Internet Junkbuster

Junkbusters is a for-profit corporation whose goal is to give users more control over Internet advertising. Among other applications, Junkbusters freely distributes a web filtering system named the Internet Junkbuster. This filtering system is written in C and available for a variety of Unix systems and Windows 95/NT. Internet Junkbuster can filter cookie headers as well as Referer and User-Agent. Advertisements are filtered using a URL blockfile which contains URL patterns that will be rejected when requested by the web browser. Internet Junkbuster is known to be a very fast filter system. The speed is primarily due to the fact that Internet Junkbuster only filters HTTP headers and therefore does not have to parse HTML or any other document contents. Not having the ability to parse web content limits the filtering capabilities of this filtering system. The system is also not able to filter arbitrary HTTP headers, it can only filter a limited set of headers.