technomancyublock origin is great and so don't take this the wrong way but I've never understood why it doesn't have a they-live mode where instead of removing the ads altogether they get rendered as greyscale messages like "OBEY" / "CONSUME" / "DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY"
lee@technomancy Fork it! Fork it! LOL :)
@exquisitecorp if only I knew javascript
Richard Barrell@technomancy I suspect the boring answer is it's a little challenging because they want to prevent even loading any code from the ad networks at all. And nowadays the ad boxes are often dynamically created at runtime by client side JS that was already blocked.
Back in the days when web ads were <a href="http://example.org/buystuff"><img src="advert.jpg" alt="Buy stuff" /></a> this would have been a lot easier and I think some ad blockers may have even done exactly this. But perhaps with kitten pics instead.
Daniel Gibson@0x2ba22e11 @technomancy
would it?
I mean, you'd still have to load advert.jpg to figure out its size?
would it?
I mean, you'd still have to load advert.jpg to figure out its size?
bovaz@Doomed_Daniel @0x2ba22e11 @technomancy You'd generally ask for a specific size to the ad server directly. A big goal in ad tech is to deliver the ad as fast as possible, and to do that, they need to serve as little bits as possible to begin with.
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK@bovaz @Doomed_Daniel @0x2ba22e11 @technomancy I think there's also a pragmatic reason for this - especially on mobile devices the ads take up a lot of room, the way current blockers work frees up this space (though maybe just replacing them with a small marker would be possible)
@vfrmedia sure
Replacing the ads with kittens instead of simply deleting them is whimsical rather than practical ☺️
@Doomed_Daniel @technomancy advert.jpg isn't so much the problem, it's advert.js that sticks a frame around the screen that I'm thinking is the problem.
Dave Vandyke@0x2ba22e11 @technomancy yea, that's right. If I were to do this I'd continue blocking those scripts, but change the element hiding filters to instead style the ads that would have been hidden. So you wouldn't be changing how all ads looked, but some at least and that would probably have the desired effect. Still might be a bit tricky in practice, you might need JS to decide if a hidden element is large enough to not hide, and what it should look like 🤔
David Penfold 
@technomancy oh wow 😍
ᴮᵉⁿ ᴿᵒʸᶜᵉVOTE IN THE PRIMARIES@technomancy that's kind of brilliant because ads are looked for by the site, to make sure they are not being blocked and that they are rendered
In which case you could do a number of Javascript or sandboxing tricks to let the ad through but, as slyly as possible, alter it in ways that the final rendering is different, not removed
[ Jer moved instances ]@technomancy I made this using Google Contributor until they killed it
RE: fedia.social/notes/9tela04hz7fen0vm
RE: fedia.social/notes/9tela04hz7fen0vm
@nyquildotorg love it!
Jake in the desert@technomancy oh wow. What an IDEA
Kevin Russell
CrimeDad@[email protected] I run AdGuard Home on my home network and you've got me thinking about how fun it would be to serve They Live "ads" to my guests.
Mike J👹🐀 🤘🏻@technomancy Because most people don't want to be reminded about how much advertising there is, they just want to not see it.
synlogic@technomancy Fnord mode. heh
Jes - Hedgehog Edition @Jes it's a cool video but I think the shots where the band themselves are shown on the billboard kinda undermines the messaging!
KDDLB@technomancy because it's not an ad blocker... it's a content blocker that happens to block ads
Ambient Sponge@technomancy As a long time user I would love that!