privatezilla VS dnscrypt-proxy

I recently used Privatezilla to disable automatic updates. Not sure if the same approach works on Windows 11, but you might find the relevant registry keys mentioned in the code helpful: https://github.com/builtbybel/privatezilla/blob/master/src/P...

Privatezilla = Is an open source alternative to ShutUp 10, but be careful what you enable/disable. It has options that will impede functionality.

PrivateZilla will do all of this for you.

For all the things you might indeed want to do there are about a billion open source programs where you at least have the ability to see what they do. (For example.) Arium is a black box, you have no actual idea what they changed and most people just blindly trust that stuff without verifying (which again you don't actually can't do, at least not completely).

https://github.com/builtbybel/privatezilla is good. There's also ThisIsWin11 by the same dev for Windows 11.

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I tried installing the RPM from the Fedora repos but it's out-of-date and there were no instructions on how to get it operational, so I went with the manual approach as per their wiki: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