Offbeat
Chromium extension swaps promos for John Carpenter-style subliminal slogans
A fork of uBlock Origin Lite doesn’t just
remove the ads from web pages; it replaces them with tiles containing slogans from John
Carpenter’s 1988 film They Live.
Published by Australian Dave Lawrence, the Chromium
add-in (so it’ll work in browsers such as Chrome and Edge) takes the uBlock
Origin Lite content blocker (also known as uBO Lite)
and tweaks it so that rather than simply hiding the ads, the ads are replaced
with white boxes containing slogans from the movies.
Lawrence listed them:
“OBEY, CONSUME, WATCH TV, SLEEP, SUBMIT, CONFORM, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WORK,
NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.”
But sadly, nothing along the lines of
“THIS AD IS HERE SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO PAY TO KEEP THIS SITE RUNNING.”
“Each blocked ad gets a single phrase, picked at random from the list,” Lawrence explained in the project’s repository.
The uBlock Origin project is not involved, and Lawrence noted that only ads blocked by cosmetic filters get the They Live treatment. Custom user-defined cosmetic filters still hide ads normally.
They Live is
a science-fiction horror film in which the protagonist dons a pair of glasses
that allow him to see the world as it truly is: run by ghoulish aliens using subliminal messaging to keep the population under control.
Lawrence used Claude Code to add the They Live mode to the ad
blocker, which might worry some, given concerns in some parts of the
open source world about projects drowning in a tsunami of AI slop.
However, Lawrence
is upfront about the use of AI coding tools, and the add-in is
certainly amusing.
Ad blocking
is a controversial subject. Google’s changes to its browser extension architecture
(dubbed Manifest v3) were expected to make content-blocking and privacy
extensions less effective, but the reality turned out differently.
The proprietary browser extension, Pie Adblock, also came under fire last
year for allegedly lifting code and text from uBlock Origin, in violation of the
latter’s GPLv3 license. The
license for Lawrence’s fork is also GPLv3, the same as upstream uBlock Origin/uBO Lite. ®
