A group of self-described hackers on leave from their senior year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are building a program that could undermine the Internet’s delicate financial underpinnings. Using the Windows NT 4.0 beta version as their development system, the kids, who have incorporated themselves as PrivNet Inc, have written a program dubbed Internet Fast Forward that can block Web site advertising from being downloaded. According to our sister paper Client Server News, it currently works only on NT and Windows95, with Unix to come soon and Mac to follow. Needless to say, an awful lot of today’s Web entrepreneurs like Netscape Communications Corp are counting on advertisement revenue to make them money. Suddenly a group of Carolina collegians come along with a way of filtering out advertisements by refusing to allow them to download to a browser. The raison d’etre for it is not just the issue of advertisements annoying surfers. There is the time needed to down load the massive graphics files many advertisers use. The program may also appeal to corporations that do not want their employees shopping on company time or schools that think students should use the Internet for more serious purposes. Internet Fa st Forward is named for the way a video recorder is used to fast forward and skip commercials on a recorded television show. The program is in what is called beta.92 for Netscape on Windows NT and Windows95. It uses a proprietary set of algorithms t o spot the digital signatures used by Internet advertisers, according to PrivNet chief executive James Howard an erstwhile drama major who says he has been programming for ever and finds it faster to learn it on his own. The Internet Fast Forwar d algorithm works with a small 5Kb to 6Kb data-base of advertising signatures, not with the advertisements themselves. It also does not rely on advertisement file names because that would be too easy: any decent server can be simply set to change the file name every time it is called – Howard says, declining to explain further how his program works. Howard says the firm is playing with an annual fee of $10 to $15, or whatever the market will bear, for the data-base updates. It plans to post th em every two days, a reflection of the speed at which Internet advertising is evolving. Besides blocking advertisements, which show up as icons with all other Web page formatting kept intact, Internet Fast Forward can be used to block server cookies . That means a server cannot query a surfer’s browser to pry into his surfing habits. Such an intrusion is currently neither illegal nor particularly hard to do. The practice is said to be common among some shady Web site operators, who use the information to build and sell marketing lists.
