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 8 HOURS · NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT · DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY · MARRY AND REPRODUCE · NO IMAGINATION · NO IDEAS · HONOR APATHY · PLAY 8 HOURS · WORK 8 HOURS · OBEY
Each blocked ad gets a single phrase — random by default, or precisely matched to the ad's content when the optional AI classification feature is enabled.
Hover over any tile to peek at the original ad underneath; move the mouse away to restore the slogan.
The idea is from a blog post I wrote in 2015 (and never got around to building): They Live adblock mode.
Enable They Live AI in the dashboard to have an LLM read each ad's surrounding context (element class names, nearby text, alt attributes, advertiser domain, ad SDK data attributes) and pick a more fitting slogan — e.g. a car ad gets CONSUME, a political piece gets DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY, a job listing gets WORK 8 HOURS.
- Calls are batched in ~250 ms windows; a random phrase is shown immediately while the LLM response is in flight, then swapped when it arrives
- Fast-path domain/keyword rules fire instantly (no LLM call needed) for ~120 known ad domains and common keyword patterns
- Startup race handled: ads tagged before settings load are re-queued and re-classified once AI is confirmed enabled
The dashboard's Your Ad Profile section reverse-engineers what ad brokers have inferred about you, based solely on the ads served to you:
| Signal | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Interest segments | Broker-category labels derived from the phrases assigned to your ads (e.g. Home & Finance, Tech & Gadgets, Career & Work), shown as a bar chart |
| Retargeting tracker | Advertisers whose domains have appeared across 2+ different pages — i.e. they are actively following you |
| Raw targeting data | Any decoded cust_params from Google Ad Manager iframes (publisher-defined first-party segments such as age=25-34&interests=travel) |
| Profile intensity score | 0–10 score combining interest breadth and retargeting depth |
With AI enabled, click Analyse with AI to get a sardonic, bullet-pointed breakdown of what your ad profile says about you in the language of the ad industry — CPM value, purchase intent, income bracket and all.
- Create a free account at ollama.com and generate an API key.
- Open the extension dashboard → They Live AI section.
- Check Enable AI classification.
- Leave the URL as
https://ollama.com, model asgemma4:31b-cloud, and paste your API key. - Click Save.
If you have Ollama installed locally, set the URL to http://localhost:11434 and choose any model you have pulled (e.g. gemma3:4b). Leave the API key blank.
Move your mouse over any OBEY / CONSUME tile to temporarily reveal the original ad content beneath. Moving the mouse away restores the slogan tile. No clicks needed — it's purely CSS.
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.
- Go to
about:debugging→ This Firefox - Click Load Temporary Add-on…
- Select the
manifest.jsoninside the extracted folder
The extension stays loaded until Firefox restarts. Re-load it from
about:debuggingafter any changes.
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. 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.
Requires Node 22.
git clone --recursive https://github.com/NaphatrB/they_live_adblocker
cd they_live_adblocker/uBlock
nvm use 22 # or otherwise ensure Node >= 22
tools/make-mv3.sh chromium # builds to uBlock/dist/build/uBOLite.chromium/
tools/make-mv3.sh firefox # builds to uBlock/dist/build/uBOLite.firefox/Load the output folder as an unpacked/temporary extension as described above.
cd they_live_adblocker
npm test # 91 unit tests for the classification engine (Node 22, no deps)uBO Lite's cosmetic filtering normally injects CSS like selector { display: none !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 phrase.
On hover the ::after overlay is hidden and the element background becomes transparent, revealing the original ad content that was always in the DOM beneath.
When AI classification is enabled, element context (class names, nearby text, alt attributes, outbound link domain, ad SDK data attributes) is batched and sent to an Ollama-compatible API endpoint; the returned phrase replaces the initial random one once the response arrives. The service worker also passively builds an ad-profile data structure from classification signals for the Your Ad Profile dashboard.
Touched files in NaphatrB/uBlock
platform/mv3/extension/js/scripting/they-live.js— phrase list, CSS generator, DOM tagging, LLM batch queue, ad-context extraction, DoubleClick param extractorplatform/mv3/extension/js/scripting/they-live-classify.js— fast-path domain/keyword classifier (120+ domain rules, 16 keyword patterns)platform/mv3/extension/js/scripting/css-{specific,generic,procedural-api}.js— call sitesplatform/mv3/extension/js/scripting-manager.js— registersthey-live.jsahead of consumersplatform/mv3/extension/js/background.js— Ollama API handler, classification stats, ad-profile aggregation, LLM prompt v5platform/mv3/extension/dashboard.html— They Live AI settings + Your Ad Profile sectionplatform/mv3/extension/js/they-live-dashboard.js— dashboard rendering: phrase table, profile section, AI analysis buttonplatform/mv3/extension/js/settings.js— loads/saves Ollama config
- 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.
- The Your Ad Profile data is local to your browser session; it resets when the service worker is terminated.
GPL-3.0, same as upstream uBlock Origin / uBO Lite.