mrgrinch

Let me be clear - I wish this would work, but alas, this will *not* work. Why? Well, due to TLS and the fact that YouTube holds all the cards. They are serving the ads from the very same servers that serve you content. So ... if you block via DNS, you will also be blocking the same servers trying to serve the content to you. YT is smart enough to know how to close loopholes that undermine their business model (an ad-free experience is available if you pay for YT premium; previously YT Red). And a paid sub brings up privacy concerns of course. uOrigin and similar blockers inspect content *on the endpoint* since they have a MiTM position where TLS is already decrypted. The only way to do the same at the network layer would be to add your own trusted cert on every device and break the TLS, determine the difference between real content vs. ad and scrub from there. This certainly alters the experience where content may/may not work and could very well be spotty as providers change how they operate. Add to this, that it's not even possible to add certs to some IoT type devices (think smart TVs). For iDevices you can manually install certs via MDM or Apple Configurator. Android is fairly straight forward, but that is also why other options are quite abundant on that platform.