Shutting down our public encrypted DNS
mullvad.net
mullvad.net
Brilliant.
[1] https://quad9.net/news/blog/italian-blocking-demands-followi...
Seriously, what the fuck? So you're supposed to block VPNs as well? What's next, Tor exit nodes? New VPN and Tor nodes as they pop up? I really don't like where this is going.
Edit: I'm with Quad9 (CTO)
Maybe your lawyer fucked up? Did you immediately appeal the fine or request a stay pending the main action?
Appeal court ruled on the substantive case. My understanding is that in Germany it has no procedural jurisdiction to order the state treasury to refund an enforcement fine. You need restitution claim that makes the thing yet another hoop.
And thanks for the great DNS service, I'm using it everywhere!
The appellate court ruled that independent recursive DNS resolvers are too far removed from the actual infringement to be held liable.
Average of (current maximalist copyright; ending copyright) is what you called middle ground.
Average of a sensible position like (current maximalist copyright; ending copyright divided by 2) still does not yield a sensible world where culture and art - or even human interactions - can thrive.
The trenches between the different factions are far too deep for any middle ground to have any chance.
It'd be great for this to be the first major relinquishment of nation-state power to happen without violence, without backroom deals, without wedge politics and flag waving.
Just... let it go.
It's beyond obvious that copyright is not going to exist in 1000 years. Every creature on earth - especially the internet - survives by copying information. It's the most basic life force in the universe.
Copyright is serving exactly nobody today. It's time. Are there elder stateswo/men in the room who can see the writing on the wall and act with grace?
Except for nearly everyone who writes anything (including software) or other artistic pursuits to make a living. This includes a majority of people here on HN.
Not to mention that everyone using coding agents probably aren't even protected by copyright in the first place, at least in the US, since the courts are taking a pretty hard line on human authorship being required...
Despite the SaaS model under which many of us build, there is still a tremendous amount of packaged and distributed software that people use every day: your phone and its OS and apps, most computer OSes, databases, medical records, transportation, communications—the list goes on—that many of us work on to put food on the table.
Also, let's be real - human written (and therefore copyrightable) code is dying already. When the machines can write anything on demand, why do you need a profit motive?
That's like asking why gardeners like to grow food and flowers in their backyards, or why hobbyists like to build furniture in their garages. Some people need a creative outlet. It doesn't mean that a lot of people won't grow food, flowers, or furniture for free, and that there's no demand for food, flowers, or furniture to be bought.
> When the machines can write anything on demand, why do you need a profit motive?
Machines still need humans to power them. They're like any other tools that need direction and guidance, by humans that possess the innate creativity.
> Machines still need humans to power them. They're like any other tools that need direction and guidance, by humans that possess the innate creativity.
Yes but ideas are not copyrightable, only the fixed expression of those ideas in (in this case) written form. If the actual writing of the code is delegated entirely to machines, then software copyrights are dead.
I am not aware of any open-source license which tries to approximate the "there is no copyright" situation:
- Such a license would not compulse you to publish the source code of any modification you make for it.
- Such a license would allow you to distribute compiled programs only.
- On the other hand, such a license must not restrict you to de-compile, modify or re-destribute any binaries built from the source code.
- But any such derivate of such a binary or source code would have to stay under the same license (this is a different kind of virality than "normal" viral licenses).
Public domain is something different from an emulation of "there is no copyright":
You can take public domain material to build some program binary:
- In the current legal system, you can enforce restrictions on the usage of this binary, and can forbid redistribution, reverse-engineering, ...
- In a "no copyright world", you cannot enforce such restrictions.
IAAL and am pretty familiar with U.S. copyright law, and am curious where support for this proposition in the law is found. Can you provide sources, please?
1. Take some CC0/public domain source code.
2. Build a binary out of it and sell licenses for your software.
Case study: SQLite's source code is public domain. On the other hand, it is embedded in many commercial software products that are sold - and you are not allowed to reverse-engineer the software or redistribute binaries of it. This would be possible/allowed in a no-copyright world.
Let's say you write some software for your employer and they sell the product to several customers with a contract not to distribute it. However, the product appears on some pirate website anyway, and you can't identify who allowed the product to be leaked. Once it's there, your contracts are worthless as nobody who downloads it from the pirate site will be bound by your contract. You need copyright laws to prevent subsequent distribution.
Without copyright laws, you'd then end up in the situation where people who paid for the software then are bound by the contract and would have to keep paying, and those who just downloaded it from a pirate site would be completely fine legally and could use the software with impunity. That would create a disincentive for anybody agreeing to buy the software and entering into a contract in the first place, essentially killing the industry.
You might not see a problem with that if you believe in Open Source, but most licences require copyright laws to exist to protect the software freedoms so that people don't just take the software and close source it.
Almost my entire career was spent on such custom software. The rest was internal software. And even that one I was doing as a contractor, so in a way we could argue it was custom software even there.
But there is far, far more in the world that just SaaS or internal only software. Sure, companies are generally shifting towards SaaS (in part because it allows them another way to combat piracy, but also to extract recurring revenue rather than one off purchases), but there's still plenty of software you can go out to the shop and buy. Most of that wouldn't exist without copyright laws, because those developers would have found some other way of making a living instead.
