Stardate 20040214.1002

(On Screen): The Washington Post has implemented a mandatory registration system for access to the majority of their online material. I always find that obnoxious, and there are a lot of sites whose material I won't use because they have such systems.

They're nearly always useless for those companies, anyway. More often than not people lie when filling out the forms, and it is not uncommon for account/password pairs to be publicized and widely used. I had been waiting to see if anyone had done that for the WaPo, but I just now noticed something and found a different way.

I have been using The Proxomitron as a web filtering proxy, along with AdSubtract, as a way of eliminating thoroughly annoying aspects of a lot of web sites. For instance, I have been adding a lot of special strings to the URL blocklist to kill off truly annoying features on some sites:

abcnews.go.com/jscript/realone_detect.js
abcnews.go.com/jscript/main.js
abcnews.go.com/jscript/hbe-11up.js
abcnews.go.com/houseads
log.go.com
[^.]+.sageanalyst.net
www.imdb.com/google/box
www.latimes.com/javascript/windoid.js
www.latimes.com/javascript/emailform.js
[^.]+bluestreak.com/
[^.]+sageanalyst.net/
[^.]+searchit.com/
[^.]+inet-traffic.com/
kounter.com/
muvc.com/winlayer.jse
muvc.com/winopen.jse
analyzer.fc2.com/
muvc.com/banner.html
[^.]+.sugoicounter.com*/
[^.]+.NetpalOffers.net/
[^.]+.trafficmp.com/
[^.]+.unicast.com/

I find in some cases that it's worth creating an entry to block a specific file, usually because that file contains javascript. I look at the contents of those files first to make sure they don't perform any function I care about, but it usually isn't too difficult to figure out. (And if I was wrong, it's no big deal to undo it again.)

As it turns out, if the nasty Javascript is embedded in the HTML file directly, it can still be foiled using The Proxomitron. For example:

What this particular rule does is to change the name of an obnoxious function, without changing any of the places where it was invoked. So attempts to call "Slide" fail as an undefined symbol, and the renamed "Glide" never gets called.

On some sites I've also found it useful to hoax their referers. So when I noticed that a WaPo editorial had been listed in Google News, and when it opened without nagging me to register, I did some experimenting. The exact same URL cut and pasted into a new window did nag me to register. The only difference between the sessions was that the second instance didn't send Google News as a referer.

Hmmm... Izzatso?

I created the following "Headers" rule in Proxomitron just to see what would happen, and now the Wapo's server leaves me the hell alone:

Referers are your friends! (The Proxomitron is even more of a friend!)

And I don't feel even slightly guilty.