DNS-Based Ad Blocking for Android
This is a DNS based ad blocker for Android.
Using it
On the first start, you must manually update the hosts files (using the refresh button) before the service can work correctly (issue #1); and you must also update the hosts files yourself regularly for now (issue #2).
Items in the hosts and DNS servers lists can be moved around and removed) of the list using standard RecyclerView interactions (long press makes the entry movable, swipe to either side removes it). For hosts, a later entry overrides a previous entry; for DNS servers, the first server is preferred.
Currently, there are some minor usability issues:
- If you change a setting, you must manually restart the vpn service (issue #3)
- IPv6 servers are not supported (issue #4)
- Host files containing just host names are not yet supported (issue #5)
There's also no validation of input, so DNS servers that are not valid IPv4 addresses are not rejected, neither are URLs for DNS server entries (we intend to support URLs in the future, so you can point the app to a remote list of servers).
How it works
The app establishes a VPN service, with routes for all DNS servers diverted to it. The VPN service then intercepts the packages for the servers and forwards any DNS queries that are not blacklisted.
Custom upstream DNS can be configured. If the feature is turned off, the current connection's DNS servers are used. The app ships are pre-defined list of well known (mostly German) non-logging servers courtesy of the Chaos Computer Club.
License
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Parts of the program are licensed under only version 3 of the license, and some parts might be licensed under the terms of other compatible licenses. See the file copyright for further (machine-readable) information.
Binaries also bundle external libraries. To the best of our knowledge those are licensed under the Apache license, version 2.0, except for pcap4j, which is licensed under the MIT license, and dnsjava, which uses a 3 clause BSD license. See the file copyright.libraries for further (machine-readable) information.
Authors
Julian Andres Klode jak@jak-linux.org
Parts are derived from https://github.com/dbrodie/AdBuster by Daniel Brodie.