Not necessarily? Any infra software is invisible to the end consumer. It's bundled into the price the customer pays for what they see, but they themselves don't know or care about the former.
> there's still plenty of software you can go out to the shop and buy
... is there? I haven't bought software in a shop in 20 years at least. Outside of games, I don't really buy software digitally, even. It's either FOSS or it's a subscription.
But anyway, the method of software delivery is tangential to the main point. Plenty of software exists that runs locally, regardless of how is paid for - whether subscription or one-off purchases, if it runs on your computer it relies on copyright law to protect the revenue stream for the developers. Without copyright laws, if one physical sale could be freely copied with impunity, sales would be vastly diminished to the point that many developers would just not bother and find a different industry to work in to earn a salary.
Modern IP law inhibits productivity more than it helps, imo. LLMs have fundamentally changed our line of work, and they have done so by completely ignoring the existing legal framework for IP. We should not defend the current implementation just because some people might suffer reduced earning potential.
If you look at outcomes it has completely failed while making big corps very rich in the process
If you want permissive rules then corporations will just resell your IP (like we see with SaaS). And if you want tighter rules then you just create a higher barrier for entry that benefits corporations rather than independent entities.
Either way, it’s easier to operate when you already have a leading position.
Oh, and also put a hard cap on individual wealth while we're at it. No one, no matter how hard working, deserves a billion dollars. And no one should be trusted with that much power, it's too goddamn dangerous.
(The caps should be indexed to stuff like median income or wealth. Wanna get richer? There's a way: help everyone get richer. That way we're actually in this together.)
And outside open source there has been a staggering amount of creative work at all quality levels done for commercial purposes under the protection of copyright. Is there a convincing argument that the last century of software and music and books and etc would have been just as staggering without copyright?
I would love to hear such an argument. In my youth I thought copyright was blatantly stupid and should be abolished. I still sorta think that but I don't have a convincing argument in the face of the absolutely massive amount of good work that has been produced under it.
> I would love to hear such an argument.
Fortunately, one of the many tentacles of the octopus most obviously at the forefront of the zeitgeist of the freedom that arises from a culture of free information - The Grateful Dead - had the outcome of producing - in the form of gripping autobiography - an extremely compelling, and seemingly utterly true and beautiful and good, instrument to fulfill your request:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36750087-mother-american...
If you don't want to read a whole book and just want a stump speech which kicks ass in the department of argument you're requesting, it's here:
Yes, some people and companies benefit disproportionately, but those tend to be the ones who finance the process and bear the risk of loss due to failures and flops.
I'm not just shooting from the hip here.
You wrote "copyright is serving exactly nobody today." If that's not what you meant, choose your words more carefully next time. This is a forum of writing, and, much like songwriting, the right words and nuance matter.
To be frank, it sounds like you are part of the problem, and that your income may partly be derived from rent-seeking via the intellectual property regime. Is that correct?
> You wrote "copyright is serving exactly nobody today." If that's not what you meant, choose your words more carefully next time.
Well, I suppose it depends what sorts of engagement we can understand as "serving". By "serving", I do not mean merely enriching. Of course we all recognize that there are massive industries which are enriched by this system; where we may disagree is whether any actual services in rendered to the folks doing the writing and recording and touring in exchange for that enrichment.
At present, I think it's perfectly reasonable to observe that _musicians_ are not _served_ by this configuration. To the contrary, it has spawned a complicated system of publication, with many musicians facing the subpar customer service experience of services like distrokid and cdbaby facilitating distribution to services like spotify and apple music, while the RIAA and MPAA employ legal threats and harassment to the more musician-friendly DRM-free and direct-to-consumer counterparts.
I think it's also fair to say that, since the beginning of music, no musician ever has wanted a system whose function is to call the cops of their fans. And ultimately, that's what copyright is - it lets me send the cops in to fuck with fans who... try to share my music with their friends? It's awful from first principles, even if the implementation weren't as rotten as it is.
You said, "Except for nearly everyone who writes anything (including software) or other artistic pursuits to make a living" in response to this statement. So I think you have no leg to stand on in terms of demanding disambiguity; your statement is flatly and demonstrably false. Every musician I know (including, I'll bet, musicians you listen to) - and I'll bet, every one that you know too - has seething daily contempt for lawyers who make these asinine claims.
That is not correct. My current role is a technical one, not a legal one.
> where we may disagree is whether any actual services in rendered to the folks doing the writing and recording and touring in exchange for that enrichment.
Besides studio time, connections to expert studio musicians, producers, engineers, advances and royalties? You may think the amount of support is insufficient, but that's different from claiming it's zero.
> no musician ever has wanted a system whose function is to call the cops of their fans
Have you ever heard of Metallica, Dr. Dre, or Slipknot? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallica_v._Napster,_Inc.) While they didn't call the cops on their fans, they fought hard against businesses who facilitated mass copyright infringement and made it known they were vehemently against piracy. They took a lot of heat for it from entitled children, but the vast majority of fellow artists quietly supported them.
> Every musician I know (including, I'll bet, musicians you listen to) - and I'll bet, every one that you know too - has seething daily contempt for lawyers who make these asinine claims.
Of course they do, but they sure as shit aren't giving up their advances and royalty checks that feed themselves and their families.
