Squashing the Product-Hawkers

If you're looking for ways of minimizing the advertising that is foisted upon you in the course of doing stuff online, Steven Den Beste has a couple of recommendations. I tend to do very little in terms of this kind of thing -- basically, running EarthLink's pop-up blocker is fine by me, although it's a bit overzealous, frequently getting in the way of Javascripts that open new windows, and in terms of spam, I really don't get a whole lot, thanks to AOL's filters. Like SDB, I do get a lot of the "Help the President of Zimbabwe smuggle $50,000,000 out of the country" messages, and I see that mails for Viagra have given way to mails for Cialis, but that's about it. In general, I actually seem to get less spam at my main inbox than real messages; although this is no doubt because I'm on a couple of fairly high-traffic lists (both for GMR staffers), the amount of spam that gets through isn't debilitating at all. (At least, not yet.)

But SDB generally knows what he's talking about with stuff like this, so if you're looking for solutions to these kinds of problems, check out the two programs he recommends.