Ads Blocking

Today's internet experience is, let's say it out loud, mostly wrecked by online-advertisement. I think it's a good idea to filter them out at the gate or your home network.

Why?

• ADs are useless bytes that needs to be downloaded in addition to the content you want to see, and they are usually many times more bytes that the content iself. Specially with video-ads, you might be downloading megabytes of useless data. This is a concern on data-caps but also on the environment (wasted power and such)
• ADs can carry malwares and viruses, even safe web sites cannot control which ADs are server by the ADs networks
• ADs can make a mess of a webpage and seriously disrupt it's content flow
• ADs can and will track you and your browsing habits

Back in times ads where mostly some text-only links provided by Google (when it was still close to the don't do evil motto). Today ads are a mess of videos, text, porno, malaware, virus stuff brought you by independent ads networks. The website you are browsing has no control on what ads are offered to you (and they don't even see them) and often not even the ads networks really know what they are serving, because of shitty advertisers.

There are different kinds of ads:

• Browser ads: easy filtered at DNS level
• App's ads (like in mobile apps): easily filtered at DNS level
• Embedded ads (like in YouTube videos): cannot be filtered at DNS level

I will show you how to filter out all ads at DNS level. This will not get rid of embedded ads, but luckly those are very limited. You can solve also that issue by using things like uBlock Origin or using non-official apps. Using embedded ads is not common, and it will not become common anytime soon, so you should be good to go.

You have already installed the DNS service to manage your home network DNS (and DHCP), so you can easily use it to filter ads as well.

First of all you need a good, comprehensive and up-to-date block list. I suggest you using the official OISD blocklist, but there are tons out there for you to pick and choose. Just check out that your preferred supplier use the format you need (Unbound or DNSMasq).

This is a more complicated technique that relies on your firewall. The complex part is translating the domains and hostnames to block to IP addresses, ad they might map to more than one or even to entire subnets. Manually adding them one by one is impossible, and you would need to keep updating your lists every few hours to check for changes IP numbers.

Not feasible, i think.