dropstep

dropstep

Download the ads but do not view them

Why?

This is at best a strange idea: prefer pi-hole or another ad blocking solution that prevents blocked content from being downloaded.

Here, you're still paying for the bandwidth, even though the ads are not passed to your browser.

Why bother? I wanted to learn about network proxies, TLS, and do some Go programming.

Also, I generally don't want to see ads. They clutter up a web page and distract from what I am reading or researching.

However, advertisement pays for much of the content on the web. Let's not punish the publishers: download the ad, but shelve it in a directory for inspection later, or never.

It's also neat to find out how much bandwith online ads are consuming and what kind of content is provided.

What?

This is a proxy server that you point your browser to. It's a Man-in-the-middle (MITM): it intercepts requests from your browser to servers on the internet, and intercepts the responses on the way back.

I use Firefox on MacOS. Under Firefox > Settings > Network Settings, select "Manual proxy configuration".

In the "HTTP Proxy" text box, enter "localhost" and enter the port that you want to use for the proxy.

How?

When the proxy receives a response from the server, it checks a dynamically updated list of advertisement domains. If the response comes from an ad domain, it saves the content to a file but does not hand it down to the client.

I'm relying on the excellent goproxy for all the MITM functionality.

You will also need to be your own Certificate Authority. For this, I used the wonderful mkcert.

mkcert -install # installs the certs

Installing mkcert on MacOS and Firefox

brew install mkcert
brew install nss # if you use Firefox

Run

dropstep -l localhost:9999 -v 2>&1 | tee ~/Downloads/logs/dropstep.log

Build

go build

References

There is a really great series of articles on Golang network proxies.