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Surprisingly, I've yet to see a service which fronts Pi-Hole or similar and allows you to point your DNS resolver(?) at it, so you can use it on the go -- witho

Surprisingly, I've yet to see a service which fronts Pi-Hole or similar and allows you to point your DNS resolver(?) at it, so you can use it on the go -- without having to use a VPN. I tried to set this up on my own using a VPS and Pi-Hole and it did work for a while. However, bad actors eventually found the server and started using it to perform DNS amplification attacks against, of all things, cricket news websites. I don't know too much about networking, so this may be a limitation of the DNS protocol. However, it seems like Quad9, Cloudflare and the like have figured out a way to prevent this sort of abuse... So, if any provider out there is reading this, please add this capability and I will gladly pay to use your DNS service.

zacwest 8y ago
https://adfreetime.com https://adfreetime.com does this, as well as proxying location checking (like MLB's video streaming).
- ethagnawl 8y ago
  Cool! Thanks for sharing this. Out of curiosity, do you have any idea how they prevent the scenario I outlined (e.g. metadata, traffic analysis)?
  - voltagex_ 8y ago
    >$1.99 US a month, less than a cup of coffee! At that price, I doubt they do.
DavideNL 8y ago
You mean a public Dns server with ad blocking? https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html Note that obviously since you are sharing all your dns requests with them, it's terrible for privacy... :'(
- ethagnawl 8y ago
  > Not that obviously since you are sharing all your dns requests with them, it's terrible for privacy... :'( Right. I'm not defending this service in any way, but couldn't you say the same about Quad9 or Cloudflare?
  - DavideNL 8y ago
    True. You could set up pi-hole as a recursive dns server: https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/unbound/ https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/unbound/ That way you don't have to use a public dns server like Cloudflare. However, since (as far as i know) dns requests are not encrypted, this is not perfect either (security wise). At least when using Cloudflare you can use DNS-Over-HTTPS: https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns-over-https/ https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns-over-https/

zacwest 8y ago

https://adfreetime.com https://adfreetime.com does this, as well as proxying location checking (like MLB's video streaming).

ethagnawl 8y ago
Cool! Thanks for sharing this. Out of curiosity, do you have any idea how they prevent the scenario I outlined (e.g. metadata, traffic analysis)?
- voltagex_ 8y ago
  >$1.99 US a month, less than a cup of coffee! At that price, I doubt they do.

DavideNL 8y ago

You mean a public Dns server with ad blocking? https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html Note that obviously since you are sharing all your dns requests with them, it's terrible for privacy... :'(

ethagnawl 8y ago
> Not that obviously since you are sharing all your dns requests with them, it's terrible for privacy... :'( Right. I'm not defending this service in any way, but couldn't you say the same about Quad9 or Cloudflare?
- DavideNL 8y ago
  True. You could set up pi-hole as a recursive dns server: https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/unbound/ https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/unbound/ That way you don't have to use a public dns server like Cloudflare. However, since (as far as i know) dns requests are not encrypted, this is not perfect either (security wise). At least when using Cloudflare you can use DNS-Over-HTTPS: https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns-over-https/ https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns-over-https/