> 1.1.1.2 is their malware-blocking DNS, and 1.1.1.3 is their parental-controls DNS. ...

TIL, thank you. Time to go tweak my pi-hole server...

I'm just curious, given all the other options that respect your privacy and don't put data collection at the center of their business model, why do you use Cloudflare on your pi-hole?

> why do you use Cloudflare on your pi-hole?

Because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." i'm not one of those users who want to endlessly tweak their ad blocker. i want to set it up, clicking as few checkboxes as necessary to get it going, and then leave it. However, (now) knowing that Cloudflare filters different only each of their servers, i'm incentivized to go tweak a number in the config (as opposed to researching the pros and cons of every possible provider, a detail i truly have no interest in pursuing).

If you mean you had 1.1.1.2 as a secondary, and don't want it to have a different configuration, you can use 1.0.0.1 along with 1.1.1.1 instead.

> If you mean you had 1.1.1.2 as a secondary, and don't want it to have a different configuration, you can use 1.0.0.1 along with 1.1.1.1 instead.

i had no clue which one was active. It was, for me, just a checkbox at the time. This thread prompted me to go check and tweak appropriately.

Which options respect your privacy?

I use unbound (recursive resolver), and AdGuard Home as well (just forwards to unbound). Unbound could do ad-blocking itself as well, but it's more cumbersome than in AGH. So I use two tools for the time being.

The upside is there's no single entity receiving all your queries. The downside is there's no encryption (IIRC root servers do not support it), so your ISP sees your queries (but they don't receive them).

I'll throw https://nextdns.io into the mix. Been very happy with it. Supports DOH, block lists, among a plethora of other features.

The ones where you don't send a single company all of your queries

AdGuard DNS servers are excellent.

quad9

It isn't anonymous. DNS server resolve, IP addresses by hostnames. It cannot then inspect further traffic but it certainly can log your IP address and all URL's a given IP ever hit.

Since ISP know your identity, and all it takes is to (request and get) the DNS logs and ISP servitude for all sort of questionable information, you as an identity are giving away all sites domains you visit.

> It cannot then inspect further traffic but it certainly can log your IP address and all URL's a given IP ever hit.

Correction: they can log host names/IPs, not URLs. The path of any given URL is part of the HTTP header, invisible to onlookers (assuming HTTP and assuming HTTPS is uncracked).

I can't edit. That is correct. URLs can't be known to a DNS server. Just the hostname and IP.

Considering that the DNS in question is third-party, that is, it's independent from the ISP. Then the DNS and the ISP will not share data with each other on a routine basis, which would make this concern negligible for every day traffic.

So to simplify, the DNS provider has a map of IPs to Domains visited, while the other hand an ISP has a map of IP addresses to identities.

To even cross-reference the data, the ISP and the DNS provider would need to partner, and violate their privacy guarantees.

At the very least it's obvious that using a separate DNS provider than your ISP's provides additional anonimity by decentralizing your traffic. Although this comes with a tradeoff, having 2 providers increases the odds of partial leaks.

This analysis is so overkill for your personal traffic that it borders tinfoil territory, if we are in a professional setting and are discussing the competitive data of a company or that of thousands of users, then this level of scrutiny is merited, but as-is, separating your DNS provider from your ISP is already very marginal and a bit paranoid. Evaluating the DNS providers to such an extent that a huge security company with good legal standing would somehow qualify as unsafe, for the traffic of one user, I stress, is paralyzingly over-engineering the security of an infrastructure that has already been secured such that users don't need to know what a DNS and how to configure it in order to have safe and private internet.

Imagine going to the bank and asking the teller for a withdrawal but not disclosing the amount and coming up with a mechanism to withdraw without anyone from the bank knowing what you withdrew. Sure, it increases your security, but also come on, what are we doing here?

This is a silly conspiracy theory: the ray ID references the specific CDN edge server which processed your request.

Even the request ID is not what you’re implying: that’s unique for a single request, but it’s not public and anyone who has your HTTPS payload has equivalent tracking capabilities.

I did some experimenting recently and I'm quite convinced that when I use Comcasts DNS they are selling it to advertisers. I've switched to 1.1.1.1 simply because it annoys me that Comcast is doing this.

How could that experiment work?

Resolve the hostnames but don’t visit the sites. RefrigeratorFixit.com, StoveBrand.com, ConsumerReports.org.

See that you start getting ads for kitchen appliances.

Today we are one of the lucky 10k

I have no idea why anyone would use Cloudflare DNS, much less trust their more filtered versions.

I use cloudflare DNS because it’s faster. But should I worry, having read your comment? What is the downside to using it? What would you recommend instead?

Quad9.

Many years ago I used Cloudflare, and more than once I had issues with them blocking websites I wanted to access.

I absolutely despise that. I want my DNS to resolve domain names, nothing else.

For blocking things I have Pi-Hole, which is under my control for that reason. I can blacklist or whitelist addresses to my needs, not to the whims of a corporation that wants to play gatekeeper to what I can browse.

So… why not use 1.1.1.1, cloudflare’s resolver that does not block resolution?

1.1.1.2 and .3 are explicitly offered with filtered responses.

I used to use 1.1.1.1. I still had issues.