I would humbly suggest you spend some time among professionals in Hollywood (music, movies, and TV). You'll learn a lot. There are entire neighborhoods--not just posh ones in the hills--of people who earn their daily bread in the industry. I know; I grew up among them. Middle class, salt-of-the-earth folks.
Well then I apologize for my presumption.
> Besides studio time, connections to expert studio musicians, producers, engineers, advances and royalties?
The first four of these have nothing to do with IP schemes and are widely available to those of us who grind not only our music but our social connections. I publish all of my music as CC0 or CC-BY-SA (and of course all DRM-free, as is nearly all bluegrass now), and I think my studio records and collaborations show quite clearly that I have not suffered from lack of access to top talent. If anything, the notoriety of my IP activism and development of p2p tools seems to have made me _more_ interesting to most of my favorite bluegrassers; I'm not sure I'd have been able to make either of my studio records without the good will that has come from this.
Royalties are obviously a complex topic with a strange history, but I see no reason to lose confidence that we can engineer a system by which funds flow form fans to musicians in a way that is at least as just (and is more direct) than royalties.
Advances are obviously an issue, I grant that. And it's not just the check getting cut, but the negotiating power from the label side to do the tour launch, get on the studio and mastering calendars, push to playlisters and radio stations, etc. - a lot of these activities are (in my opinion, cringely) crosswired with the systems of contracts and advances.
I have almost no familiarity with the motion picture industry, and only a passing connection to soundtrack musicians.
But I have repeatedly been shocked to find that even when one of my friends writes a big hit, they receive what seems to be a joke in terms of financial compensation.
Yes, of course Metallica made that fuss. But they didn't outwardly say, "we want our fans arrested" - they dressed up their complaint as a qualm toward an industry too tolerant to the presence of p2p file sharing (what today we might even call freedom of general purpose computing).
In other words, they kept the quiet part quiet. And in any case, if that's the closest thing we can picture to a band wanting to call the cops on their fans, I feel reasonably secure in my assessment.
Much of your comment seems designed to question why I want to take money out of the pockets of these entire neighborhoods of salt-of-the-earth folks. I don't. My contention - the obvious observation I believe - is that the framework of casting their work as intellectual property has impoverished rather than enriching them, and that a better way is coming.
If you stand on the east bank of the Cumberland and look west, I hope you notice that nearly all of the glitzy logos atop the high-rises are financial firms - Third Fifth, Wells Fargo - I can't immediately remember the rest. Obviously the batman building notwithstanding. :-)
The intensity of financial firms in and around downtown Nashville is a testament to how many billions have been diverted from their fan-=>artist path and have instead made their way into the pockets not only of studio execs, but their underwriters and insurers.
Since the internet seems wont to route around IP laws anyway, I feel strongly that we live at a moment of opportunity to right this wrong.
Some hit artists might disagree with you.
Besides, the ones who flopped don’t owe the rightsholders money from their own pockets. It’s not a “heads I win, tails you lose” situation for the artists. In some ways an advance is a better deal than a typical business loan. In fact, a business loan is a pretty good approximation of a typical early record deal. The challenge is that it’s often difficult to get artists to understand that.
> The intensity of financial firms in and around downtown Nashville is a testament to how many billions have been diverted from their fan-=>artist path and have instead made their way into the pockets not only of studio execs, but their underwriters and insurers.
Well, yeah. For every hit artist there are thousands of flops. Someone has to bear the risk of developing the artists, building repertoires, fronting the money to make first records, and marketing. It’s an axiom of capitalism that the party that takes the biggest financial risk gets the biggest share of the rewards.
I think what you’re really saying is that you think artists deserve a bigger share of the profits. That’s a fair position to hold, but it’s a rather differ one from the statements I was previously responding to.
Are you sure about that?
So just to be clear;
You're advocating for the end of software licensing? Ie the removal of GPL or Open Source licenses? A landscape where any source code (or binary) can be snapped up by say Amazon or Microsoft and run via a paid subscription?
You're advocating for a business model which removes your access to local code and only allows access via a terminal or browser?
Because removal of copyright doesn't mean corporations go away. Rather it incentivizes business models that protect their products in other ways.
In the 80's and 90's, pre-internet, binary programs were distributed on media. An arms race of copiers and copy protection ensued. The copiers won, and since copyright enforcement has always been weak, business changed to favoring remote access (with subscription) over running locally via purchase.
At the same time Open Source and Free Software have thrived. Copyright protects that software being used outside the terms of the license. Indeed there's even outrage when it's used within the terms of the license (by AWS etc.)
Of course OSS still thrives under a copyrightless environment. (Free Software less so). But equally it means AI can simply be trained on it (probably no great loss since it's likely most of OSS will be AI generated anyway.)
Business however will adapt. And the easiest way to prevent coping now is simply remote execution. With a suitable Terms Of Use declaration.
Outside of software it would destroy music, movies, books etc. Basically it becomes a race to the bottom in terms of production costs (think user-generated You-Tube as the high-water mark.) But I assume you meant in the context of software.
Yes, I agree, that in much less than 1000 years copyright is dead. Because by then so much is in the public domain it doesn't matter anyway. Also because by then the last human programmer is long dead. AI will write anything you want, only you won't even ask because computer interfaces and abilities will be long past where we are now. You would have no need to create software any more than you need to build a plane or car today.
