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Ad Muncher: keeps the brain intact while surfing the Net - beats AdBlock!

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Josh:
The only thing that proxomitron has that ad muncher does not, currently, is support for regexp filters, which 4.8 or 4.9 will include. 4.8 will include options to make filters PER SITE, PER DOMAIN or PER SUB DOMAIN, meaning you can write a filter and not fear about it breaking something else on another page. 4.8's first beta will include full gzip support. Admuncher also comes with a default list which is updated AUTOMATICALLY or manually via the updates menu. The lists are updated 4 times (at least) per week and are highly scrutinized and screened by Jeff, the list maintainer.

I've seen many programs get glowing reviews simply for being free, but free does not always mean better, as most people seem to assume. Proxomitron is nice, but the gui is ugly, the filters are a pain to write (any novice can write a filter for ad muncher with knowledge of regexp), the filters have to be manually updated and its development has stopped some time ago due to the death of its author (RIP). Dont get me wrong, I am not saying ALL commercial apps are better than their freeware counterparts, but in this case, I honestly believe that ad muncher blows the pants off of proxomitron.

alexp:
I have to mostly agree with you Josh, as of just now proxomitron is just slightly more powerful than admuncher but a hell of a lot more complicated to set up and maintain properly, admuncher (using the 4.7 beta version) does all I need just now and hopefully if Jeff gets the regexp filters into 4.8/9 and the per site filters while still keeping it just as easy to use then I'm sure glad I bought a copy when I did.

As you said free doesn't always mean better.

mouser:
it's not just that freer is not always better, but also: more powerful does not mean better.
you have to decide how much time you want to spend customizing and learning, tweaking, etc.  or how much you want something to work out of the box and make it easy to use.  these are not insignificant issues and the best way to decide is to try out the different programs and figure out which one meets your needs best.

taichimaster:
I am also evaluating ad-muncher currently.  It is working great and has an "IP Scramble" function that acts us a surfing anonymizer.  The author is also very nice and active in #admuncher on IRC.

I don't think I will purchase it after the trial though (unless I see a discount).  There are other free alternatives out there so I don't find it as essential.

The other thing with Admuncher is that it comes with a default list of 20 to 40 processes that it intercepts.  It intercepts their winsock calls and reissues them on their behalf, so your firewall would report admuncher.exe is trying to access the internet instead of the originating process.  If you create a firewall rule to always grant internet access to admuncher.exe, you are essentially granting internet access to all processes that Admuncher intercepts as well without knowing it.

I guess it's not really a big deal, most if not all local proxies work this way so it's more of a heads up.

wr975:
The other thing with Admuncher is that it comes with a default list of 20 to 40 processes that it intercepts.  It intercepts their winsock calls and reissues them on their behalf, so your firewall would report admuncher.exe is trying to access the internet instead of the originating process.  If you create a firewall rule to always grant internet access to admuncher.exe, you are essentially granting internet access to all processes that Admuncher intercepts as well without knowing it.

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I don't think Admuncher comes with a default list. It just adds any application acessing Internet as "filter target".

About AdMuncher to allow Internet access... Could you test this behavior on your system?

I've Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall and Admuncher installed. AdMuncher is allowed to do "code injection" and Internet access.
Kerio still intercepts any process trying to access Internet (even those who try to get access via IE, like LeakTest or Google Video Player).


all local proxies work this way
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AdMuncher is not acting as a proxy, like AdSubtract or Proxomitron.

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