Web Shapping
It’s a Thing
It started with burger joints offering their food “your way” and has now become the norm in many industries. Customizing tech solutions to companies needs has always been a thing but now customizations are coming directly to your web browser.
Don’t like annoying, flashing, auto-playing video, bandwidth consuming, network congesting, and malware infested ads? Then block them.
Don’t like never-ending tracking scripts and web beacons pulling your personal information and selling without asking you? Stop them!
Don’t want software vendors uploading your telemetry information to the cloud but you don’t have all day to figure out how to turn it off and where they hid the settings? Great, you can block that too!
OK, so you get the point. The way business traditionally has been done on the Internet has been very one-sided. Now this is changing, and not with buggy, memory hogging, browser crashing ad block plugins that cannot be centrally managed or deployed to certain browsers or BYOD devices. Don’t forget some of those ad blocking companies or sell their own ads in place of the original ads, pimping you, your browser, and your security out in the process.
Security and Privacy Plus is based on Privoxy, an open source, time tested, and drop-in solution to any network. (www.privoxy.org)
Next Vector Security provides easily importable virtual appliance, streamlined installation, consulting services, and support contracts to enterprise networks and a web based management system available to everyone for free. (www.nextvectorsecurity.com)
Why would an enterprise network need this software?
The main reason is for security, Malvertising in particular. Ad networks and website publishers cannot stop the constant flow of malicious ads which put your network security at risk.
Besides security, careful planning and optimization are mandatory for a successfully managed network. Even more capacity planning is required for an enterprise WIFI network since throughput and bandwidth are more limited.
Today every device is a streaming video player, sometimes intentionally and sometimes forcibly when irrelevant and unwanted video ads are forced on users. These unsolicited video streams and other externally linked ad networks traffic can bog down wireless networks, robbing other users of legitimate network needs, consume extra power (on both the AP and mobile endpoint), and deliver unwanted malware.
On an Ethernet (contention based) network, each device on the network will attempt to transmit until it is able to. Continuous streams of data that need buffering (video ads) take up much more time on “the wire” and create longer wait times for other devices resulting in network collisions, and excessive re-broadcast attempts, all resulting in degraded or poor network performance. This problem is often the cause of poor WIFI performance.
Seriously, do we really need this?
Well, that’s your call completely. You are the master of your domain and network. We would also like to help you tame the Internet Overlords. We figured at some point people would want some kind analytical evidence, proof that Privoxy is the real deal How would you like up to a 50%-90% improvement on your network when loading web pages?
