Ad Hacker Blog

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.