WWW Shield
Programmable HTTP proxy server

WWW Shield is an HTTP proxy server that intercepts connections from your web browser to the Internet. It contains a simple language for writing macros that rewrite web page requests, reply headers, and the HTML markup in the returned page. It is primarily useful for deleting banner ads, useless images by URL, cookies, referers, and other things that are either slowing you down or are privacy invasions.

All configurations are done with web pages that are built into WWW Shield. To install WWW Shield:

1. Get the source package from ftp://bitrot.de/pub/wwwshield/.

2. Unpack with gzip -d < file.tar.gz | tar xvf -

3. Compile and install WWW Shield with cd src; make; make install

4. Configure your browser by following the directions in the Installing WWW Shield page.

5. Start WWW Shield (wwwshield).

6. Enter a single - in the URL field of your browser to verify that WWW Shield is configured correctly.

You need a C++ compiler to compile WWW Shield. It is tested on SGI IRIX 6.5 and Linux 2.0.36, but should be easily portable to other platforms. At the above FTP address there is an inst-able distribution file for SGI IRIX 6.5 and later.

The following pages are part of the WWW Shield distribution. Only static pages are shown. WWW Shield also creates pages dynamically to configure the proxy, select and parameterize macros (for example, set up lists of banner ad URLs to kill), and access and header histories.

• Introduction to WWW Shield

• Sources, support, security, revisions, limitations, copyright

• Installing WWW Shield

• Configuring the browser

• Macro language manual

• Macro language examples

WWW Shield is no longer actively supported. Firefox and its adblock extension take care of much of what WWW Shield was designed to do, with a better user interface.

• 1.0.1 released 8.12.99
  • New features:
    • FreeBSD port (Wolfram Schneider)
  • Bug fixes:
    • fixed little-endian port assignment bug (Mel)
    • cannot deal with gzipped HTML, filtering is now disabled for gzipped pages
• 1.0.2 released 12/8/99
  • New features:
    • added regular expression substititions: new substitute(var,re,sub) command. Regular expressions are now compiled early and cached.
    • reassigned and extended -v verbosity level codes (see wwwshield -h)
  • Bug fixes:
    • added many const modifiers necessary for some compilers, fixed rule destructor crash if the rule file is empty (Jeff Kowalski)
    • fixed misleading error pages in direct Internet connection mode