[HN Gopher] DNS Provider Quad9 Sees Piracy Blocking Orders as "E...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       DNS Provider Quad9 Sees Piracy Blocking Orders as "Existential
       Threat"
        
       Author : gslin
       Score  : 229 points
       Date   : 2025-11-10 11:21 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (torrentfreak.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (torrentfreak.com)
        
       | MangoToupe wrote:
       | I've increasingly taken the attitude that digital media is simply
       | lost to corporate interests and there's nothing we can do about
       | it aside from not spending money or time on the internet.
        
         | ACCount37 wrote:
         | No, "not spending money or time" is utterly worthless.
         | 
         | It has zero leverage. Even if you could convince 1 person in
         | 1000 to do that, you'd represent 0.1%. And that "1 in 1000" is
         | hopelessly optimistic as it is.
         | 
         | If you want to change the world, "individual action" should be
         | at the very last place in your list of actions to take.
        
           | anonym29 wrote:
           | >If you want to change the world, "individual action" should
           | be at the very last place in your list of actions to take.
           | 
           | The heliocentric model began with one person out of the
           | entire population of earth having the courage to publicly,
           | loudly, and assertively disagree with TPTB.
        
             | iso1631 wrote:
             | Presuming you're talking Europe only, are you talking
             | Copernicus? Brahe? Kepler? Galileo? You know that the
             | heliocentric model had been discussed 2000 years earlier in
             | Europe.
        
             | cess11 wrote:
             | Guessing this might be interpreted by some as a reference
             | to Galileo so I'll take the opportunity to mention Against
             | Method.
             | 
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method
        
             | ACCount37 wrote:
             | Let's assume that correct. Now, what did that "one person"
             | do? Just reject the idea of Earth being the center of the
             | universe? Or actually seek ways to make an alternate model
             | more accepted?
             | 
             | "Individual action" is fucking worthless. But not all types
             | of activism are.
        
           | MangoToupe wrote:
           | My point was not about changing the world but having a
           | pleasant consumer experience. My local library works just
           | fine for just the cost of my tax dollars.
        
       | Imustaskforhelp wrote:
       | > "At what point does legal compliance become de facto
       | censorship?"
       | 
       | I genuinely agree with this statement a lot. Also another aspect
       | of this is that the bigger companies can somehow "legally" do
       | things which I don't think would work but they have so many
       | resources to strech the court case for a long time.
       | 
       | And the fact is that even after that, even if they are fined for
       | some dollars. They are more than likely to just pay than try to
       | actually fix the core issues which effects everyone harmfully
       | except the company.
       | 
       | All for profit smh. I sometimes wonder if there is a word for
       | this phenomenon for how our system has gotten into such a rotten
       | state from lobbying to this yet at the same time genuine non
       | profits get existential threats for the same behaviour but they
       | simply don't have the funds...
        
         | gtsop wrote:
         | > if there is a word for this phenomenon for how our system has
         | gotten into such a rotten stat
         | 
         | There is, it's the system's name: Capitalism
         | 
         | Noone ever in the universe claimed that this system serves
         | primarily the needs of humans. It serves profit. Now there is a
         | ven diagram that has a union area between profits and needs,
         | but the system does not care about making this union bigger, it
         | cares about making the profits bigger. When that overlaps with
         | needs... it is just a happy side effect.
        
           | kannanvijayan wrote:
           | I tend to agree with this sentiment, but my takeaway is
           | slightly different.
           | 
           | People who would describe themselves as supporters of
           | "capitalism", as well as supporters of "communism" or
           | "socialism", are not able to admit that their belief systems
           | are actually religious in structure. Not spiritual perhaps,
           | but effectively "secular religions".
           | 
           | Both capitalism and its nemesis arose in the mid 1900s, when
           | humanity was obsessed with modernist thinking about "solving
           | problems once and for all". And in that context, the people
           | fell in love with these two "clean systems". A more perfect
           | set of rules.
           | 
           | Sure, capitalism doesn't claim to be the most powerful god.
           | But in surrogacy, it claims to be "the least imperfect
           | system". Which is structurally the same claim: declaring the
           | scripture to be some apex that is not surpassable.
           | 
           | The main difference between communism and capitalism was how
           | it was implemented. The USSR went full-tilt ideologically
           | rigid, and collapsed very quickly. The US didn't go full-tilt
           | capitalism. It implemented a hybrid system with a high
           | marginal tax, welfare programs, subsidies, labour unions,
           | public works projects, along with a market system, and that
           | hybrid non-ideologically rigid model served it well.
           | 
           | Around the time it was clear the USSR was collapsing, the USA
           | went hard tilt in favour of ideological purity in capitalism.
           | Systematic series of clawbacks in the tax regime,
           | privatization, elimination of labour unions.
           | 
           | As they leaned into the religion, it was used against them,
           | much like the communist religion was used against the people
           | of the USSR. And now they have been robbed of their
           | prosperity, of the value of their efforts, much like the
           | people in the USSR were robbed.
        
