Too much of a bad thing.

Like any news reader seeking to preserve his sanity, I installed AdBlock on my desktop computer and laptop years ago. At no charge this removes intrusive ads from news feeds, replacing them with a blank space or a grey box.

And it has worked well for years.

But when Apple’s iOS devices added Apple News, there was a handy news consolidator whose content you could curate. Well, whose feeds you could curate as the content, which started with light and bearable advertising a couple of years back, has let greed rear its ugly head. AdBlock did not work on Apple News content. Read a typical Washington Post story on your iPhone or iPad and you will get a blaring ad every two paragraphs of text. I already pay for the subscription and see no reason why it should include unsolicited ads, especially as those increasingly include politician lookalikes to make them doubly irritating. You want to lie to me, steal my money and then pay for the privilege? I don’t think so.

It turns out there’s a simple solution which actually improves on the desktop/AdBlock experience, for the ads are stripped out with no empty spaces testifying to their absence.

It’s called NextDNS and you can download it from the App Store for just a one time charge across any number of iOS devices.

Installation is simple.

After downloading, go to the Smart DNS app and touch Enable on its home page:

Enabling

Then touch the dots at the base of that page to get to the configuration screen, touch ‘Custom Configuration’ and enter this code in the ‘Configuration ID’ field:

Enabling

Now jump to the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad and go to Settings->General->VPN, DNS, & Device Management->DNS and touch ‘NextDNS’:

Enabling

You are done. Exit AppleNews, restart it and the ads are gone.

If the custom configuration code does not work generate your own code using the instructions here.

The app is free for the first 300,000 ad removals per month (that’s a lot), and $19.90 annually thereafter.

Who owns the company? Best as I can find out, it’s a Delaware company owned by two Frenchmen. No obvious indication of dirty Russkies trying to infiltrate your system.

Is it perfect? No. The process is somewhat akin to catching a drug addled Russkie athlete cheating in the Olympics. No sooner does detection technology catch up with the latest drugs than the Kremlin finds new and improved ones which defeat detection. The process here is the same. The maker of the app has to maintain a database of offending sites so as to know to block them. So the occasional ad does get through, but it’s still night and day compared to the original with no ad blocking.