And those industries have taken less than 150 years to invent, explode, consolidate and commoditize. Indeed most of the complexity disappears when we go EV.
In 1000 years copyright is gone. But today it serves a lot of people.
As a budding wannabe fiction author, I certainly hope you are wrong.
Intellectual property serves corporate interests and the idea of "nations" you are forced to have in your head are the exclusive servants the interests of capital. Ironically, tragically, that's what's holding us back from dismantling it in the first place, even a critic of it can't articulate it properly.
Sorry that will be undecipherable for HN. Let me try again: The defense you get in this pigstall is the individual that copyright is protecting. You just hate the small businesses and individual artists. Instead of the trillion dollar industry holding the copyrights and the practice of exploiting copyright on works by authors who died decades ago. The commodification of copyright of something produced by the lowest bidder, crappiest AI and cheapest third world labor you can get your literal bloody hands on. Or even a vaccine against the literal plague or cure for cancer protected by intellectual property.
To make something immaterial with no cost to reproduce, a commodity, to trade and invest and speculate in is the part to argue if you want to dismantle it, identify the rotten bits of the system even peasants can smell. If you are a billionaire or even trillionaire then just argue like everybody on HN always does, because it's identical.
Trivial to do nowadays: https://focsec.com/
>I really don't like where this is going.
German courts think the internet revolves around German laws. There are some really insane cases, sometimes they will consider a website to fall under German jurisdiction simply for having a German-language version (somehow ignoring that Austria and Switzerland exist, ignoring German-speaking minorities in other countries, ignoring that a fully automated translation in 100+ languages is now possible at the click of a button).
That kind of thing isn't unheard of for police agencies with moral and oversight issues, though. Orgs start seeking for bigger reasons. A simple copyright issue creatively expounded into an imaginary global drug bombing cyber trafficking crime ring takedown creates a massive internal win. So they do that.
The reason is that the CDN network is/was being used to illegally stream games so access to the entire CDN network is closed.
https://apnews.com/article/laliga-cloudflare-piracy-spanish-...
https://hayahora.futbol/#sobre-los-bloqueos (click "IN" to view in English)
Anybody can change their DNS and for an ISP to perform a man in the middle on all dns they would need to inspect every packet. Impossible
Calling a solidly democratic nation "fascist" is a rhetorical reversal straight out of the authoritarian playbook.
According to what? Some think tank’s “democracy index”, carefully constructed to preserve the illusion that Western countries are free and democratic? That’s begging the question.
He used violence and backroom dealing to get from that majority to become Führer, but without a doubt Hitler did get his foot into the door democratically.
>Since Quad9 already performs DNSSEC validation, DNSSEC being enabled in the forwarder will cause a duplication of the DNSSEC process, significantly reducing performance and potentially causing false BOGUS responses.
This sounds dodgy. Surely that means Quad9 can poison my DNS?
Haven't had time to study the bug and really understand the whole issue myself. Just left it there with the takeaway that local validation is currently not for non-experts.
(Sorry not at my computer. Details rather vague from memory.)
What's the specific threat you're envisioning? If it involves Quad9 themselves being malicious, what would DNSSEC on the forwarding prevent?
This page explains how all of this works in detail: https://quad9.net/news/blog/quad9-enables-dnssec-on-all-serv...
I've always been of two minds on this. On one hand, that concern is beyond any reasonable level of security/performance/reliability tradeoff for most any user. At the same time, it is a bit of a shame DNS doesn't have a more scalable & performant approach to security which can just always be done without having to consider it a tradeoff, however minor in practice.
1. The forwarder gets a response claiming the record is supposed to be DNNSEC signed from the parent (recursively traversing from the root). The forwarder checks the signature of this claim. If the signature is valid, the forwarder continues on to validate the signature of the record and checks its validity to know if the info was secure. If the signature is invalid, the forwarder knows any information any information is not able to be validated as secure
- Somewhere during the recursive checks through the root, the forwarder gets an unsigned (no DNSSEC) or invalidly signed (e.g. your stripped response) response. The forwarder knows any information is not able to be validated as secure.
- A claim for lack of configuration or support of DNSSEC records comes back. The forwarder knows any information is not able to be validated as secure.
So you always know whether or not the information was secure, it's just if it was insecure you don't know if it's because it was just never secured or if someone tried to tamper with it. And that should make sense, an insecure message is by definition one which you can't tell if it has been tampered with.
Can you be more specific about how, using current DNS software, that downstream resolver can reliably detect whether a zone is DNSSEC signed? The upstream recurser can erase every DNSSEC record in the tree if it wants. What does the downstream recurser do short of jettisoning the upstream and doing all its own recursive lookups?
Perhaps the confusion comes from the context of the above being "what Quad9 says to do to your forwarder's DNSSEC configuration" and it'd be easier to ask this question with a fully fresh situation & context?
1) The signature chain checks out all the way to the root, who's key info comes from a file included the DNS software rather than a DNSSEC query. The integrity of the end record is trusted (not the upstream itself) and the process is complete.