             | Imustaskforhelp wrote:
             | Nice read but we also have democracy to prevent things but
             | it still feels effectively hi-jacked by such fictional
             | constructs like capitalism and the lobbying power
             | 
             | Theoretically we should be able to think of the majorities
             | or ourselves and we can have a good system
             | 
             | but we also feel like a lack of choice I suppose, the
             | elections feel between just two parties with choosing the
             | lesser evil (I think zohran is cool tho in the democratic
             | party and maybe he could signify some good things I guess)
             | 
             | Personally I feel like we need to focus more on the
             | incentives and competency of people more than anything and
             | try to vote it on that and not what they speak I suppose.
        
               | iso1631 wrote:
               | We don't have democracy because the people with the most
               | money can use a century of learning how to manipulate
               | people through mass propaganda, advertising, pr, spin to
               | get the results they want. People don't form political
               | opinions in a vacuum, they are formed by the messages
               | they receive.
        
             | cess11 wrote:
             | 'Both capitalism and its nemesis arose in the mid 1900s,
             | when humanity was obsessed with modernist thinking about
             | "solving problems once and for all". And in that context,
             | the people fell in love with these two "clean systems". A
             | more perfect set of rules.'
             | 
             | All of this is junk. Karl Polanyi famously puts the birth
             | of capitalism very late compared to other important
             | thinkers, in 1834, by defining it as characterised by
             | markets of fictitious commodities, i.e. stuff like labour,
             | land, money. More mainstream would be to point to the
             | Renaissance or british 16th century.
             | 
             | The idea that capitalism and communism would be dependent
             | on an art movement of the early 20th century is quite
             | bizarre, the Communist Manifesto was published in 1848 and
             | by the late 19th century when modernism started to form
             | unions and communist parties were already common.
             | 
             | Actually, modernism is a reaction to the apparent stalling
             | of 'progress', WWI and nostalgia for the optimism of the
             | early modern period. I.e. from 1500 to late 1800s. In part
             | it was also a reaction to what is usually called modern
             | physics, i.e. things like newtonianism and ether hypotheses
             | breaking down in due to Michelson-Morley and early study of
             | quantum phenomena, relativity and so on.
        
             | whimsicalism wrote:
             | another absurd ahistorical comment on HN, where capitalism
             | apparently arose in the mid 20th century despite the long-
             | standing pre-existence of stock issuing multinationals,
             | wage laborers, currency-mediated trade, reserve banking,
             | etc.
        
           | whimsicalism wrote:
           | and yet the largest group of professional utilitarians in the
           | world (economists) largely do claim what you are saying
           | 'nobody even in the universe' would.
           | 
           | transitive preference satisfaction is generally a pretty good
           | framework. if you give more people what they want, you get
           | more of what you want in turn.
        
             | benlivengood wrote:
             | Free markets are not unbridled capitalism; capitalism needs
             | strong trust-busting and anti-monopoly enforcement.
        
         | iso1631 wrote:
         | I find it amusing that it's always the governments fault. Or
         | the users fault.
         | 
         | It's never the fault of the trillion dollar industries that are
         | millions of times more powerful than any individual.
         | 
         | Our system get gotten into a rotten state because a tiny number
         | of modern barons have all the power, and none of the civic
         | responsibility. Concentration of money - when money is power,
         | is the same as concentration of power.
        
           | mvandermeulen wrote:
           | What is always the governments fault?
        
         | walletdrainer wrote:
         | > Also another aspect of this is that the bigger companies can
         | somehow "legally" do things which I don't think would work but
         | they have so many resources to strech the court case for a long
         | time.
         | 
         | A big part of this impression is that people very often very
         | much underestimate what they can get away with, whereas big
         | companies have lawyers to tell them "oh yeah you can totally do
         | this".
         | 
         | Of course there are some exceptions. Uber and AirBnB are
         | probably decent ones, in some jurisdictions anyway.
        
           | immibis wrote:
           | This seems true.
           | 
           | Look at Donald Trump - he failed, over and over again, but he
           | always kept trying. Seven bankruptcies, but he never said
           | "I'm bankrupt so I'm not allowed to do any business again" -
           | he just kept on doing business. And look at the government
           | shutdown - he kept saying the Democrats will eventually fold
           | and do what he wanted, and they have now folded and done what
           | he wanted. This is a man who doesn't understand the word "no"
           | and look where it got him.
           | 
           | Not just him - you have basically every successful tech
           | entrepreneur too. They don't ask permission. However, some
           | people don't ask permission and as a result of not asking
           | permission they end up in jail, like Sam Bankman-Fried,
           | instead of as billionaires out of jail, like Larry Ellison.
           | So it seems you need a good intuition on which things you
           | shouldn't ask permission for, and this has very little to do
           | with facts and very much to do with personal connections.
        
