cname-trackers VS AdGuardDNS

Note that CNAMEs is literally caused by GDPR, and the pathway every single ad or tracking company seems to go sooner or later.

For people not understanding how it works: you can set a CNAME entry on your tracker.domain.tld to bypass all Browser's third-party tracking preventions, and make it look like it's a normal subdomain of your website.

You need to make a CNAME tracker database manually by resolving the reverse entries for known IPs. Usually there is hundreds or thousands of CNAME entries pointing to the same IP address.

The AdGuard team also made a database for this, in case anyone needs it for UBOL [1]

[1] https://github.com/AdguardTeam/cname-trackers

So nextdns’s third party disguised trackers is actually really tiny of a list, like 30 domains. (Im trying to add more so it has the same amount of cname’s blocked as adguard). Anyways, the reason why the list is so tiny is because it uses wildcard logic so all subdomains get blocked. It already uses some of the cname companies that adguards cname-tracker list uses but not all. Hopefully my pull request can get merge eventually because then the setting will be a little bit more effective

I see fathom on Adguard CNAME tracker. Example:

> uBlock Origin already performs CNAME decloaking and blocks this approach, it’s pretty cool.

... which in return is a static list of domains which needs to be regularly updated, and therefore is not really failsafe. uBlock0 uses Adguard's scraped dataset [1] as a source to do this, as Chrome Extensions cannot make DNS requests without a DNS-via-HTTPS endpoint.

[1] https://github.com/AdguardTeam/cname-trackers

Not sure where I should report this, but I seem to have found a CNAME cloaking tracker which i don't find in either the original or disguised tracker lists here https://github.com/AdguardTeam/cname-trackers Is there a mechanism for reporting these? I saw someone posted a list on github, but no response there. Maybe this example is just ordinary tracking though?

Are you able to block trackers/ads using this new CNAME cloaking technique? https://github.com/AdguardTeam/cname-trackers

I've tried hosted Pi-Hole and AdGuard Home. They are good as long as I'm around to fix stuffs. Then I tested something which can be global (home) and also for individual devices -- Control-D, NextDNS, and Adguard DNS. All of them works pretty well. If I really have to choose, then it would be in the order of NextDNS > Control-D > AdGuard DNS. Affiliated with none, and have decided to subscribe to all three to further test them for this year.

https://controld.com

https://nextdns.io

https://adguard-dns.io

I used Pi-Hole, then went to NextDNS, then to AdGuard DNS, tinkered with AdGuard Home, and currently testing Control-D. They are all actually pretty good, similar features, and it has become just a matter of personal choice.

In all fairness, when I have some time and can invest in decent hardwares, I might go back to AdGuard Home with one of the paid services as backup for travel, and when for the other family members.

Pi-Hole works really well but once-a-while, when I'm traveling, it will decide to act up and it's a whole IT support with the family over phone for minutes if not hours. I'm not smart enough to setup a secure enough tunnel and the like, and haven't read up enough on the topic. This follows similar pattern with AdGuard Home.

NextDNS, AdGuard DNS, Control-D are easy and just works, especially with the devices that the family uses. I think I bought one of those AdGuard Lifetime license, so I use that to block client-side rendered ads in conjunction with either AdGuard DNS or NextDNS or Control-D. Right now, Control-D is doing pretty good with my test-drive.

https://adguard-dns.io

https://nextdns.io

https://controld.com

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardDNS

In the case of AdGuard DNS being open source does not change the fact that it is a centralized service and using such a service is a matter of trust.

Then just unlock it. I am not sure which Adguard method you use, if you use a personal one which I recommend then you can just whitelist the domain that is used. If you use the general DNS then use https://adguard-dns.io/ to customize it. Trust me you will like it.

Google is your friend my dude.. https://ourpact.com/ and https://adguard-dns.io/

A feature request has been made for ECH support for AdGuard DNS, but there has been no further information added. You can follow the issue tracker here.

On my Mac Adguard DNS (i.e. adguard-dns.io) does not work without the Adguard app.