Return-Path: <nifl-technology@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.10.2/8.10.2) with SMTP id g1KIFau25714; Wed, 20 Feb 2002 13:15:36 -0500 (EST) Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2002 13:15:36 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0202201250080.31160-100000@shagrat.silicongoblin.com> Errors-To: listowner@literacy.nifl.gov Reply-To: nifl-technology@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-technology@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-technology@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: "Steve Linberg" <steve@silicongoblin.com> To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-technology@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-TECHNOLOGY:2259] Question: ads and classroom web use X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: O Content-Length: 2623 Lines: 56 Hi folks. As I move along in work and life in the tech-geek world, I try to make mental notes about things I stumble across that I find useful and consider whether deploying them on LiteracyTent would be useful to people. I'm wondering, just informally, whether teachers who do, or would like to, use the web in classroom settings are deterred to any degree by the increasingly intrusive nature of online advertising, pop-up windows, and related annoyances that are more and more common. They drive me crazy, personally, and I've set up a proxy server on my own machines that does a pretty good job of stripping them out, so I don't get many ads and no pop-ups or pop-unders as I surf. It can also strip out javascript, annoying things like <blink> tags, and basically anything else that one doesn't want to see. No filtering system is perfect, but this one seems to be stripping out about 95% of the crud I normally encounter. It's an open-source Perl script that requires a Unix server (or Mac OSX) to run on, and it takes a little tweaking to configure, but so far I'm really enjoying it. It would be relatively simple for me to set it up on LiteracyTent as a public proxy for people that wanted to avoid ads; the nice thing is that it doesn't matter what browser/OS anybody is using, it just works (as long as people configure their browsers to use the proxy, which is a straightforward preference setting on most browsers). The downside is that I wouldn't be able to offer it as a freebie, since I have to pay for all traffic to and from the server, and this would be a non-trivial amount of traffic. I'm not sure how much it would cost to run, but it would at least have to cover its own cost, as I try to have most of the LiteracyTent services do. There would have to be more than a handful of folks interested in this and willing to pay some hopefully-reasonable cost to use it in order for it to fly as a service, and if I'm the only one bugged by ads/etc enough to take action to block them, then there's no need for it and I'll just continue to run it locally for myself. If there's interest, though, I could look at setting it up on LiteracyTent and what it would involve in terms of cost. This is just a non-committal request for comments. Is this idea out in deep space, or do you think literacy programs would benefit from having an ad-stripping proxy server to make web surfing a lot less commercial and annoying? Cheers, Steve Linberg -- Steve Linberg, Chief Goblin Silicon Goblin Technologies http://silicongoblin.com Be kind. Remember, everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
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