2) The signature chain checks out but part way down it (explicitly) ends early. E.g. "example" is not configured for DNSSEC but "com" and "." are so .com ends the signature chain with a signed "example will not be signed" handoff. The process is complete, the record is securely known to be insecurely defined by the authoritative servers for "example" per the signatures from the .com records and the local security anchor (e.g. bind.keys file)
3) The signature chain doesn't validate at some point. This could be because the malicious upstream tried to modify a record or it could be because the malicious upstream tried to fake lack of record response even though it can't fake the parent domain's signature of that (recursively to the root because the root keys are local to the server). In this case, the invalid records from the malicious upstream are jettisoned in favor of trying to get valid responses via recursive resolution.
.
Tying it all back together: Because the downstream forwarder is only looking for the signature chain to trust the record, it just wants to get those records as fast as possible. BIND determines the most likely way to get a quick response is to ask the forwarder. It then checks the full signature of all of these, almost always bind was right - the forwarder had the records needed cached and didn't try to modify them. If the forwarder was malicious or just in error bind throws these away and tries to recurse the answer directly.
Quad9 wants people to disable it because it's extra record requests, most people don't care, and, if you trust Quad9, you can just send your request in a DoH or DoT tunnel to secure the last hop more efficiently while they do the validation of the record itself.
The question is how DNSSEC breaks down in the last mile, where recursive lookups aren't happening. A stub resolver --- every resolver on an ordinary workstation is a stub resolver --- can absolutely be tricked by its upstream DNS server. Quad9 can lie to clients about whether it validated DNSSEC, or whether DNSSEC was present at all.
To protect yourself from an upstream resolver using DNSSEC, you need to be doing something akin to a full recursive lookup yourself. This is a flaw in the DNSSEC design and a reason why DoH took off instead.
What? I don't see how you can call that a flaw in DNSSEC when DoH is no better in this regard; it doesn't even attempt to protect against a malicious recursive resolver. The only way to do that is to validate DNSSEC on the client.
> That's something people should run themselves. I run Adguard Home on my router.
But you'll also get a bunch more benefits from OpenWRT, to make it worth your while.
- I was able to buy a router for <$100 that was WiFi 7 capable (W1700K[0]) and had better hardware than most consumer routers. You can find plenty of cheaper routers that are flashable and more capable.
- Adguard Home
- Split tunneling/VLANs: Since we're talking Mullvad, you can put devices behind Mullvad on a VLAN. So activate Mullvad by changing SSIDs.
- Trivial to put IOT devices on a VLAN (can make one directional too so you can access from your main network but they can't reach back. I throttle everything IOT)
- Tailscale
- QoS (Control the speed and prioritization of different connections)
- It's a fucking computer, you can even run shell scripts
If you're on an iPhone, uBlock is now supported: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
There's also Orion browser, but I found it to be a bit more glitchy, especially around sites like YouTube (fuck the app, I'm not watching videos there): https://orionbrowser.com/
I could also use a VPN to keep my phone always on my home network and thus behind my own ad blocking DNS but Mullvad's adblocking DNS was really nice and convenient.
For example, DNS blocking isn't going to block YouTube ads if you're using the app since they don't need to respect your DNS, but it will if you're in browser because they can't control that.
For apps I always use revanced.
Youtube ads do not get blocked by DNS adblock because Youtube ads are served from the same domains as the content and thus DNS blocking would be counterproductive. I don't think it has anything to do with respecting DNS.
I don't have the Youtube app installed to test but the Internet suggests that at least in 2023 it was very possible to block the Youtube android app (content and all) via DNS, which hints it does not bypass system DNS. [1]
[1] https://superuser.com/questions/713289/blocking-youtube-andr...
A weak rebuttal of the reason why DNS adblock doesn't work for Youtube and the Youtube app.
I'm on your side but telling people to buy a new phone doesn't solve their problem. Short of that uBlock and/or Orion are their best options
Look, I still run AdGuard on my router, but it's not the same thing
Setting up a local resolver, such as a Pi-Hole or Unbound on a firewall can serve unencrypted responses to your devices. Those resolvers in turn can use DoT/DoH with their upstream resolvers to encrypt the requests that go through untrusted networks on the Internet.
This is the best of both worlds, the simplicity of unencrypted DNS while encrypting traffic where it matters.
Maybe it’s time to try nym.com?
Fiber ONT -> Proxmox x86 -> OpenWRT -> Adguard Home -> unbound -> Quad9.
Browser: Firefox + ublock origin & privacy badger & strict privacy setting & Https-only.
My internet is rock solid and super fast, extra low latencies. OpenWRT shapes my traffic to 90% of line speeds, so zero bufferbloat on my end. All my devices connect to this setup. The proxmox box is just an old dual core mini-pc with 8gb ram and 2x 1gbps NIC's and a wifi 6 module for 2.3gbps wireless (only 5Ghz, no 2.4Ghz). I want to replace this box with a new one to get 2.5gb ethernet & better power efficiency as my box is a 51W cpu, but total powerdraw is about 20w without causing wifi to drop. Aggressive power saving can make wifi unstable.
I hope at least they'll keep these options in their tunnel configuration but if not there's not much sense in keeping their service....
Use an online service that's new enough and small enough and it might not be compromised, but the moment it gets popular men with guns and national security letters with gag orders will show up to install hardware on their prem, take over entire offices, or just demand reports.
