Wired on Friday: It's not a pleasant name, I'll admit, but then what it does is a rather dirty job. It's a small, free add-on for web browser Firefox - what the cooler surfers use instead of Internet Explorer these days.
It's called "GreaseMonkey", and it chops and changes web pages while they sit on your machine. It's a neat trick that points to the future of the web and beyond. A future that might make it more bearable for its users - and far more uncomfortable for the producers of popular websites and other media.
Let me give you an example. Supposing you have a favourite website, one that you regularly visit, but whose text is written in a frustratingly small font.
You know that your browser has an "enlarge font" button, but it's very irritating to have to crank this every time you visit, and then manually reduce the type size again when you leave.
GreaseMonkey can, in theory, fix that. Every time you visit that site, GreaseMonkey can run a little mini-program of its own, one that will change the HTML - the code that describes how that web page will appear on your screen - of the web page itself.
Your computer will receive the original HTML from your favourite website, GreaseMonkey will fiddle with it a little, and then your browser will show it, improved type size and all. It will only fiddle with this particular web page, and your other sites will remain unchanged.
Until, that is, you decide that there's something that needs to improved with them.
What GreaseMonkey does is not a new phenomenon: people have been performing strange tortures on incoming data from the web since the web began.
Programs that block pop-up advertisements pull the same trick. Small utilities disabled people use to increase the contrast or make the colours clearer work in a similar way.
Your ISP may even do a little limited meddling: it may well be that when you access the most popular websites, you will actually be downloading the data from a machine at your ISP's office, which keeps a temporary copy of the original data to save on bandwidth costs.
The fiddling here is minor - a few bits changed in the web page's descriptive headers - but changed they are. What makes GreaseMonkey different is the flexibility by which a reasonable programmer can chop and change the data.
It's not just a matter of finding and destroying adverts, or tweaking the colours on a page. GreaseMonkey lets you fiddle with every detail of a page, and even bring in new data from elsewhere to decorate what you see.
As the popularity of GreaseMonkey has grown, so has the collection of "user scripts" that web programmers have devised for it, and not all of the changes would be welcomed by the websites they transform.
Adverts of all kinds are stripped away (or for those who like the ads, extra adverts can be added to any website). A GreaseMonkey script for Amazon inserts book links to competing websites - and even your local library, so that rather than buy, you can simply reserve a book. Supposedly "unsaveable" graphics become accessible. Sites that sneakily exclude VAT in their prices are fixed to include it in the total.
The main target for the plug-in's many authors so far has been usability: making a slow website quicker, or getting rid of "un-content" like advertisements and overly flashy graphics, but content can be improved or changed too.
For the prudish, there is a plug-in that ensures that rude words are silently removed from the web. For the bored, all Michael Jackson stories are removed from news websites.
Is GreaseMonkey legal? It's hard to see how it couldn't be. All of the changes wrought by the plug-in occur in the comfort of its users' homes. It's only handing out cannibalised web pages to the person who ordered the changes.
But if GreaseMonkey is legal, then it's just the thin end of the wedge as far as user-changed content goes.
What can be done for web pages will, sooner or later, be done for all media.
Television companies in the United States have already thrown fits, legal and otherwise, over devices that automatically skip their precious adverts when playing back recordings. What will they say when a GreaseMonkey plug-in becomes available for video, one that can skip adverts and even recut scenes or remove "the violent bits"? Artists and designers are traditionally very sensitive as to how their work is portrayed; our copyright laws have stringent controls on how we may reinterpret original works, or even how they can be used. But in the privacy of our homes, smart programs like GreaseMonkey dismantle those limitations.
The content creators will either have to grin and bear the knowledge that we could be doing anything with their works.
Otherwise, they will have to go to war, and attempt to pass laws that reach into the private homes of citizens, and tell us what we can and can't chop and change, fiddle with and improve.
