You may have read our post about the cyberstalking crew over at Fetchback here and their odious idea to stalk your personal web habits by snooping and tracking the sites you visit with purpose of then serving up ads from their ‘clients’ to you, repeatedly, until you submit to clicking on one of the ads. No thanks.

Here is a little known solution to this type of problem that is ratching up on the web: ad blocking. One of the cool thing about browsers is that there are many plug-ins already developed out there to help improve your web surfing experience. I personally have all but abandoned the new IE 7 browser and almost exclusively use Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6.

One of the great plug-ins available for users of Firefox is Adblock Plus. Developed by Wladimir Palant, this plug-in works pretty well ‘out of the box’ and there are other intrepid souls who have developed some helpful subscription files that does plenty of the heavy lifting already for you.

Here is how Adblock Plus works:

Right-click on a banner and choose “Adblock” from the context menu — the banner won’t be downloaded again. You might also decide to even replace parts of the banner address with star symbols to block similar ad banners as well. Or choose a filter subscription.  The filter subscription will block most advertisements, fully, automatically.

Sometimes that can be overkill so there are ways to ratchet that process back as well.  Pretty sweet.  There is talk out there that adblocking could prove to be illegal.  That’s right.  Illegal.  WTF right?

CNET has a great rundown about this whole issue here.

So wake up Casale and stop selling pop-ups and making it nigh on impossible to uninstall your stinking spyware.  And you online casual game site publishers and affiliate sites – knock off the spamware and blinking bullsh*t ads.  The majority of web users are sick of them so knock it off or be blocked – forever.