VPNs and secure DNS services aren't there to keep your data from the NSA, ICE, or even the police. They are useful for keeping your ISP from selling your browsing history to anyone willing to pay them (https://www.mitnicksecurity.com/in-the-news/republicans-just...). It'll help keep a little of what you do online away from data brokers, keep your ISP from sending you DMCA notices, and not much else.
However, it's not at all the reality of a vast swath of other countries (or, at least, not yet; see Chat Control v2). The US is particularly foul (and effective) when it comes to this practice, but anything outside of US jurisdiction that doesn't have an office in the US can't be touched by laws like these, and the laws of most other countries tend to be significantly less invasive than American ones when it comes to data interception and the practices surrounding it.
Citation needed. At least in DE it is also true.
they arent gods. some people actually have moral standards and dont just do whatever a foreign agency wants them to do
Big tech services are less private than you think but almost every provider who cares about privacy is safer than you expect. Most of the people who work there are committed to their mission, and if they ever get a gag order someone will leak it in no time because they know exactly how to do it without exposing their identity.
Lesson to learn: Let's Encrypt does not protect against MitM by a state-level actor, unless you take precautions. *let's assume network admins won't MitM your server for personal vengeance reasons
But S in https stands for secure, or ? /s
When it’s a hostile environment entirely, they hack and do secret operations and bribe.
And they don't provide the key to law enforcement because ... they care about your privacy. /s
They don't need to break in guarded data centers. See Crypto AG
> or one of the less America friendly EU countries.
Besides Spain, there is no such country in EU. And even Spain might change its mind.
Unbound can also be used to block malware and advertising domains using shared public lists, or you can build your own list. Your resolver’s DNS queries could be piped through Mullvad or Tor if you want additional privacy.
- People may also live under regimes where VPN providers are blocked. Unless there's some order of magnitude more limitations on DNS resolvers, I don't see how the VPN approach is superior here.
I agree about blocked VPN providers, but in the real world it’s usually possible to get around those blocks, even in places like China where there are sophisticated national firewalls.
Furthermore, even once you layer all that tunneling on top, it's still unclear how doing recursive resolution from your end of the tunnel is better than going through one of the big resolvers. The privacy benefits seem marginal at best. Overall, I don't think you have convinced me in the slightest of your original point that "really anyone who cares about bypassing national blocking orders should run a local caching recursive resolver."
Latency is a tradeoff, I mentioned there are tradeoffs. For an individual or home network, the latency should not be a problem especially with caching.
As for TCP/UDP, current RFCs say that DNS servers must accept TCP, but not all may follow the standard and some misconfigured firewalls may block it. But it doesn’t seem to be an issue when tunneling all traffic over Tor using something like Tails. So I don’t think this is really a problem.
Oh yeah crap, you're right about DNS over regular TCP. I totally brainfarted on that.
> Mullvad Browser uses them [ the DoH servers ] by default when you're not on Mullvad VPN, preventing your ISP from seeing the domains you visit.
This is a half-truth until Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) is in-use for most of your traffic. Sure, you won't have clear-text DNS floating out there in the series of tubes. However, without ECH the hostname you're connecting to is exposed in the SNI field during TLS handshakes.
I imagine most sites we are browsing will eventually be able to leverage ECH, so this should become less of an issue over time, but in the event you frequent any self-hosted operations (e.g. no Cloudflare or similar), encrypted client hello could still reveal identifying information since it requires still exposing an "outer SNI" that a valid certificate needs to be presented for. You only get to easily hide in with the masses when you use a big infrastructure provider as a consequence, since the common outer SNI of cloudflare-ech.com doesn't really reveal anything different than an IP <-> ASN database would. But if the outer SNI is "dunder-cat-enterprises.com", then all I've protected you from is your ISP snooping on the subdomain or pinpointing exactly which one of my domains you might be talking to.
VPN providers at the tier of Mullvad should be precise about this stuff -- I think it's more than just a nitpick, considering the audience. oh god did I just use an emdash.
Note that you need some flavor of secure DNS to enforce ECH. The protocol is designed to be downgradable.
Sad to see this going away, but I assume this is so Mullvad can focus on their primary services.
While reproing the issue I noted the average recursor round trip time from my OVH server hosted in Oregon to the default upstream DNS - Quad9 - was around 70ms. When I changed it to Hurricane Electric the roundtrip dropped to a steady 20ms. Later I changed it again to Cloudflare and the roundtrip was a consistent 2 to 3ms.
First: We welcome the Mullvad users who will be shifted onto our systems, and we appreciate that Mullvad contacted us instead of doing this unilaterally. Since we have no signup process, they could have just moved users across but we very much appreciate their cooperation and communication, both with us and with the users of the service - this is exactly how an ideal transfer should go, at least from our perspective.
I'll try to make some short summaries of some of the points here, and a reply on each.
