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One Man, One Long List, No More Web Ads
Rick works as a machinist in upstate New York and maintains EasyList in his den. "People hate ads," he says.
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But few are as popular or as effective as EasyList with Adblock Plus, both of which are available through Mozilla, a nonprofit organization that puts out the increasingly popular Firefox browser and other free software.
Wladimir Palant, a software developer from Cologne, Germany, put Adblock Plus together. Like Rick, he said he has received no money for his efforts.
The program has been downloaded more than 20 million times, according to Mozilla statistics, and Palant said there are about 4 million active daily users, most of them using the program with the EasyList filter.
"Rick's list is the top recommendation exactly because he has built such a big community around himself," Palant said.
Rick relies on about a dozen people who keep tabs on new ads and new efforts by Web sites to foil his list.
The essence of Rick's work is putting together a list of Web addresses for advertisements. Adblock Plus then uses the list to stop ads from appearing on a user's screen.
The trick to his work comes when some advertisers try to goof up his system. Then a kind of clandestine geek vs. geek warfare erupts between Rick and the Web sites.
For example, some companies disguise their content -- the stuff people want to see -- as ads. That makes the ad blocker block the content.
This has happened repeatedly, and on some of the biggest Web sites in the nation. To fix that, Rick sometimes resorts to individually "whitelisting" or approving, content addresses while continuing to block the ad addresses.
Last week, he was working on how to handle video ads on Hulu.com, a partnership of NBC and Fox that shows new and old TV and movies.
Adblock Plus and Rick's list blocked the video ads that run before the clips.
But the site sensed the ad blockers and put up a static message: "This program is brought to you by Hulu's advertising partners. . . . If you see this message repeatedly, you may need to disable your ad blocking software."
