For example junkbuster. Has anyone ever tried them? Do they work? Do they slow down your browsing? Any input greatly appreciated
Yes, yes, yes (a lot.)
There’s a good discussion of these in today’s paper.
The website version is at
http://www.accessmagazine.com/privacy
I’ve used http://anonymizer.com when contracting at a site where they screened and logged where the employees surfed.
As a contractor, I was exempt from those rules, but I never wanted to confront the IS guys over it.
For me the answers are yes, yes, and tolerable. On the free versions you get popup ads every other screen. They claim you can speed it up by using the paid service, but if it’s just a firewall from trojan horses that you want, try Norton Firewall.
Be aware that some things cannot be done with one of these packages, like on-line banking, and even posting to this site, because the cookies are lost between logon and posting a transaction.
I’ve used and am currently using right now, Junkbuster. (The Waldherr variant - very nice… http://www.waldherr.org/junkbuster/ )
It’s simply wonderful and very easy to use. Blocks ads, cookies, you name it.
If you want cookies, it’s easy. There’s a flat text file. Simply insert the name of the site to be allowed. (For instance I have a line that looks like this:
…and I can now accept cookies sent by the SD site.
There’s more advanced options, including mangling all http headings that you want, including “Referer” and whatever-the-browser-one-is.
I swear by JB and will not surf without it. If it’s slower, I don’t notice it.
Ahem. To hijack this a little, for best results, use it with Opera, http://www.opera.com . You can guarantee that the cache gets cleared, you know what gets sent to whom and that you’re safe from any of those little annoyances found in IE, like http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS01-020.asp
A clarification here: Junkbuster and Anonymizer are two completely different products/services. Junkbuster is a program that you run on your own machine, which blocks cookies and ads. The SDMB won’t work as well for you if you have cookies turned off (you’ll have to log in every time, and the icons for read threads might be messed up), but that’s your decision.
Anonymizer, on the other hand, is a remote proxy, designed to hide a user’s IP address. This is a concern to the staff here, because IP addresses are one of the tools we use to track down trolls and sockpuppets. If we discover that you’re using Anonymizer or another such service (and we can tell if you’re doing so), then you will very probably be banned, unless you can come up with a very good explanation.