nextdns VS dnscrypt-proxy

uBlock Origin still works in Firefox. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

And you can, I believe, still just modify your hosts table to block out ads in Chrome. https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Or your router's DNS using something like NextDNS. https://nextdns.io/

Ads suck. Support content where you can, but even when you pay they still serve ads / tracking scripts. So fuck 'em. Block all the ads.

I've used NextDNS for years to keep our home internet safe for the kids and it works really well. Fortunately NextDNS offers API access that you can use to automate turning different internet filters on and off. Unfortunately their API docs are horrible.

I think that we'll need to adopt network-level filtering if we want to outsmart the browsers. I haven't looked back since adopting NextDNS and configuring my router to filter all traffic through it. It does a great job of stripping ads out of all my devices connected to it, and that's something I don't mind paying a few bucks for a year (I think it's like $19/year).

Check it out here: https://nextdns.io/

NextDNS is very much alive, although progress is measured and calm¹ as compared to Control D. But it's also been rock-solid for me for years, where Control D seems to be less so².

¹ https://github.com/nextdns/nextdns/releases ² https://www.reddit.com/r/ControlD/comments/1irgehp/178ms_lat...

One of the most values I get out of a SaaS service is NextDNS [0]. There are competitors like ControlD [1] that are also very good. At the end of the day they both check all the boxes for me.

But, the piece that really got me with NextDNS when I started using it was the unlimited number of profiles. This allows me to target any device, no matter where it is (this is fantastic for mobile devices) and keep my filtering lists in place. I selfhost a lot but still find the annual cost of NextDNS more than fair.

[0] https://nextdns.io/

Use NextDNS (https://nextdns.io) on your mobile phone as a Private DNS provider, and switch as many apps as allow it to be web apps, i.e. https://m.uber.com works just fine, and use Firefox on mobile and enabled about:config as it's at chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml , from there switch beacon.enabled to false.

Far less requires an actual app than most people imagine. It's the apps that leak so much.

- Pi-Hole can run on a Linux box, in a Docker container, and on a Synology. You don't need a Raspberry Pi to run it.

- Look at https://nextdns.io as an alternative.

- I use uBlock Origin and NextDNS at home.

" appears to have blacklisted it on the basis of its model name"

Why is that?

I think Pixel was always good for this. The problem with rooted phones is that many bank applications wont run anymore.

"of systemwide adblocking"

Your alternative would be to use another DNS service like https://nextdns.io

That can be done at DNS level in dnscrypt-proxy: https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy/wiki/Filters#time...

There is more than one way to do this but I have decided to use dnscrypt-proxy. We will not be using dnscrypt for the dnscrypt protocol though you could elect to use that as the underlying DNS protocol. dnscrypt-proxy lets's us use a SOCKS5 proxy through which the DNS queries will be sent. We will use a Tor SOCKS5 proxy here. You can choose which protocols should be enabled and which ones should be disabled. There are two points:

I tried installing the RPM from the Fedora repos but it's out-of-date and there were no instructions on how to get it operational, so I went with the manual approach as per their wiki: https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy/wiki/Installation-linux

This is awesome, thanks -- going to look into that now. I found SmartDNS interesting and thought I would share it, it's pretty simple to setup. I can see why it's Chinese focused, they have "interesting" internet access over there :-).

I have been looking into DNS quite a bit lately (Unbound, etc), as DNS lookup performance has been pretty subpar lately. I'm in Perth, Australia, and we're pretty remote so our latency is meh at best, and Cloudflare performance has been all over the shop lately, I think they're having issues in WA). DNS can also cause really routing issues here sometimes as we get better latency to Singapore than Sydney, so we might get shunted off to SG.

I've also been using dnscrypt-proxy2 (https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy) for a while, but the above issues with Cloudflares DNS is what triggered me to look into other options.

I use a min-cache-ttl of 15 minutes, which seems to work well.

Thank you for sharing this tip about, looking into this now :).

Sure. I run dnscrypt_proxy behind a pihole. https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy