Forbidden - The Polipo Manual
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### 3.8 Forbidden URLs

The web contains advertisements that a user-agent is supposed to download together with the requested pages. Not only do advertisements pollute the user's brain, pushing them around takes time and uses up network bandwidth.

Many so-called content providers also track user activities by using web bugs, tiny embedded images that cause a server to log where they are requested from. Such images can be detected because they are usually uncacheable (see Cache transparency) and therefore logged by Polipo by default.

The file pointed at by the variable `forbiddenFile` (defaults to `~/.polipo-forbidden` or `/etc/polipo/forbidden`, whichever exists) specifies the set of URLs that should never be fetched. If `forbiddenFile` is a directory, it will be recursively searched for files with forbidden URLs.

Every line in a file listing forbidden URLs can either be a domain name — a string that doesn't contain any of ``/`', ``*`' or ``\`' —, or a POSIX extended regular expression. Blank lines are ignored, as are those that start with a hash sign ``#`'.