A long time ago, there was the Internet Junkbuster,
by Anonymous Coders and Junkbusters Corporation. This saved many users a lot of
pain in the early days of web advertising and user tracking.
But the web, its protocols and standards, and with it, the techniques for
forcing ads on users, give up autonomy over their browsing, and
for tracking them, keeps evolving. Unfortunately, the Internet
Junkbuster did not. Version 2.0.2, published in 1998, was
the last official release, available from Junkbusters Corporation.
Fortunately, it had been released under the GNU
GPL,
which allowed further development by others.
So Stefan Waldherr started maintaining an improved version of the
software, to which eventually a number of people contributed patches.
It could already replace banners with a transparent image, and had a first
version of pop-up killing, but it was still very closely based on the
original, with all its limitations, such as the lack of HTTP/1.1 support,
flexible per-site configuration, or content modification. The last release
from this effort was version 2.0.2-10, published in 2000.
Then, some
developers
picked up the thread, and started turning the software inside out, upside down,
and then reassembled it, adding many
new
features along the way.
The result of this is Privoxy, whose first
stable version, 3.0, was released August, 2002.
As of 2012 the Junkbusters Corporation's website (http://www.junkbusters.com/)
has been shut down, but Privoxy is still actively maintained.