GitHub - davmlaw/they_live_adblocker: Replace Ads with They Live style slogans

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Pangram verdict · v3.3

We believe that this document is fully human-written

41 %

AI likelihood · overall

Human

100% human-written 0% AI-generated

SEGMENTS · HUMAN 0 of 2

SEGMENTS · AI 0 of 2

WORD COUNT 411

PEAK AI % 51% · §2

Analyzed

May 12

backend: pangram/v3.3

Segments scanned

2 windows

avg 206 words each

Distribution

100 / 0%

human / AI fraction

Verdict

Human

Pangram v3.3

Article text · 411 words · 2 segments analyzed

Human AI-generated

§1 Mixed · 35%

They Live Adblocker

A fork of uBlock Origin Lite that, instead of hiding cosmetically-blocked ads, replaces them with white tiles bearing slogans from John Carpenter's 1988 film They Live: OBEY, CONSUME, WATCH TV, SLEEP, SUBMIT, CONFORM, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WORK, NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY. Each blocked ad gets a single phrase, picked at random from the list. The idea is from a blog post I wrote in 2015 (and never got around to building): They Live adblock mode. Screenshot

Install Download the latest uBOLite_theylive.chromium.zip from the Releases page, extract it, then in Chromium / Chrome / Brave / Edge:

Open chrome://extensions Toggle Developer mode on (top-right) Click Load unpacked and select the extracted folder

Keep the folder around — the extension is loaded from that path. Make it actually replace ads By default uBO Lite uses Basic filtering mode, which blocks ads at the network layer. Network-blocked ads never produce a DOM element, so there's nothing to "they-live-ify" — you just get empty space, as with normal uBO Lite. To see the OBEY tiles:

Click the uBO Lite toolbar icon → cog (⚙) → Dashboard. Set the filtering mode for the sites you care about to Optimal or Complete. Reload.

Building from source Requires Node 22. git clone --recursive https://github.com/davmlaw/they_live_adblocker cd they_live_adblocker/uBlock nvm use 22 # or otherwise ensure Node >= 22 tools/make-mv3.sh chromium # or: firefox | edge | safari The packaged extension lands in uBlock/dist/build/uBOLite.chromium/ — load it as an unpacked extension. How it works uBO Lite's cosmetic filtering normally injects CSS like selector { display: none !

§2 Mixed · 51%

important } to hide matched ad elements. This fork patches those injection sites to instead apply a white-box mask with a ::after overlay whose content is read from a data-ubol-they-live attribute, then walks the DOM (with a MutationObserver for late-loaded ads) to tag each matched element with a random phrase from the list. Touched files in the davmlaw/uBlock submodule:

platform/mv3/extension/js/scripting/they-live.js (new) — phrase list, CSS generator, DOM tagging platform/mv3/extension/js/scripting/css-{specific,generic,procedural-api}.js — call sites platform/mv3/extension/js/scripting-manager.js — registers they-live.js ahead of consumers

Caveats

Personal hobby fork; not an official uBlock Origin product. Don't file uBO issues against this. Forcing previously-hidden elements visible can occasionally shift page layout where the site's CSS assumed the ad slot collapsed. Custom user-defined cosmetic filters still hide normally (no OBEY treatment). Network-blocked ads (most of uBO Lite's blocking) don't get replaced — only cosmetic-filtered ones do.

License GPL-3.0, same as upstream uBlock Origin / uBO Lite.