Old Proxomitron Forums

Well, here's a list of some proggys that I use regularly.

GNU Emacs editor from http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html
if you can't do it in Emacs, it's not worth doing
(Actually, I also use UltraEdit for a few things)

The Cygwin Unix environment for Windows from http://www.cygwin.com/
makes all the good Unix commands available on Windows.

Atomic Clock Sync for keeping your system clock synched to an atomic
clock time source on the internet,
from http://www.worldtimeserver.com/atomic-clock/

Download Accelerator (DAP) from http://www.speedbit.com/
for downloading files.

OpenSA Web Server from http://www.opensa.org/. A distribution of
the Apache web server packaged for Windows.

Process Explorer for Windows from http://www.sysinternals.com
for telling you everything you could imagine about processes running
on your machine. In fact, everything I've used from this site was
good. These guys really know the internals of the Windows OS,
if you're not familiar with this site, you should take a look at what
they have.

 

Yes, that's exactly what I meant!
Before I started using Proximitron, I had ZAP configured to allow
internet access for the NAV popproxy.exe, (which shows up in ZAP as
"Norton Antivirus Utilities" for NAV 2000)and deny internet access
to Microsoft Outlook. That was great because it totally prevented
Outlook from accessing the web when rendering HTML email, so it blocked
all mail "bugs" that people put in HTML email. But now that I
use proxomitron, I can't distinguish Outlook originated
requests from MSIE originated requests. (I wish Outlook would
use a different HTTP Agent value!)


 

Well, that's B.S., HTML authors have never had an "exclusive right
to control how their pages are displayed". That's not what HTML
is about. If they want that, they should use PDF or something.

I dare them to try and say that a sight-impaired person must not
increase font sizes because it "interferes" with the web publishers'
rights!


 

I don't think that sending that information is anything new, Windows
Update has to get something in order to work. I think they've just
changed the way they do it. As I mentioned in another post some
time ago, they are sending this information by POSTing SOAP
messages. If you want to see what is being sent, select
"View Posted data" in the HTTP Message Log window.

I'm also glad they provided a way to disable the automatic update, but
realistically they had no choice. There are too many people like
me who develop, test and integrate complicated systems who have
absolutely zero tolerance for uncontrolled updates to Windows.

I also have no confidence in the drivers that Windows Update
suggests I install. I generally try and keep up to date with
Windows Update, except for things I don't use. But I've had
problems with an IR driver and a mouse driver that I installed
via Windows Update, and I currently see it offering drivers
for hardware that I don't even have in my machine. I no longer
trust Windows Update for driver updates.

 

I suggest that you look at buying one of the small hardware routers from Netgear,
Linksys, D-Link, etc. They come with a built-in "firewall" and the
price of these things has dropped considerably (and if you wait for
the right time, you can usually get a good rebate offer). Plus, it also
gives you the ability to connect multiple computers to the internet.

I used the ZoneAlarm software firewall on my computer, and while it
does a pretty good job, I didn't feel completely confident about it
protecting me so I also bought a Netgear RP114 router and now have both
it and ZoneAlarm running.

Although I must admit that I'm running far more server programs on my
computer than the average user, and probably have a higher need for
protection. For a normal computer user, a software program like ZoneAlarm
is probably good enough (I haven't used any other software firewalls
other than ZoneAlarm)


 

Yahoo has made changes to news.yahoo.com pages which happens
to make it easy to strip out a few advertisment sections.
This filter removes tables which contain certain key words:
ADVERTISEMENT which conviently marks a table of ads,
MTFSID which seems to always be part of a comment line inside
the table for the advertisement banner on the page, and
MTFAD:N:750x100 which catches some other banners that don't
have an MTFSID comment.

[Patterns]
Name = "Kill news.yahoo.com advertisement tables"
Active = TRUE
URL = "(story.|)news.yahoo.com*"
Bounds = "$NEST(<table,</table>)"
Limit = 10000
Match = "*(ADVERTISEMENT|MTFSID|MTFAD:N:750x100)1*"
Replace = "<!-- Yahoo 1 removed -->"

So far I haven't seen where this has removed any legitimate content.
Although it would on older-style yahoo pages such as sports.yahoo.com
and biz.yahoo.com if you used it on them (which is why I've been so
specific with the URL match)
Hopefully they are moving those other pages to this new format!!
I'm sure this filter will evolve, I've re-written it several times
since I started posting this
(and now editted it once since posting!)



Edited by - pooms on 15 Jul 2002  07:44:12

I guess it depends on what you mean by disabling the "go back" feature.
Most times I've seen this it isn't actually caused by disabling
the "go back" feature but is caused by a page that does a redirect to
another page. Once you are viewing the page that you've been redirected
to, and you try and use the "go back" feature, you go back to the
page doing the redirecting, and then get redirected back to the page
you were one. So it looks like the "go back" is disabled.
Here is one example that I occasionally visit:
http://www.imagesatintl.com/
When you go to that URL, you get a "sniffer" page that uses javascript to
check browser characteristics and redirect you to an appropriately sized
page. Once you are on that page, if you try to "go back" you go to the
sniffer page, which once again redirects you. Sometimes if you "go back"
twice very quickly you can get past the redirection before it has time
to work, but the easiest way is simply to use the browsers back history list
to go back two pages. (In IE, right click on the back button, in Opera
click on the little arrow to the right of the Back button).

(BTW, if you visit the URL above, your filters may prevent the "sniffer"
page from working)

Here's another example: http://www.spotimage.fr/ in this case
they try to redirect you to a french version if they can detect that
your browser language is french.

 

Just a warning about the content on that site: you might not
want to visit that page if you are at work!

As sidki3003 mentions, the mime fix works by looking for extensions, and
there is none in this case. I was a bit surprised that the MIME Fix List
does not have an entry mapping .htm or .html to text/html. I'm guessing
that this is because some/most browsers do this automatically. Even with
altosax's page having no .htm or .html extension and the wrong mime type,
IE6 renders the HTML, although Opera just displays the raw HTML text.
I guess IE must also look into the content to decide it is HTML.

On the other hand, I notice that Jor's MIME Fix file has an entry
for the extension pattern "(?|)htm(l|)", so I guess some browsers must
have needed it.