Tech Toys Holiday Internet Gifts by Robert Fabian

It's that season. If your thoughts are not already turned to gifts, then the "holiday cheer" blaring from local merchants will properly direct you. This is my contribution. It's about a couple software gifts that an Internet user can give themselves.

First on my list of list of personal software gifts is interMute. It's priced at a modest $19.95 US and effectively blocks unwanted web behavior. It knows how to filter out advertisements, animated images, pop-up windows, background music, and more. It will selectively block the use of cookies, and put you back in control when an automatic referral is attempted. It also selectively allows you to turn off Java applets and JavaScript.

There are some advertisements that interMute thinks may contain useful information. It uses a database of suspect banners. The database is updated regularly and can be automatically downloaded by interMute users (at no extra cost). But it's not perfect. I find that maybe one in ten or twenty advertisements gets through, but it's never let through one of those really annoying banners that insist on being downloaded first.

The program runs on many platforms. It is, in effect, a personal proxy server. Your browser doesn't ask for a web page directly, it ask the interMute proxy server for the page. interMute watches everything going in both directions. It blocks requests that would result in unwanted behavior. You don't get bothered by distracting, irrelevant material. And pages load noticeably faster because all that junk isn't being transmitted.

If interMute gets really popular, advertisers may decide to so something about it. With enough work, a web page designer can defeat, at least temporarily, the blocking performed by interMute. Fortunately, it's not (yet) popular enough to seriously threaten advertisers. I hope it stays that way, because I really like the better web experience made possible by interMute. It's well worth it.

My next personal software gift has an even better price. Sam Spade is free for the asking. Steve Atkins, the author of Sam Spade, is all fired up about spam and the misdirection that spammers practice. With Sam Spade, users have a chance to figure out who sent an unwanted email message, and where it came from. Sam Spade will perform a full email header analysis on unwanted messages.

But Sam Spade goes beyond being just an anti-spam tool. I have space to mention only one more of its neat features. Give it an Internet address and it will build a picture of how information goes from your computer to that location. It performs a traceroute. You see how packets are routed across the Internet, and see the location of Internet traffic jams. You see the speed of your ISP, the speed of the open Internet, and the speed at the destination site.

Every Internet user deserves to give himself interMute. Every user curious about how the Internet works should give herself Sam Spade. After all, 'tis the season.

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