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Comment by ngngngng | Hacker News Reader

I've found a few apps that are able to get around this. The Youtube app on my phone is still able to load ads even when I use this method, and the Hulu app on my Playstation.

Does anyone know how they're able to do this and if there is a solution?

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I’ll add a link to a few blocklists when I get to my laptop. My understanding (I’m sure someone here knows more) is that the ads are served from dynamically generated urls so you can add them to url block lists based on url structure for some platforms.

If you're using Android, you can look into YouTube Vanced, which blocks ads, provides a dark mode, and enables some other features that are normally exclusive to Premium, like background play.

I don't know for sure since I don't know which apps you are talking about, but DNS blacklisting can be worked around by embedding your own libresolv and server configs into your app. That means you don't use the DNS servers provided by the platform, so you can use the ones you "trust".

I imagine end users could then configure their routers to use udp port mapping to point all dns queries at the local dns resolver.

Then, app developers could https tunnel out to a well-known ip running a dns resolver, I suppose.

At that point, end users could configure routers to block all outgoing ip’s that weren’t recently returned by the local dns resolver.

And so on. It is an arms race.

You can't block YouTube ads by blocking DNS queries, since they are served from the YouTube domain itself. Basically, you can't block them without blocking the entire site.

There are other ways of blocking YouTube ads that works great but needs an install on each device.

How does uBlock do it then? I always assumed it did blocking based on domain.

It has access to and parses the web page and can as such do advanced pattern matching in various ways. Domain, subdirectory, file, you name it. It can also hide HTML elements known to contain ads in order to collapse the blank areas where the ads used to be.

It's not only blocks banner ads but also the ads that appear inside videos. How does it figure out the video stream is of ad? Their must be some sort of marker to separate out video stream from ad stream.

From my experience uBlock origin has a feature set/list that can do this where the more advanced uMatrix cannot. I run both and hope to not have to in future. Also run pihole for other devices where custom blocking is tricky.

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