who have learned to hate security software packages. …because it is so extensive, should win back some of the free antivirus crowd….this is the least annoying, lightest weight security package you‚Äôve probably ever used …

The Norton box is still rather uninspiring:

For me, my distaste for the Symantec corporation goes back a really long time. For example, Acronis TrueImage displays incredible programming ingenuity by creating full hard disk images while Microsoft Windows is actively running whereas Norton Ghost has to reboot into an oldschool DOS era screen rendering the computer unusable for the duration of the “ghosting” process. This, obviously, isn’t a big deal, but it’s just another example of how I feel that Symantec’s Norton is the Yahoo of security tools, and it would take a lot of work to convince me otherwise after so many years of fighting to get Norton off of systems just to get them fast enough to open a web browser at a reasonable speed.

See, Symantec products are very much in the same realm as Yahoo. (One could also argue this for older products like AOL, RealNetworks, etc.) They are the default security software for nearly every new PC manufactured, the majority of PC users do not know how to deal with security, and Symantec uses tactics like these to coerce people into subscribing to their software:

As a result, it’s no surprise that they are still in business. Only recently are they under renewed pressure to perform as a result of the integration of Microsoft’s Windows Defender in Vista, and the soon to be Anti-Virus solutions they’ve mentioned. Enough.

I could go on about Symantec products. I’ve had to restore MBR’s (Master Boot Record) of computers that have had failures due to people using the Norton GoBack (which is now Norton Ghost 14) utility which can cause serious low-level problems to a system. Fortunately, it’s a relatively simple task for an IT professional to restore an MBR, but for the average computer user? I don’t think so.

My hope is that Symantec finally gets it figured out, not for the sake of their business, but for the masses — the uninformed users they push their software on.

admin@variableghz.com

This article is from 2008 and is pretty much obsolete. Google Chrome now has AdBlock; the Filterset.G Updater is no longer necessary, and IE9 may have some support for ad blocking. So, there is no longer a need to do the awkward workaround that I have outlined below for Chrome and AdBlock Plus for Firefox works fine just by itself.

***

There are a few things about Windows and the Internet that I cannot do without. Writing about them, however, is something I rarely do. People and businesses rely tremendously on Internet advertising, without it the Internet likely wouldn’t be as diverse and free in many ways as it is today. Advertising revenue enables even the smallest of site owners to generate revenue for otherwise very expensive websites. Moreover, there are plenty of things online that wouldn’t be feasible at all without Internet advertising.

In the 90′s, when animated flashy banners were more common, I became very accustomed to advertising and was generally able to ignore it. Over the years, ads started appearing in different forms. Pop-ups, pop-unders, square ads, flash ads, interstitial…and a whole, whole lot more. For me, however, this wasn’t a problem until the ads started appearing close to the text which I was reading.

(typical flash ad, circa 2005)

Most of the ads would change between a few different preset frames and my eyes would dart over to the ad, distracting me from what I was reading. Over time I got sick of it and started seeking solutions.

The simplest way to block most advertising is to use a couple of extensions for the Firefox web browser. Now, I understand that not everybody likes or wants to use Firefox, so I will cover alternatives as well, don’t worry.

Firefox has an amazing array of extensions that, well, extend the functionality of the browser dramatically. Because of this, we can readily use an extension which blocks advertising and a second which keeps our “lists” up to date. Here’s how to do it.

Firefox.

If you haven’t already, download the latest version of Firefox here. You can find older versions here, if you’d like.

Once you’ve got it up and running click on the Tools menu and select Add-ons. Starting in Firefox 2, Mozilla now calls the menu Add-ons rather than just extensions because the area includes Themes and Plugins. Type/search for “AdBlock Plus” — this, is the simplest most reliable adblocker around. Install it, then search for a second Add-On entitled, “Adblock Filterset.G Updater” — this will keep your AdBlock up to date, painlessly!

Now, restart Firefox. Upon restarting you will note a whole host of notifications. Be sure to suppress update messages, and choose the Easy List USA, etc.

Internet Explorer 7.

Before you say it — yes, I know that IE8 is coming out soon. However, if you must use IE7, then here’s whatcha do:

Download IE7Pro and install. Check or Uncheck options at will but be sure to leave “Enable ADblock” enabled. I’d recommend only leaving the “Enable ADblock” option checked in order to reduce overhead, IE7 is slow enough if you ask me.

IE7 will open automatically. A handy image will appear:

Go ahead and right click that little icon and click “Enable Flash Blocker.” Here is what the traditional ad-space looks like on yahoo after the ad is blocked:

Fact: Yahoo was the first company on the Internet to make money with advertising.

Google Chrome.

The hype has died down on Google’s new browser, Chrome, but I’m still impressed. For me, it’s only lacking two things: (1) adblocking; and (2) the ability to middle-click and drag down a page — anyway. Here’s how we ditch those ads:

Go download Privoxy, (link, or direct download 3.0.10) a small web-proxy which is perfect for just such an affair.

Once you’ve got it installed (you’ll see a “P” in your system tray), open up Chrome, click the wrench and choose Options. On the “Under the Hood” tab, select “Change Proxy Settings,” which will open the default Internet Options you’re likely familiar with. Now select “LAN settings.”

Make sure “Use a proxy server for your LAN” is checked and add the following: 127.0.0.1 and port 8118. Leave everything else alone and click OK to everything.

Now, restart Chrome and…

Ads are gone. It should be noted, however, that this method is more of a “hack” and blocks far fewer ads than, say, AdBlock for Firefox does — but this definitely makes Chrome a more viable solution for day to day use. You must have Privoxy running, or you may have some issues with Internet access.

If you like AdBlock and Filterset.G, you’ll probably want to look into other extensions such as NoScript, an incredibly powerful script blocking extension for Firefox.

admin@variableghz.com