Blocking ads for the whole house at once

One place instead of many

Ad and tracker blocking usually happens device by device: an extension here, an app there, a setting buried in one browser that never quite covers the others. Every new phone, every guest, every smart TV starts from zero.

We took a different route. We block ads and trackers at the network's DNS layer, in one place that every device already passes through.

How it works in practice

When any device in the house looks up where an ad or a tracker lives, that lookup goes through our resolver first. Known ad and tracking domains simply don't resolve. The request never reaches anywhere useful, so the content never loads.

The nice part is that nobody has to do anything. Phones, TVs, laptops, and guests all get the cleaner experience by default, without installing a thing. A visitor joins the wifi and, without knowing it, gets the same treatment as everyone who lives here.

Fix it once, at the layer everyone shares, and the whole house benefits at the same time.

Why the DNS layer

DNS is the quiet phone book that every connected device consults constantly. That makes it an unusually good place to draw a line. We don't have to touch each device, chase every browser update, or trust that a guest arrived with their own defenses. The rule lives at the doorway everyone walks through.

It runs quietly and by default, which is exactly what we wanted. The best infrastructure is the kind nobody thinks about. No one is configuring block lists or comparing extensions. They just notice, if they notice anything at all, that pages feel a little lighter.

One change, made once, for everyone at the same time. That's the whole idea.