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How to Setup a Foolproof Proxy for Anonymous Browsing

1 Comment | This entry was posted on May 31 2010

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.

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Norton Internet Security 2009

1 Comment | This entry was posted on Feb 06 2009

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.

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Removing Internet Advertising

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Sep 28 2008

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.

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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.

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