Ad Hacker Blog

- Fixed logging and pop-up menu creation bugs
- Added menu options for creating rules to track Javascript web bugs
- Pass URL to rule manager for easier rule creation

I’ve already walked down the top 25 sites in Alexa and found most of the web bugs on their homepages. If you’d like to help I’d really appreciate it
To join in (and assuming you use Firefox) download Ad Hacker and visit your favorite sites. On each site click the Ad Hacker “watcher” link, then “Javascript from N servers”, then a domain name, then script URL, and then finally “Add rule for this Javascript”. This will fire up a web page to edit your new web bug rule. If you’d like your rules to be included in the default package Ad Hacker uses fire me an email at feedback@adhacker.com

I just pushed a minor revision to AMO that includes:

- Testing against 3.5b4
- New rules XML format
- Pulls rules from new rule manager at http://rules.adhacker.com/

After two weeks of distractions I was able to get back to the keyboard and make some improvements:

* Beacon tracking
* Option to see count on status bar
* New icons
* Revised wording on drop down
* Finalize Wiki host, cookie, and beacon paths
* Cache rules on local computer to better handle network and server problems
* Links in menu to explain cookies, beacons, etc.
* Load rules asynchronously during startup
* Better support for Firefox 2.0
* Use “tooltiptext” to show full paths of scripts or contents of cookies

Downloads are available from AMO

Every time you browse the Internet, advertisers and publishers try to watch you see what you are doing. Spooky, eh?

So over the last week I hacked out a Firefox add-on to make this tracking more transparent and easy to understand.  I used David Cancel’s Ghostery as inspiration and built an extensible framework to find more trackers, let others play under the hood, and with links to a Wiki so we can all contribute information.

If you’d like to try it out visit the Ad Hacker install page.