Imagine a $120 box that sits between your cable modem (the box that brings the internet into your house) and your wireless router (the thing that fills your house with wifi) and blocks every kind of ad that can be delivered over the internet. No more ads on your laptop, tablet or smartphone. No more ads on webpages, in music streams, in front of videos, or on mobile apps.
That’s the goal of AdTrap, a device that is already in the working prototype stage. If you want to get your hands on one, you can pre-order it now by supporting the project on the crowd-funding site Kickstarter. If AdTrap’s three Palo Alto, California-based creators can get enough pledges by December 8 — $150,000 worth — they’ll start shipping the device.
AdTrap is basically a small computer running the Linux operating system, programmed to recognize and block every sort of ad its creators could identify. Many people already have ad blockers on our web browsers, but AdTrap’s combination of simplicity and comprehensiveness are reasons it could take off. (As of this writing, AdTrap has less than $20,000 in pledges on Kickstarter.)
I don’t need to illustrate this post because all you have to do is look elsewhere on this page and you’ll see advertising. Would AdTrap kill the internet as we know it? Yes.