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Comment by petesergeant | Hacker News Reader

I am tech savvy and run ad blockers on all my devices. However I consume Instagram through an app, and can’t be arsed setting up an ad blocker that would deal with that. I have bought a whole bunch of stuff through Instagram ads. I see too many ads on Instagram, but not enough to make me stop using it, and the ads are apparently relevant enough.

I assume this is a large reason why websites are so keen for you to use their apps.

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I've been so much happier with YouTube when I removed the Android app and replaced it with an icon on my home screen that goes to https://m.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions in Firefox (with uBlock Origin). Works perfectly.

I do the same thing with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit, which has the added advantage of trashing the experience a bit so I use them much less.

Instagram doesn’t really work outside of the app for me though

You could try NewPipe instead!

or libretube. newpipe is a broken mess for me now that libretube is here.

i get buffering on a regular basis, videos take multiple seconds to get started.

libretube OTOH is much better.

been using newpipe since it came out first so i have seen the whole drama of previous many years.

I switched to ReVanced

I run an ad blocker centrally on my router (pfSense with pfblockerng on an APU2.D4), which has an automatically updated list of all known ad servers worldwide, directing traffic for those into a DNS sink. No device configuration needed. Cannot be detected by websites.

Couldn't JavaScript on the page notice that ads aren't loading?

No, DNS sinkholes silently replace queries by a valid internal IP - to JavaScript, it looks like the resource is loading, but the webbrowser actually just displays whitespace instead of the app. Check for example this page [1] - if you run AdBlock, it will be detected. My page just looks void of Ads with pfblockerng [2].

It works inside Apps (Android etc.) and games or youtube videos, too. There are ways to get around this, like e.g. hardcoding IPs that are not known to serve Ads, but this needs additional work and 99% of ads don't do this. Benefits of router based DNS sinkholes:

    - cannot be detected by websites with anti-adblock scripts
    - no memory consumption on clients
    - fewer web browser plug-ins needed
    - lower device CPU utilization from AdGuard PC/Android apps, uBlock extensions etc.
    - protects all network devices without requiring extra work
    - browser, software and OS independent
    - device and PC independent.
    - implements redundancy should users remove/disable browser plug-ins

[1]: https://next-episode.net/

[2]: https://imageupload.io/i/pL0x1yM8eC

So it's incredibly easy to detect.

Care to explain? Give me an address that runs an anti-ad-blocker and I show you it won't work.

Someone determined enough to serve you ads through a DNS sinkhole could do something like this: the page injects the ads using js and waits for a pingback that is triggered after the ad is loaded. On a timer, if the ping was not received, the page can inject another ad with hard-coded ip address, instead of DNS.

The reason why this does not happen is that companies understand that someone who hates ads so much they are willing to deploy an ad blocker, a DNS sinkhole, etc will probably not click on an ad either way.

Also, note that pfblocker-ng contains lists of millions of (automatically updated) IPs known to serve Ads (or malicious content), redirecting those, too. So unless you are willing to switch precious IPs for your hardcoded IP-Ad-Serving Servers, injection through Javascript won't work either.

The only actual direct consequence to clients I have noticed is that if you directly want to resolve Blocked-Ad-Links, it won't work - e.g., Google usually displays some "Ad"-Links first as results - clicking these won't get you anywhere. For my private LAN users, I think this is a good lecture to have - realizing that you're bullied into clicking valid-looking links that are instead Ads, from people that pay others to distract you from what you were actually looking for, or distort the natural ranking by paying for being ranked first.

I have a printout at our house for visitors who complain about this: They can manually set their DNS to 8.8.8.8 and my router won't interfere (it could, but I found spoofing direct requests to Google's DNS a bit too much).

It's probably still somewhat detectable by noticing that all requests to ad domains are taking a long time to load while requests to non-ad domains are loading quickly. There will be false positives and false negatives, but I think it can be pretty accurate for people who have good network speed.

Requests to ad domains don't take longer - they're faster, since 0.0.0.0 (the sinkhole) will answer the query, instead of some internet Ad IP.

Then the request will fail right, since the https cert doesn't match? Or are you installing a custom root CA?

Loading faster is also probably detectable, especially if there's some request that the server intentionally replies slowly to to aid detection.

You're right, in this case the https will fail and this will indeed (mostly) slow down loading of Ads. I was wrong - although, personally, I do not observe slower loading times for pages, even though some ad-urls are failing. There are indeed some very rare pages (like zdf.de) that won't load at all because they have a very aggressive ad/surveillance checking.

They can but it’s pretty rare for them to do anything about it (and even then it’s normally just a full page div that’s easy to remove with dev tools).

I use nextdns (because I was too lazy to setup pi-hole), which has a simple ui for whitelisting domains as and when I can’t get around one (though usually it’s down to a tracking script breaking a site when it fails to load).

Enough non-ad stuff breaks for me using a browser-based blocker that I’m not sure it’s worth the hassle for me, to block ads only on Instagram, especially as I do occasionally buy stuff

Yes, then DNS sinkhole is the way to go because it cannot be detected and won't break stuff.

Instagram ads are uniquely irrelevant for me. I get some ad for wayfair advertising an excavator or a cedar lined sauna. I don't even think wayfair sells these things they are advertising towards me.

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