Tired of blinking, flashing come-ons cluttering your screen? Even if you've developed the ability to ignore banner ads, they still waste screen real estate and slow browsing speed. Guess what: You can avoid downloading them if you want to. Many people argue that Web ads are a blessing, providing an income source to sites and services you'd have to pay for otherwise. True, but nobody says you have to watch them, any more than you're obliged to watch television commercials. Why else were the remote control and the refrigerator invented? So let other users support the advertisers. Here's how to enjoy an almost ad-free environment.

Bust the Banners: Filtering out Web ads isn't as easy as switching channels on television, but you can do it. At least a dozen utilities banish banner ads from your browser. And such products aren't just hackerware-even big-time software vendors sell them. Symantec recently licensed WRQ's AtGuard ad blocker and incorporated it into its Internet Security 2000 package. And Siemens, Europe's grey eminence of Net security, promotes its WebWasher to companies that want to reduce their network bandwidth consumption.

Most of these applications are special-purpose proxy servers. Strategically situated between your browser or other Internet software and your connection to the Internet, they examine the link addresses that your browser requests when it loads a Web page, comparing them to a frequently updated list of known ad server addresses. When the proxy server finds a match, it discards the browser's request to retrieve the ad. This may alter the Web page layout slightly in some cases, but the benefits-fast loading and fewer irritating product pitches-usually outweigh this minor inconvenience. And because many banner ads use cookies to track your surfing habits, banishing the banner ads reinforces your online anonymity as well.

-Scott Spanbauer