"You should just run your own DNS server - it's easy." - Yes, we agree that for a small company or home running your own recursive resolver is a reasonable solution. You probably won't get the threat mitigation depth of service that Quad9 offers, but you may not want that. Privacy also suffers a bit, since it's still the same IP address (your home "public" address) sending queries to authoritative servers, probably unencrypted. A good middle compromise is to run PiHole or AdGuard software, and forward your queries to Quad9 via an encrypted connection. (see below) This mixes your queries in with a large number of other users, and gets the potential improvements of having a much larger active cache nearby which will have "hot" answers. Running a home resolver for yourself or even a few dozen (or even a few hundred) people is not difficult. But with all services, things change with scale. As the query volume and number of locations grow, you soon find yourself hitting all possible exception cases, instantly. Many millions of requests a second requires a lot of time, expertise, and money to ensure nearly 100% uptime. We are admittedly quite a small group - less than 10 full time - but even that is under-staffed for supporting more than 100 million daily users. We do quite a bit with a very small resource set, and I doubt it could be done less expensively with the same robustness for the same scale. Again, we appreciate Mullvad's sponsorship to help keep this expanding at our normal weekly growth rate of around 2%.
"I want ad blocking, and Quad9 doesn't do that" - Correct, Quad9 does not do ad blocking at this time. There are good solutions like PiHole or AdGuard extensions that provide this functionality, and getting local control and logging of your DNS queries is probably useful for power users. There are also commercial platforms that provide this capability, and they may provide significantly more "knobs" for what you want to block. Quad9 is a non-profit - we're not out to corner the market, and as long as privacy and security is increased for the end user, we're all for commercial solutions!
"Quad9 blocks domains in Germany" - Currently there are no mandatory blocks that Quad9 is integrating or enforcing on our DNS platform, from any external party. We did briefly block some domains as a result of legal actions against us in Germany. The good news is that we won that case in Germany, after two years and three appeals and an enormous amount of time and money (which despite Germany's "loser pays" rule, is not even close to expenditures.) https://quad9.net/news/blog/quad9-turns-the-sony-case-around... The bad news is that the identical thing is happening now in France where we have a number of legal cases open against Quad9, and we do not see an end to this any time soon as long as there is an open question in the EU about what a content-neutral intermediary is and is not required to do.
"Mullvad exiting creates more centralization, and that is bad." On the fact that centralization is bad, we agree. DNS resolver centralization is not a great thing, and it seems to be trending in the wrong direction. It's not just large public resolvers - consolidation in the ISP industry is causing more and more of the world's internet-using population to utilize a smaller number of recursive servers. Those servers are operated (mostly) by law-abiding companies, and so there is a strong interest by various parties interested in control of content to "put a hand on the available throat" even though it's the wrong throat to choke. We're busy with some ideas of how to solve this, both from a legal defense position as well as a technology position - stay tuned in the coming months. In the meantime, you can contribute a few euros/francs/dollars to us and we'll have more funds to pay for legal defense in France and hopefully up to the EU courts. https://quad9.net/donate/
"Government agencies can tap data" - Quad9 is based in Switzerland. Despite what may be common knowledge from movies, there is a very formal and rigorous process for governments (Swiss or non-Swiss) to demand data. It is (ultimately) transparent, and managed in a way that is quite well structured - this is, after all, what the Swiss have been doing with financial data for many years. More importantly: Quad9 stores no user data about queries. There isn't anything to demand - the box of data is quite empty. Because of this technological decision and our wide announcement of it (https://quad9.net/about/transparency-report/) we have never received a request for data. As for technological methods: Quad9 operates in 200+ widely-separated locations, with no backbone or central data transport network - it is intentionally 'islanded'. It would be a significant challenge to intercept data at all those locations, though we're certain that there are many queries that are observed due to their presence on various ISP or cable networks which are under surveillance. We support all major DNS encryption methods today (even the two that run on QUIC - HTTP/3 and DOQ) and we encourage users to use one of those for their communications to us. We are also one of the few major resolvers experimenting with ADOx, which encrypts messages between the recursive resolver and authoritative server. (https://dnsprivacy.org/adox_status_and_deployment/)
It seems all too similar to the degradation of peer-to-peer networks where nodes are replaced by few supernodes. You mentioned a couple reasons yourself: consolidation and legal pressure. Add to this the technical qualification aspect and time investment (Mullvad's position), and the financial cost of sustaining such a non-profit project. Suddenly there are very few people or even organizations worldwide, who can bear the burden.
Thank you for existing and your tireless work.
Due to Lugano Convention [0] / Budapest Convention [1] / Hague Convention etc, I don't see how Switzerland is any more insulated than, say, Norway is (both these countries are part of EFTA & signatories to various UN/EU/EFTA treaties). Per this article [2], Switzerland ranks below Ireland, Portugal, Denmark, France in Data privacy laws (in fact, it ranks the same as the UK).
If I am being honest, at this point, "based in Switzerland" (or Cyprus or Sweden or Gibraltar) comes across as marketing gimmick VPN companies are notorious for.
[0] EU civil & commercial law enforcement in Switzerland: https://www.legal500.com/guides/chapter/switzerland-enforcem...
[1] Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) is bypassed: https://rm.coe.int/16802e726c
[2] https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/surveillance-st...
Swiss data privacy law is also much more strict on us, which "puts our money where out mouth is" as the saying goes. Violating privacy laws in Switzerland may result in criminal penalties, not simply civil penalties - jail time, rather than just fines.
[1]https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls
In the near term, there is no filter set that we offer that mimics that functionality.
