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Comment by thematt | Hacker News Reader

Would Ghostery be successful at blocking this?

http://www.ghostery.com/

Yep. It blocks the Like buttons and other stupid widgets, which is how the cookies get sent. That also has the pleasant side-effect of drastically decreasing load times.

I highly recommend it. Be aware that it does block disqus by default, I usually whitelist that one.

I had a few problems with the blocking when actually going to the sites in question. I believe I had to unblock Google Plus, Google Analytics and Facebook when actually visiting those sites.

However, I'm happy that most of the time it prevents the annoying features of a page from loading.

I've never had that problem. That'd be a pretty big flaw in ghostery if that was the case.

I've had problems with Ghostery blocking cookies and web bugs that prevent some Flash videos on YouTube, Hulu, and the New York Times from playing.

Would using noScript with firefox work?

Yes. Ghostery is much more targeted however, it blocks scripts based on a blacklist (of trackers) rather than blocking ALL scripts. Ghostery is much more user/non-techie friendly; the only time you need to mess with it is:

a) You want to allow some service (I allow disqus, for example): disable blocking for the service b) A site requires facebook/twitter to log in, or you trust the site: whitelist the site (allows all tracking scripts)

I do wish it had a "allow by domain" so I could allow e.g. just facebook on just turntable.fm so I can log in, but not allow all of ttfn's other trackers.

Works fine on abc.com ;) http://screencast.com/t/01D8EF6AH5ij

I'm pretty sure this is exactly what Ghostery and the like block.

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