Quad9 behaves exactly as I expect a DNS to work, in the sense that I only remember I use it when the topic of DNS pops up.

No, I do not keep any logs from domain name resolution from the DNS service I used from 7+ years ago. If you do, I commend you.

I used the term "blocking" in a loose sense. I have no idea if Cloudflare was failing to resolve certain domains because it is a shitty service, or if it was ordered to block those domain names by its government, or if it was actively not resolving domain names because it thought a good idea to be a sort of arbiter and gatekeeper. I suspect the last option, but it is just speculation.

What I can affirm is that I had issues more than once with domain name resolution when I used 1.1.1.1. After it annoyed me enough I switched to Quad9, and it has been great ever since, which is why I recommend it as a user of their service.

> I have no idea if Cloudflare was failing to resolve certain domains because it is a shitty service, or if it was ordered to block those domain names by its government, or if it was actively not resolving domain names because it thought a good idea to be a sort of arbiter and gatekeeper.

I'm going to go with option D) whatever shitty site you were browsing to had a broken DNS or more likely DNSSEC configuration and Cloudflare was correct to not serve a corrupt response.

99% of the time, tales of "they're blocking my site! you guys are nazis!" always turn out to have a root cause of broken DNS configuration.

> I'm going to go with option D) whatever shitty site you were browsing to had a broken DNS or more likely DNSSEC configuration and Cloudflare was correct to not serve a corrupt response.

And once I switched DNS I could browse it normally.

This does not align quite well with the scenario you propose.

> "they're blocking my site! you guys are nazis!"

I said no such thing. I said it was a shitty DNS because it failed at the thing I was trying to use it for.

I don’t keep DNS logs at all. But I also don’t show up 7 years later trash talking a company or product based on guesswork and fear.

It's not based in "guesswork and fear". It is a first-person account of someone that used their service. A user review, if you will.

There's this thing - when you offer a service to the public, the users of your service, can, will, and should review your service.

So, yes, I am free to "trash talk" a service that was, frankly, terrible at its job in providing domain name resolution. That works as any other user review, a data point so other users may switch away from a bad provider to a better one.

I imagine if someone goes to a restaurant and they their hot dish is served cold, if your response to the user review is a silly request for proof that the food was indeed served cold, and whining that their review is "trash talking based on fear and guesswork".

If you said that they served you cold food because the US government made them do it, yea, I’d think you were nuts.

And that's not what I said?

I offered some possibilities of why they did a shitty job in providing naming resolution. I even speculated what was the most likely one (not the one you mentioned).

But it's okay, at this point I have very little optimism regarding your reading ability.

Because that would be subject to the whim of the provider, who subject to court orders would have to oblige to continue operating as US entity.

How does that differ from Quad9? You’re subject to Swiss laws, so there’s still a government involved? And you’re now hosted in an area where the US government has far fewer limitations on what they can attempt.

Quad9 is based in Switzerland, but the three founders-sponsors are US-based [0], so I’m not sure if it can be considered 100% safe from US government intervention.

[0] https://quad9.net/about/sponsors/

The ASN and stuff is also operated by a US entity it seems like:

  ASHandle:       AS19281
  Street:         CleanerDNS Inc. dba Quad9
  Street:         1442A Walnut Street, Suite 501
  City:           Berkeley
  State/Prov:     CA
  Country:        US

They also have servers in the US, so that's yet another reason not to consider them "100% safe from US government intervention"

Also a quick search suggests that Switzerland has made Internet providers in-country block DNS results in the past.

Why give all your queries to a single company with an interest in tracking you and selling your data?

But don’t most ISPs do this? And if you use google’s DNS, for example, are they not doing this? Does cloudflare sell the data?

IMO all the more reason to run your own resolver and not just forward every query to a single entity.

Same thoughts. Cloudflare DNS is noticeably slow to resolve on some of my devices.

Switching to literally any other DNS and the same domains resolve instantly.

Could be a issue specific to my location or devices, but its been consistent enough that I stopped bothering.

I don't use the public resolvers but here [1] is a script that will show which of those public resolvers is fastest from your location. Add or remove resolvers as you desire. Be sure to scroll down to see a few of the sorting examples. Not my script or repo.

Just as a side note: Something I have done with this in the past as a fun experiment was to set up an Unbound DoT server on assorted VPS nodes in assorted locations around the country, run this script and configure each Unbound to use the 5 to 10 fastest servers on each node and cache results longer. Then I used Tinc (open source VPN) to connect to these VPS nodes from my home's Unbound and distribute the requests among all of them. I save query logs from all of them and use cron to look up all my queries hourly to keep the cache fresh and mess up any analytic patterns for my queries. Just a fun experiment. 99.99% of the time I just query the root DNS servers for what NS servers are authoritative for a given domain or what I call bare-backing the internet.

[1] - https://github.com/cleanbrowsing/dnsperftest

The "censored" part of archive.today seems unrelated to the filtering itself. 1.1.1.3 flags Pornhub.com as "EDE(17): Filtered" but archive.today is "EDE(16): Censored".

Supposedly it should be an external party that's requiring Cloudflare not to publish the DNS record. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8914.html#name-extended-dn...