After 15 years as shareware, Ad Muncher is now completely free | Hacker News Reader

After 15 years as shareware, Ad Muncher is now completely free

admuncher.com

48 pointsMurrayHurps28 comments

Zero technical info on the site, weird. But since it also filters out ads in non-browser apps, it should be some sort of proxy. Then how does it handle https'd ads? Self-signed certs and all? Perhaps dwindling supply of http resources and increasing privacy concerns are the reasons why it's "now completely free" :-/

PS. I've been Windows user since 3.11, I am very pro-privacy and I've never even heard of Ad Muncher. Make you what you want from it.

Haha, quite self-sentric, aren't we.

I've been reading sci fi books since the 1980s. I guess, by your logic, any title I haven't heard about is just bad ...

I've been using AdMuncher since 2002 or so and IMHO it's absolutely great. It's the number 1 reason I didn't switch my desktop to Linux. It's also the reason I'm using a Windows tablet (Dell Venue 11 Pro).

This is the statistics, since last I installed Windows:

Statistics for Ad Muncher v4.93.33707/5539 Adverts removed: 181,604 Bandwidth saved: 5,346 MB Counter started: June 7, 2014

I've tried AdBlockPlus and uBlock many times, but they leave way more ads than AdMuncher. One of the reasons may be that they are more popular, so advertisers put more effort in defeating them.

You haven't really refuted any part of GP poster's points. There's no technical info on the site, there's no telling what kind of user data they may be taking and doing who-knows-what with it. This is solid grounds to stay away from the product.

http://www.admuncher.com/privacy

Don't use AdMuncher because it will slow down web surfing and increase the bandwith usage. AdMuncher only supports HTTP 1.0 - it strips out important HTTP headers like gZip compression or keep-alive connections. 15 years ago this might have been OK, but doing this in the last 10 years is plain dumb. Adblocking makes more sense if it is done in the browser directly, like AdblockPlus does.

What? 100,000 people decided it was worthwhile paying for this product, but you feel guilty about taking their money, so now it's free? This is one of the most bizarre things I've read recently!

There are a few clues in the text like "I've made a net loss running you for the last two years" and "At some point in the future, I may need to offer complimentary software products to Ad Muncher user" hinting that he thinks that bulding a bigger userbase by being free and then bundling ads into it would make more money, as paid users were no longer paying the bills.

Bundling ads may be the wrong business model for the target audience... doubt that that's the plan.

It may be unreasonable, but I think it is pretty common. I always feel a little guilty about billing clients when I take on contract work. There are personality types that are always going to find that kind of self assertion difficult. That said, in the American business environment (and anything resembling it), it is absolutely necessary. If his reasons are what he says they are, I think he is making the wrong decision.

I don't mind free stuff, but to be honest I don't see why you release it for free. Seems like you had something sustainable going on. One person selling everything he owns to pay 3 persons' salaries don't seem sustainable.

Would this be an optimal scenario to open source it? You could still bundle the install for the "official binary" with other things.

Also thinking about this. Wouldn't it be a good idea to open source it and cut down on your staffs' working hours. Seems like you got a fairly big user base so there should be developers out there willing to contribute. Perhaps you could cut down on your costs and merge pull request from open source contributors.

Definitely something I'd like to do, but preferably with our new v5 codebase.

http://www.murrayhurps.com/blog/ad-muncher-version-5

never heard of it. might've been different 15 years ago, but its probably the only choice nowadays with AdblockEdge on Firefox and µBlock on Chrome.

and on that note: how does this differ from them? different block lists? alternative blocking mechanism?

I'd never heard of µBlock myself, definitely going to check them out; been frustrated constantly with performance loss from Adblock/ABP

IMO it's far better than AdBlock. It's a Windows only program and it differs to AdBlock by listening for HTTP packets coming directly off the ethernet adapter (I don't know the full inner-workings of course, but I'm taking an educated guess here). This has a significant benefit over AdBlock / similar browser based solutions for several reasons:

1. It works across any browser (on Windows) 2. It's far more reliable for blocking crazy JS hacks

How does it compare to HTTPSwitchboard for WebKit-based?

Please stop with astroturfing.

From the "blocks ads in all browsers" tagline this appears to be a filtering proxy server, so it essentially MITMs your connection to filter stuff out and/or modify it before it gets to the browser.

I've been using Proxomitron, which is a similar (discontinued) freeware product, for the same purpose. The only real pain is HTTPS - which AdMuncher doesn't appear to support - but Proxomitron can filter HTTPS too (you need to install a local certificate), albeit it was written at a time when single-core was the norm and so needs to be constrained to run on one core due to some race condition that I'm not too bothered with figuring out and attempting to fix at the moment...

Proximodo is another open-source alternative which aims to be compatible with it but also lacks the increasingly-needed HTTPS MITM feature. (Should we call this "benevolent MITM" since it is completely under the consent and desire of the user, as opposed to the usual "malicious MITM"?)

If I may, I'd like to take a moment to honour the memory of Scott R. Lemmon.

He was a hell of a coder, and person, and ten years after his passing his work is still hugely appreciated.

Cheers wherever you are Scott.

I built a filtering proxy module on node. It filters by domain (only) and works with HTTPS. It still chokes once in a while on malformed responses but can still provide efficient filtering with good performance.

https://github.com/thibauts/node-host-filtering-proxy

Proxomitron wow I haven't heard that name in awhile. Yeah I used to use that and even had a huge set of custom rules in it back in the day when it was literally the only way to filter crap from webpages, I don't even think there were ad blocking browser addons back then.

In case anyone is wondering, it works fine on Windows 10 http://i.imgur.com/TIwVPBD.png

Thanks Murray. Glad this went freeware, I will recommend it to friends who have been complaining about ads in non-browser apps since Ad Muncher blocks them system-wide and isn't limited to browsers.

Looking forward to trying v5 when it comes out in the future since it'll have SSL blocking.

Anyone knows how to block popups on pirate bay?

I don't get blocking some ads. What does it hurt to have a basic banner add next to the story you are reading? They took the time, effort, and money to create content you want to read why block it? I understand blocking ads that take over your page but not basic ads.

Where is this banner coming from? Whose servers are you contacting to get it? Whose javascript is it running? Is it loading flash or java rather than an image? How many people end up tracking you for requesting "one banner"?

As far as I am concerned the advertising industry has screwed themselves over by allowing security threats to be delivered via their networks.

Several years ago, thousands of people were infected with a virus from an ad that snuck its way onto reddit by exploiting a Java flaw. I was one of those people and I have run ad blocking software ever since.

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