Question

This is probably considered hacking, but is it possible to programmatically download swfs using something like Ruby? Not decompiling them, just downloading them so I can view them without having to go to the site with a billion advertisements.

Answer 1

Assuming you know the address of the flash movie:

require 'net/http'

Net::HTTP.start( 'www.example.com' ) { |http|
  resp = http.get( '/movie.swf' )
  open( '/tmp/movie.swf', 'wb' ) { |file|
    file.write(resp.body)
  }
}