We Know Where You Live

Back in the olden daze, when I was using Macs, I used Privoxy to "Improve My Internet Exerience" — that meant, killing all those stupid little ads that litter web pages like toilet paper on your shoe. It didn't work that well, and it was easier to kill Privoxy than fix it.

Same now. I also use the Sage 1.4.6 news aggregator to read RSS summaries from Reuters, Slashdot and Boing Boing, among others. I'd read Science News too, but their feeds are invariably broken for the same reason I have problems — we're both amateurs. I'd hoped to kill the toilet paper stuck to Slashdot, too, so I tried Privoxy again. It worked for one day, then blocked everything including regular web pages.

Nuts. So I've killed Privoxy again, and now I'm persuading myself that Slashdot's ads "tailored to me" are part of the existential hoohoo of the times.

But nothing turns me off faster than parochial ads I'm supposed to buy into because they hilite my home town. Way too personal, dudes. {Update I may have figured this out. Had a small difference of opinion with the /etc/privoxy/config file...}