An open DNS recursive service for free security and high privacy

Just a quick note for the unsuspecting: I run two local DNSes, one recursive and one forwarding. The forwarding one uses few services, like 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, 9.9.9.9, etc. One day I noticed inconsistent responses and started investigating. Turns out that by default 9.9.9.9 have "protection" and for your safety will lie and return NXDOMAIN or something else, for some dangerous domains, taking into account their definition of "dangerous". I am not saying that this is bad, probably lots of non-HN people don't want to run their DNS or anything related and just want a tablet that works because they don't even have laptop. It just hit me hard because I did not expected filtering on these servers.

Sending every single query to a centralized third party is hard to square with "high privacy". I prefer to run my own local recursive resolver.

    cache-min-ttl: 3600 // seconds
    cache-min-negative-ttl: 3600 // seconds

    serve-expired: yes
    serve-expired-client-timeout: 20 // milliseconds to wait for resolution before serving the old value to the client

    prefetch: yes

quad9 is recommended by Privacy Guides. There's also other recommendations.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/dns/#recommended-providers

I tried Quad9 at our business for a while, about a year. I ended up moving to something else due to latency. I'm not sure if it was a routing issue or what but there were a lot of timeouts and slow responses. I have not had these issues with other providers.

In California, from Xfinity Cable, Google’s DNS consistently has the lowest latency.

From AT&T fiber, Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 is always the fastest, though Quad9 is a very close second.

It’s interesting that it’s different from different ISPs.

  --- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
  10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9015ms
  rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 23.666/25.241/27.628/1.022 ms

  --- 9.9.9.9 ping statistics ---
  10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9015ms
  rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 23.811/25.256/27.003/1.024 ms

  --- 1.1.1.1 ping statistics ---
  10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9014ms
  rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 13.216/14.553/15.835/0.739 ms

I've been meaning to switch my in-laws to Quad9 and just not mention it to them. They fall for too many scams, I'd love for those websites to just not work anymore.

Quad9 DNS sometimes returns a CDN node with obviously slower response and higher delay, so I have rarely used it since then.

Please note this service is censored by the French and German authorities

https://torrentfreak.com/dns-resolver-quad9-loses-global-pir...

I quite liked the idea behind one of zerodns's services, it wouldn't resolve any domain that hadn't existed for at least 30 days.

It felt like a simple (rather brute force) filter that cut out a lot of potential noise/malicious activity

>"Quad9 blocks lookups of malicious host names from an up-to-the-minute list of threats. This blocking action protects your computer, mobile device, or IoT systems against a wide range of threats such as malware, phishing, spyware, and botnets, and it can improve performance in addition to guaranteeing privacy."

OK, let's understand the following:

Yes, it is absolutely true that there are malicious web sites, malicious API's, malicious endpoints on the Internet, most having hostnames, aka domain names, that can be blocked on lookup...

It is, generally speaking, a good idea to block malicious hostnames, malicious domain names, if they can be identified, if they can be known. And usually they can.

But there is a problem with performing such blocking however, and this is not a problem specific to Quad9 -- it's a problem for any DNS provider.

The problem can be simply stated as follows:

If you have the power to block any hostname, any domain name, any web service or web site whatsoever, then...

...how do you know that you are not accidentally blocking any legitimate, morally upstanding, ethically correct, legal, lawful, web services or websites, inadvertently?

?

In other words, for every 50,000 or so malicious domain names, how do you know that you didn't drag in at least one legitimate/legal/lawful one into that mix?

You see, it's philosophical question!

It's a variation of "Who guards the guardians?" (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%...)

In other words, it raises such questions as "What's the resolution process if a lawful website is inadvertently blocked?" and "What is the criteria for blocking a website?" and "Who determines that criteria?", etc., etc.

Simply put: Who guards the guardians?

Now, this being said, we do appreciate everything that Quad9 and other free/privacy-focused DNS services do and provide.

We can make the counter-argument that privacy-focused DNS providers in general are "the good guys" and that for every 10,000+ domains with malicious intent, maybe only 1 or 2 actually legal, lawful, law-abiding domains are ever actually accidentally blocked -- and that would be a good counter-argument...

It's a great life to browsers to get rid of all of the malicious websites, but it's a horrendous life to individual legal lawful website owners when their ethical website is blocked for no apparent reason via an unaccountable non-transparent black-box service with no formal resolution process or channel!

Heard of "The Great Firewall of China"?

Most of that is implemented via DNS blocking!

Via DNS providers!

So in the future, I'd love to see a more, let's call it "responsibility-focused" DNS provider, one that at least attempts to notify any party that is blocked, notifies users of blocks, and has an open, public and transparent dispute resolution service for any party whose domain is blocked.

Anyway, in the interim, we thank Quad9 and the other privacy-focused DNS providers for their services!

Downvote.*, holy old.

What are the odds that it's a honeypot?