My ISPs DNS lookup takes literally one second every time, so I went with Quad9, it really sped up my browsing. Do you know any other alternatives?
I use NextDNS, which allows to set filtering rules.
I didn’t know that one too. They seem to be based in the US, and apparently they seem to be a profit-oriented organization. I’ll keep them in the back of my mind, maybe I’ll consider them in a few years.
Mullvad has a free DoH service.
Unbound
The only downside here is that the root servers don’t use TLS so your queries are plain text.
Why does that matter when your ISP will know the IP of the server and a reverse lookup is probably very easy to find what domain you visited?
Reverse lookups are comparatively time consuming and a single IP may resolve to many domain names.
It’s not the ISP I’m most worried about, although, in regard to their TOS, that one seems to go south, too.
Which is funny when we’re looking for “privacy-friendly”
Depends on where you’re at. If that’s Germany or close to it, we have the Digitalcourage DNS server, OpenNIC. I haven’t tested anything else but there’s also dnsforge.de, Digitale Gesellschaft in Switzerland, and of course Quad9 who operate globally.
Run your own
You still have to perform lookups by reaching out to the root resolvers.
and all the authoritatives
Hm…That’s just how it works though.
Exactly, hence why it’s very difficult to run a truly “private” DNS. Your best bet would be to run your own resolver on a VPS or something
Mullvad is probably the most trustworthy one.
There’s not a ton - however you found Quad9 would have told you about the others.
Huh, I didn’t know AdGuard also runs a DNS service. Who is AdGuard, anyway? Their stuff seems so corpo.
I wouldn’t use theirs based on being originally Russian and then moving to Cyprus. Corpo-sketch.
That’s what I found out, too. Reminds me of Telegram.
1·19 hours agoRemoved by mod
You could probably just piggyback off some random DNS server out there that permits public queries. I doubt that most domains are logging everything.
$ egrep "^[a-z]+$" /usr/share/dict/words|shuf|sed "s/$/.com/"|xargs -n1 host -t ns|grep "name server"|cut -d" " -f 4|awk '!seen[$0]++'|xargs -n1 host www.slashdot.org|awk '/^$/ {f=0} /has address/ {f=1} /^Name:/ {if (f) {print}}' Name: ns2.afternic.com. Name: ns1.bluehost.com. Name: ns2.bluehost.com. Name: ns-570.awsdns-07.net. Name: ns1.sedoparking.com. Name: ns02.cashparking.com. Name: ns01.cashparking.com. Name: ns1.namefind.com. Name: ns2.namefind.com.etc.
That’ll look up the DNS server for a bunch of domains and, omitting duplicates, list all of the ones that can resolve “www.slashdot.org”, which I imagine likely means that they’ll also probably be willing to resolve other domains.
EDIT: Modified the above command line to randomize the order of domains it tries so that if multiple people use this, everyone doesn’t just grab the same DNS server.
This looks interesting for some scenarios.
i just use Quad9 too, or firefox’s builtin DoH cloudflare since i’m a bit lazy… (though it’s very likely not a good option)
I use DNS over https with https://base.dns.mullvad.net/dns-query
The concept of a privacy friendly DNS resolver is a paradox. You can hope that they dont log your traffic, but you will never know.
Exactly, but isn’t it better to have tried and fail than to not try at all?
Sure yeah, but i think the better argument for switching is decentralization. Its dangerous for everyone to depend on one or a few monopolistic DNS providers. Thats also why you shouldnt use cloudflare.
You’re totally right. In the long run I’ll probably get myself some selfhosted solution, but right now I want to focus on other things. Also, I stay away from Cloudlare as far as I can. I don’t trust them.
What would be a better alternative that you’d recommend to hide a public IP? I’m familiar with self-hosting, so I could deploy the necessities.
I always used 4.2.2.2 and 4.2.2.1. Not sure how privacy friendly they are, but probably miles more than 8.8.8.8
I’ll admit I’m not sure what the threat model is with 8.8.8.8.
Well, it belongs to Google, so I assume they use it for logging which addresses do which lookups, and correlate this with their other fingerprinting databases. I very much doubt they run a public DNS just to be nice.
I mean, that’d be a major GDPR breach, be hard to extract any signal from because queries will usually be coming from a relay or from behind a NAT so you can’t tell who the query even originates from, and DNS is cached heavily too so you only get a small fraction of the queries anyway. I’m not seeing a way the calculus work in favor, basically.
OTOH the question of why they’d even run a public DNS is interesting, yeah. Running a public DNS is cheap and helps the Internet work better, and they make more money when the Internet works better since that adds up to more page views. Less charitably, though, it’s possibly just a thing from back when they were an engineering company first and foremost and did that kind of stuff, and now they can’t turn it off without breaking a lot of things and causing a lot of costly anger.
What’s wrong with Quad9?
Nothing, I just want to have alternatives in case something goes belly up.
