DNS-BASED BLOCKING
DNS-BASED AD BLOCKING IS A TECHNIQUE WHERE, INSTEAD OF USING A REGULAR DNS SERVICE, YOU SET YOUR DEVICE UP TO POINT TO A SPECIAL AD-BLOCKING DNS SERVER.
DNS is effectively the White Pages of the internet: when you try and visit a website like
techlife.net, your computer will go to your configured DNS server and ask it “hey, what’s the IP address of that server?” Ad blocking DNS servers remove known ad server addresses from the directory; when your PC or mobile tries look up the IP address of the server, it gets a null result, preventing it from finding the site online.
Some examples of ad blocking DNS services include Alternate DNS ( alternate
DNS.com) and AdGuard DNS ( adguard.com/
en/adguard-dns/overview.html), and normally they’re very simple to set up. All you need to do is manually set your DNS server address to one of these services (23.253.163.53 for Alternate DNS and 176.103.130.130 for AdGuard).
Unfortunately, that’s a problem on mobiles. While you can set your DNS address when you’re connected to Wi-Fi — just go into your Wi-Fi settings and use manual network settings — neither Android or iOS let you manually configure DNS when you’re connected to a mobile network like 4G. When you’re connected to 4G, you can only use the DNS supplied by your mobile network provider.
Of course, it’s when we’re on mobile data that we really want to use an ad-blocking DNS server — the bandwidth usage of ads is not such a big deal when we’re on Wi-Fi. That means that these services generally aren’t that useful for mobiles.