However, we recognize some variation of "best effort" adult content segmentation is a useful filter to have. We're considering it in the near term, as we have some specific educational institutional pressure to try to meet as well, since students are often easy targets for phishing, classroom computers are rife with malware, and there is also the problem of inappropriate DNS-based profiling of students and schools - problems that Quad9 can help solve.
All modern Apple systems use QUIC. For instance if given 9.9.9.9 via DHCP they will automatically upgrade to encryption via DDR, then then upgrade to DOH3 with no intervention by the end user. We find that encryption load is lower with QUIC-based transports, but we need to really get a formal research paper together on that "in our spare time."
Faster? Probably, but is it measurably "better" remains a question for others to answer. Due to parallelism in most query sets, minor wins with DNS latency matter less than you might think.
DoT is more complex than you’d imagine because it has to try hard to implement its own solutions to avoid handshakes.
https://adguard-dns.io/kb/general/dns-providers/ have a list of options that some of them have ad blocker
Trivial to self-host, and gives you full control of blocking.
Sometimes you need to unblock things to ensure something works properly, so having it be local is better in my opinion.
1.1.1.2
1.0.0.2
2606:4700:4700::1112
2606:4700:4700::1002IME, it was much faster than Quad9 for this purpose
First Mullvad shuts down its Google search proxy
Now its DoH service
What's next
I say this respectfully, but Mullvad is perhaps “dumbing down” their VPN service in an effort to simplify their operations and cater to a wider and more general audience.
For sailing the high seas, or for harboring? I, for one, am glad to not have Mullvad's IP ranges blacklisted everywhere.
1. Not every service still supports 1.1, RFC recommends H2
Discontinued
DNS is harder to do that way because it's hard to have limits on DNS. Perhaps DNS could be adapted with QUIC, to allow fast, encrypted DNS that's easier to rate-limit, and then it'd be easier for average people to run public mirrors with limits.
I'm not trying to start an unhealthy discussion about this topic, genuinely curious about your opinion on the matter.
It's great that they didn't try to cancel the guy or get seduced into driving a wedge into their team. It is great they chose their principle over pleasing the crowd in such a transparent way.
I have been a customer for many years. I once even used the cash payment option out of curiosity.
Here is their statement:
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/donation-controversy
They even linked his (Swedish language) private blog on which he wrote on the issue:
Those parties exists for a reason, a response to certain pressures. Nothing happens in isolation. If you zoom out a bit and if you can for a second try to empathize with both sides, you will often find that both sides of an issue is correct, reasonable & rational from their own perspectives. It is often more an emotional response than one of pure survival.
The more you force things on people or suppress them, the more they will resist & push back. The rise of the far-right is not random or just pure evil manifesting out of thin air. It is like a acute inflammatory/immune system response. Obviously it can be exploited by bad actors to further inflame/divide & accelerate certain agendas. Often times extremism takes hold when certain justices are denied (which is in fact evil).
Life is best if you assume the guy on the other side (90% of a group) is just a bro trying to survive & have no real bad intent towards you, they don't know you or have been in your shoes, and the other way around too. Thus it is very important to become non-reactive, become observant who is trying to stoke the flames, who benefits from the chaos and so on.
Are there any alternatives?
I'd tempted to setup a DNS Forwarder up on that with Ad-Blocking then use Quad9 as upstream, then just have Tailscale be always on.
Additionally the default of blocking 'malware' doesn't jive with uncensored internet - that should be an opt in and not a default on their flagship address if they want to be taken seriously as unfiltered provider.
If the encrypted endpoint can go down for extended periods and they curate list of 'malware' they are not something that should be considered a gateway to uncensored and open internet.
Quad9 also has worse latency but I could live with it, I just can't live with web pages failing to load several times per day(especially hacker News that has their DNS TTL set to 1 second)
It doesn't happen with my ISP's servers nor with CloudFlare or google or even good ol' L3.
“ Daniel Berntsson
Known for: Mullvad VPN (co-founder, co-owner)
Daniel is the co-founder of Mullvad VPN, alongside Fredrik Strömberg. In June 2026, Daniel donated 5M Swedish Krona (~$500,000 USD) to the populist anti-immigration Örebro Party,[source] saying “it’s sad that it’s needed”. The party supports the ethnic cleansing of non-white people from Sweden, and Daniel’s donation represented, at the time, 72% of the party’s revenue. Daniel cited immigration as a motivating factor for his donation.”
This is probably service you can host locally with the lowest maintenance and hardware requirements so it isn't even a hassle to do it yourself.
This seems like an overstatement: I have been running my own recursive DNS with Unbound for years and never thought it was a "highly specialized undertaking." It took perhaps a couple of hours to set up in the pre-AI age. I filter ads and trackers using an aggressive blacklist[0].
This dude has been doing it for 25 years, and actually this is a dns provider for domain names which I'm decently sure makes it more complicated than public dns.
They're allowed to say they don't want to pay for it anymore, I just think their logic is bad. Or maybe their lawyer said they're running risks just ignoring takedown and they didn't want to deal with it anymore.
Can you expand on this? Isn't all DNS for domain names?
Hey dang can I get my rate limit removed yet?
I'm sure that the time, effort, money, and exposure that goes into responding and adhering to legal requests for a publicly offered service is something Mullvad wasn't expecting and would rather not be doing considering it's not their core focus.