Hacker News Reader

Comment by ropiwqefjnpoa | Hacker News Reader

It's functions similar to other mobile ad-blockers in that it can route all your phones traffic over a VPN tunnel it establishes.

But the ad-blocking vpn server is 127.0.0.1, so perhaps, like it says all the blocking happens right on your phone.

This is what I've been waiting for if this works.

Still getting ads on instagram though.

View on HN

On Android, DNS66 does exactly this, available on F-Droid. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.jak_linux.dns66/

Blokada seems to be very similar to DNS66, and is more actively maintained. Any reason to prefer DNS66?

Blokada doesn't DoH or DoT the last time I checked, but they have added a wireguard-based paid VPN service, which is nice.

Intra [0] can DoH (but no on-device custom blocklists) and Nebulo [1] can DoH and DoT (with on-device blocklists). Personally, I see better latencies with DoH.

Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598413

[0] https://getintra.org + adguard-dns or nextdns

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.frostnerd.... + adguard-dns or nextdns or hostfiles

For those unfamiliar with the acronyms.

DoH = DNS over HTTPS

DoT = DNS over TLS

Very useful apps!

> Blokada seems to be very similar to DNS66, and is more actively maintained. Any reason to prefer DNS66?

No, I've never heard of blokada. Thanks for the tip.

The blokada in play store doesn't block ads. Get it from their store.

Also agressive power management from phone makers close them.

There is an aggressive stayalive option. :)

Please details. I've set certain apps to have no power restrictions. Yet they get shutdown.

Thanks. Think I found it.

As does NetGuard, both on the Play store and F-Droid: https://www.netguard.me/

A paid upgrade to the Play store version lets you filter traffic like adblock, or just use the releases from Github (they allow filtering, but not most pro features)

I use and love Netguard. It's great to see the trackers every app is connecting to but can't see a global option to block a particular domain across the board. I can only block on a case by case app.. Maybe they added this option recently?

It's only in the github version due to play store rules. And it's a global DNS based blacklist.

I wish there was global or group based ip rules though, since there's no way to whitelist DNS per app or temporarily, without completely turning off filtering.

It's kind of a pain, honestly. Some of the developers decisions seem pretty arbitrary to me. It's so close to being a must have app. I wish I had time to get familiar with the code.

That said, it's still my favorite option since losing adhell3 again.

I've only seen across-the-board, though you can allow individual apps to bypass the filter entirely. I think it's just a filter on DNS requests, but for APKs from github:

    settings -> backup -> import hosts file

You may also need to enable traffic filtering, I forget. that's at:

    settings -> advanced -> Filter traffic + Block domain names

The github apks notify you about updates and link right to the download page, so they're pretty painless to use.

Do you have any tips on how to set up NetGuard well? I use an app now called "NoRoot Firewall" that lets me filter on ip address or url and also port, with wildcards. (Ex. *.facebook.com). I cannot find a way to set up NetGuard since it appears to me that I can only decide on each request, which makes it near impossible to ever whitelist/blacklist something like AWS, which uses an ever rotating number of locations.

Nrf hasn't been updated in a very long time, but as you say you can whitelist/blacklist pretty easily. Sadly, netguard doesn't have this facility as a global, and only allows it to be done on a clunky, per-app basis. I seem to recall the author not being receptive to the idea.

Just knowing how to allow "*.facebook.com" for Whatsapp would be a godsend

Everyone should fire up https://mitmproxy.org/ from time to time just to see how much chatty your mobile apps can be, phoning home to places like analytics services on every tap and swipe. I was using a translation app on my phone that sent every keystroke to google analytics.

Of course also fun in its own right to see the sorts of APIs an app uses and how often the developers like to query it.

It was sending every keystroke in the app, or every keystroke in the entire phone?

Just the app. I think it's just a testament to how normal and easy tracking/info-collection has become that there's no real downside to doing it everywhere nor pressure to really stop, think, and care.

That you have to go through the trouble of mitm'ing yourself to see this stuff is also the flip side of HN's native app fetishization and knee-jerk web hate.

On iOS I use DNSCloak. It takes some work to setup, like downloading the blocklist from somewhere yourself, but it works. I will try lockdown to see how it compares though. It looks easier.

DNSCloak and Lockdown cannot be enabled at the same time. When I tried it quite sometime ago, it was one or the other, which is a bummer if you want to use Lockdown while also choosing specific DNS servers to use. I’m guessing this is due to a limitation imposed by iOS, but have no idea how it can be solved.

It probably can't, seeing as both use a local VPN server to implement what they do.

You could always manually enter your DNS servers in your iPhone's settings.

> You could always manually enter your DNS servers in your iPhone's settings.

Can you do this for mobile connections? From what I've been able to see, you have to set DNS settings on a per SSID basis, and that particular menu doesn't exist when connected to the cell network instead of wifi.

I have an old version of adblock for ios that can block (and even break) apple services. Just what I wanted.

Apple forced the developer to "upgrade" it to use DNS based blocking and provide no lists of adservers, which pretty much let everything back through.

> It's functions similar to other mobile ad-blockers in that it can route all your phones traffic over a VPN tunnel it establishes.

"Can", not "does". The App Store page for it (for both Mac and iOS versions) says

> Optional VPN for additional privacy

LOL! Additional!!

> Still getting ads on instagram though.

I haven't checked myself, but I read that it's likely because Instagram may use the same domain to serve ads as its regular content. So, if you block Instagram's domain, you will block Instagram itself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com