That sure was some improvement, but this proved the lua method to be unable to cope with that many entries - recursor crashed at startup with a constant overflow - so I searched how to make recursor behave correctly while still be able to block all those bad domains. I decided that it would be interesting to include the content of several well known host lists and ended up with more than 690000 domains blocked!! With the ~1500 domains that the Disconnect list was offering, I was only blocking a tiny fraction of the trash that most of Internet has become today. I thus wrote this tiny script that would do the job for me, without even touching the Git repo from the blog post, and PowerDNS Recursor was now happily blocking DNS queries to some advertisement and tracking domains. While the process is quite easy, after reading some of the project readme it seemed even more simple to just get the domains from the original list. On this particular setup I was using PowerDNS Recursor and so stumbled upon this nice blog article from last year where they explain how to use the Disconnect list used by the Mozilla Focus project to efficiently block ads/tracking domains. Oh wait don't we have a recursive DNS resolver on this OpenVPN tunnel? We sure do! And wouldn't it be nice that it removes ads for us? Indeed it would! Since I use non rooted CopperHeadOS as my main mobile OS, solutions like AdAway that require root access were not possible either.
So the other day I wanted to remove ads on my Android phone, but apparently you can't install extensions on Android chromium and I didn't feel like using Firefox for that.