Were you ever annoyed about huge slow banner ads on your favorite pages, or offensive blinking tags? Were you ever afraid of giving out personal information through browser ``cookies'' and Referer headers containing your credit card information from the previous page you visited?
WWW Shield is an HTTP proxy server. It sits between your browser and the Internet and keeps an eye on the traffic. Outgoing requests and incoming pages are modified, which means that WWW Shield applies a configurable set of rules. Rules are basically search-replace instructions: ``if there is a blink tag, replace it with boldface'', for example. Exactly which rules are applied is configurable on the feature menu page.
WWW Shield is entirely configurable through web pages like this one. After you have configured WWW Shield, you can access its internal pages with the URL
http://local
(Just a single ``-'' in the URL field of your browser will also work.) The pseudo host local is ``built into'' WWW Shield; it intercepts all references to it and displays appropriate pages without sending requests to the Internet.
WWW Shield is what is called an HTTP proxy server. This means that your browser will send all web page requests to the proxy, which will forward it to the appropriate server and modify the reply according to certain rules. WWW Shield can be configured to talk to another proxy such as squid or http-gw. Whether WWW Shield talks directly to the Internet or through another proxy depends on your local network; if you have a firewall you may not have a choice but to use its proxies. This has no effect on the way WWW Shield modifies requests and replies.
Once the browser is configured to talk to WWW Shield, the fact that it is there is invisible. Nothing special needs to be done when choosing URLs or following links. See the page on browser configuration.
One of the primary purposes of WWW Shield is the removal of banner ads. Banner ads are images, and WWW Shield comes with predefined rules that remove images by host or page, or by image. This is especially useful for frequently loaded pages such as search engines because it makes these pages load faster without having to configure the browser to ignore all images. Consider the example below.
I find advertisement offensive and I kill it wherever I can. Some
people say that ads pay for services that would otherwise cost extra,
and should therefore not be turned off, but I cannot accept this.
Advertisement is a pest that has become pervasive and blights any
medium it has touched - just consider commercial interruptions on TV,
and syndicated programming. Do you feel obliged to watch those ads on
TV or do you feel annoyed and zap to another channel or do something
else? Advertisement has damaged TV programming to the point where the
actual program is just padding between the ads that pay for the TV
station. In fact the fewer ads a medium carries the more valuable its
content tends to be - just consider the nearly ad-free Scientific
American vs. your average TV sitcom. You may feel you are the customer,
but in reality it's the ad agencies because they pay the money, and
you attention is the merchandise that is being sold. He who pays the
piper calls the tune.
Now the same thing is happening on the web, and it's worse because you probably pay for the transmission to your machine too. Search engines, for example, have existed before going commercial. In no case has the Internet or any of its services depended on advertisement support, so there is no reason to expect it to collapse without ad money. WWW Shield is a tool to attempt to avoid the problem.
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