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"Ad Finitum" needs Internet Explorer (5.5 or later) running under Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP or later.
If you have already decided to give it a try then please go straight to the Download page.
Can you think of any "reasonable argument" for the author of a web page to include a graphic which may be as small as 1 pixel square and transparent (i.e. a "Web Bug") and then source such a graphic from a third party site?
The "reasonable argument" is, of course, that the web site will likely reap financial reward by making information available to others about your surfing habits. Inclusion of such third party content is one way that such information can be made available. At least those sites that provide visible third party graphics, described below, are being less deceitful than those which include web bugs which are designed to be invisible.
"Third Party Graphics" usually, but not always, represent advertising content which can be both visually annoying and distracting. On its own that may be a sufficient, if trivial, reason for blocking such content. Third party content can also be used to track your surfing habits, in particular but not exclusively by using "Cookies". Waiving the privacy concerns this rises, why waste your time (and possibly increase your telephone charges) downloading froth?
"Web Bugs" and "Third Party Graphics" come from web-sites other than the one that appears on your browser's address bar. Typically, such content is provided by advertisers and/or companies which track the surfing habits of people like you who use the Internet. Such tracking can be done via Cookies (which can be dealt with by my program Burnt Cookies) and also by more insidious methods such as the HTML PING protocol. Ad Finitum can stop this invasion of your privacy.
Ad Finitum can block access to any domain name by telling Windows that the site content is already available on your computer and that there is no need for it to be fetched over the Internet. Additionally, when registered, the Parental Controls feature allows not only domain names to be blocked but also allows any web page whose domain name and/or full page address contains characters or words which you deem to be unacceptable. The first method blocks access by all programs on your computer (but can be easily circumvented) while the second only works in conjunction with Internet Explorer.
Site blocking can, of course, be accomplished by firewall software
and/or hardware and should be if you have serious concerns regarding parental issues.
While this solution is the most bulletproof it begs the question of how
do you know which sites are sourcing web bugs and third party graphics?
You can Download and Install "Ad
Finitum"! It will examine the source and size of all graphical elements on web
pages viewed using Internet Explorer. If a page contains web bugs it will alert you to
the fact using a dialog box which will allow you to block such content in the future
or mark such content as "friendly", preventing nuisance warnings. It will
also alert you to the presence of third party graphics by changing the mouse pointer
shape and/or playing a sound as the mouse passes over them. Again you can block or mark as
friendly such content.
Perhaps the best solution of all is to run Ad Finitum and occasionally use the information it gathers regarding the sources of web bugs and third party content to update the list of sites blocked by your firewall.
Ad Finitum may cause a higher incidence of "Script Errors" when loading web pages using scripts. This problem is believed to be due to a timing issue in Internet Explorer as Ad Finitum does not contain any "hooks" into the script engine. Clicking "Yes" to continue running scripts as the page loads seems to result in pages loading correctly. Because Ad Finitum does not hook into the script engine there is no fix available for this except, unfortunately, to uninstall Ad Finitum via the usual Add/Remove Programs applet from the Windows Control Panel.
As a result, I have removed the links to Ad Finitum from this website's main page but retained the Ad Finitum web pages as a service to those who continue to use the program without problems.
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