[inetknght]

> Step 5: Later, you may encounter broken functionality. When this happens, look at your logs, and see which server(s) were blocked at that moment

Eventually you end up with advertisements being served because the application refuses to show the content without the advertisements.

So let me cut back to your main idea:

> Main idea: Ads, updates, etc. typically (not always) need to resolve hosts before connecting to servers. Simply resolve these hosts to 0.0.0.0 instead of a real IP.

Better solution: resolve these hosts to an address you control on your network. You could even resolve it to a "public" address and add a static route to your router.

You can then choose to serve no-content from that address.

[jillyboel]

Maybe that worked 10 years ago but nowadays they figured out ssl certificate pinning