As one can guess from previous posts, I’m skeptical about the pervasiveness of advertising in our society.  I’m also just plain sick of seeing ads everywhere.  With the internet, advertisements are even invasive, tracking your browsing habits and web searches to target you individually with products and services.

The good new is that we do not have to see internet ads if we don’t want to.  One uninformed journalism professor at my school (who specializes in new media!) thought I was making up a crazy fantasy when I told him I don’t see any advertisements while web-browsing.  Read on to make this fantasy come true for you.

1. If you haven’t already got it, download the Mozilla Firefox web browser and stop using Internet Explorer.  Firefox is an open source web browser with highly customizable features.  It is more secure than IE and controls impressive market share in some European countries.  In the United States it’s around 15% and growing.
2. Once it’s installed, open the program and click Tools –> Addons –> Get Addons.  Search for Adblock, Adblock Filterset G., Flashblock and NoScript, and download each
3. After they are all installed, re-start Firefox
4. Click Tools –> Addons –> Extensions to see your new extensions and customize their settings
5. What these extensions do:

• Adblock:  Comes with a pre-installed set of filters for common ads and ad servers.  When enabled, it will load pages without displaying these ads.  You can add more advertisements to your black list by right-clicking an ad or banner and then clicking “adblock image” or “adblock frame.”
• Filterset G. complements Adblock by including a bigger list of automatically blocked ads.
• Flashblock: Loads flash files but does not play them unless you tell it to play by clicking the button.  You can then specify which web-sites are allowed to display their flash elements.  This blocks out flash advertisements and distracting videos and music (like, say, people’s MySpace pages).
• NoScript: This program is slightly more complicated in that it automatically prevents scripts from running on web pages.  Many websites run scripts that essentially track your browsing behavior or install malicious software onto a Windows computer.  NoScript also blocks Java, so that many pages you navigate to will not be displayed properly at first.  This is okay, however, because like Flashblock and Adblock, you can simply right-click –> NoScript –> Enable _________ and specify which scripted elements are okay to display.  You only have to do this once on a website and it will save that preference.  All of these customizations are able to be undone.

Now your internet experience will be almost complete ad-free and corporate influence over your computer will be highly scaled down.  In fact, you will probably get on someone else’s computer and be unpleasantly reminded of how many ads are actually out there.  Give it a try, the software is free and it only takes a few minutes of your time to fight back against the corporate takeover of your internet experience.

This story by the BBC about bloggers around the world being at risk for speaking their minds makes me think about my own country, the United States of America.  We are truly fortunate to have a constitution that codifies freedom of speech as a basic right of citizenship.  This is one of the most fundamental aspects of the American experience and something I value deeply the more I come to recognize how rare it actually is.

However, this freedom is always at risk and, indeed, encroached upon by non-government factions (and also by government factions themselves, though this is not my biggest concern).  Corporations increasingly seek to exert control over public expression.  This is what makes  America different.  Though our laws grant a right to speak whatever we may, private interests can take this away from us.  With regards to bloggers and the internet, the private control of access by a few companies almost guarantees that our freedoms will be curtailed.  If Verizon is my internet provider, they have EVERY interest to prevent me from accessing the search results for “verizon sucks my balls.”  If I’m a blogger, these corporations have every interest in preventing me from blogging about their shitty service or from posting damning information on wikileaks.org.

As an American reading this post, one should be aware that although our government does not (regularly and openly) arrest and detain citizens for speaking out, our freedom of speech is vulnerable to much more subtle and insidious means of restriction.  When ISPs try to enact things like net neutrality and tiered access, they are essentially making it more difficult and expensive for us to access non-mainstream information, and therefore making it easier to exert control over what information is accessible to the public.  This is not based on reactionary alarmism, but rather, a simple examination of whose interests are threatened the most by free speech and the internet’s multitude of new voices.

As I posted yesterday (and commenters agreed), there is an awareness problem with free/open source software.  In case anybody is interested, click this link to find a pretty comprehensive list of free software options, provided by the lovely people at the Free Software Foundation.

I keep seeing people excited over the new Adobe Photoshop Express online application.  Everyone’s favorite feature is the cost: free

So I fell like I should remind people that there are already FREE applications out there for you to use: open source software.

Be sure to check out GIMP  for your photo editing needs, whether you use Windows, Mac, or Linux.  It’s comparable to Photoshop and ahead of Photoshop Express in terms of features.  And the best part, it gets corporate software off of your computer!