Author Topic: Solution to occupational hazard: privoxy  (Read 6530 times)

Offline Barnaby_McEwan

  • Posts: 861
Solution to occupational hazard: privoxy
« on: February 26, 2007, 09:55:33 am »
After reading this thread and viewing the awful site it mentions I decided I never, ever wanted to hear another MIDI file.

After a bit of head-scratching I found a way to block MIDI files and many other kinds of annoying website clag, without spending any money: privoxy. This is a local web proxy designed to protect your privacy online by preventing cross-site user-tracking and so on. Its versatility means you can do all sorts of other things with it. The main site is down so the online manual is unavailable but if you download the version for your operating system a manual is included. Configuring privoxy can be tricky for non-technical users - it can take a bit of tweaking once it's set up - but the benefits are worth having. If you need to, get someone who knows what they're doing to help you install and configure it (don't ask me - sorry, I don't have the time or skills to do this for you remotely). Once that's done create a new user action:

Actions:

+block
+handle-as-empty-document


URL pattern:

/.*\.mid

...and worry no more about being blasted with cheesy music from some twinkie's website. This action means "Don't fetch any resource via http which has the file extension .mid - instead put an empty document in the page where it was supposed to go." You will not be able to deliberately download any MIDI file unless you also whitelist the site you want it from, or turn off privoxy temporarily. Refer to the manual for that.
« Last Edit: February 26, 2007, 10:08:19 am by Barnaby_McEwan »