             | walletdrainer wrote:
             | > and this has very little to do with facts and very much
             | to do with personal connections.
             | 
             | Disagree, anybody would have gone to prison for doing what
             | SBF did
        
               | immibis wrote:
               | CZ got a presidential pardon alongside giving the
               | president a bunch of money. So did Ross Ulbricht. SBF did
               | not give him money, and is in jail. It's true none of
               | them did the exact same crimes as each other, but there's
               | a clear pattern here. Let's see if in the future SBF
               | gives the president a bunch of money and gets a pardon.
        
       | flumpcakes wrote:
       | Going after DNS resolvers seems like the easy win. If a website
       | was breaking the law so egregiously then take it to ICANN to get
       | the domain name seized. I'd wager that's a much harder thing to
       | prove, hence the strong arming of DNS resolvers.
        
         | michaelt wrote:
         | Seizing a domain name via ICANN has to be global, as I
         | understand it, while a website might have only broken _some_
         | nations laws.
         | 
         | If the UK government wants to ban porn but loves gambling,
         | while the US wants to ban gambling but loves porn, a blocking
         | mechanism that lets them have different blocklists allows both
         | nations to get the censorship their voters have chosen.
        
           | whimsicalism wrote:
           | Pretty sure the US does it all the time or just contacts the
           | registrar.
        
             | iamnothere wrote:
             | Only for TLDs within legal reach. TLDs like .ru and .su
             | require diplomatic outreach and backroom deals.
        
         | dc396 wrote:
         | ICANN has no mandate, mechanism, or ability to seize domains.
         | The only tool they have is de-accreditation of registrars
         | (which obviously affects ALL domains registered by that
         | registrar) and that tool is only used when there is clear and
         | non-cured breach of the ICANN Registrar Accreditation
         | Agreement.
        
       | BLKNSLVR wrote:
       | Would the root DNS servers ever get modified or censored as a
       | result of court action?
       | 
       | My thoughts were that DNS-level censorship is essentially a dead
       | end because the root servers are sacrosanct, and there will
       | always be secondary DNS servers to query, who then use the root
       | servers.
       | 
       | Sucks for DNS providers in authoritarian countries though.
        
         | Macha wrote:
         | The root DNS servers basically only tell you where the registry
         | servers are, they don't contain records themselves. If someone
         | censored a domain at the registry level then the root servers
         | would be no help
        
           | iamnothere wrote:
           | This is true but I can imagine where they might go after the
           | lowest reachable branch of the tree, up to threatening to
           | remove country-level TLDs from the root servers for
           | noncompliance. Only the US really has the leverage to do
           | this, and it would just fragment the internet, as additional
           | root servers would pop up to serve the missing TLDs. So it's
           | unlikely but possible.
        
             | dc396 wrote:
             | "Additional root servers" popping up that would server
             | missing TLDs would fail DNSSEC validation unless you
             | modified the root hints and turned off DNSSEC or resigned
             | the root zone and updated the trust anchors in validating
             | resolvers.
        
               | iamnothere wrote:
               | Oh it would be chaos, but I'm sure there would be a
               | workaround available within a week. Alternative roots
               | already exist:
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
        
           | lokar wrote:
           | But the query is of the whole name. In theory they could
           | nxdomain blocked names.
           | 
           | But long ttls and caches would mostly break this as an
           | approach
        
             | JdeBP wrote:
             | Ever since the Verisign coup in 2003, the world has had the
             | idea of "delegation-only" and suchlike filtering on
             | responses from superdomain servers. More recently, query
             | minimization was invented. Both of these can militate
             | against the root content DNS servers doing that.
             | 
             | Better still, one can run one's own private root content
             | DNS server. I've been doing that (in several ways) for a
             | couple of decades. If ICANN decided to blackhole (say)
             | www.microsoft.com. tomorrow, my DNS lookups wouldn't be
             | affected.
             | 
             | To affect them, the aforementioned "court action" would
             | have to target Verisign.
        
               | dc396 wrote:
               | I'm curious: how did you implement your "private root
               | content" DNS server such that it keeps up with (valid --
               | and how would you know?) updates made by the TLD
               | registries via IANA?
        
             | dc396 wrote:
             | Yes and no. See QNAME Minimization
             | (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7816.html).
        
         | iamnothere wrote:
         | I suspect the US would push back on this unless they were the
         | ones doing the censoring. So far the US has not opened that
         | door with DNS; it's important to make sure that the door stays
         | closed, as this would create chaos and major fragmentation.
         | 
         | In the meantime it might be worthwhile to develop alternatives,
         | like some kind of DNS-over-Tor or DNS-over-DHT scheme, along
         | with normalizing Tor onion services as an alternative access
         | method for clearnet sites.
        
           | idiotsecant wrote:
           | Yes, some kind of alternative DNS system where domain
           | assignment is authenticated using some kind of distributed
           | system of ownership consensus! If only such a thing has
           | existed for years already and was well tested and
           | performant...
           | 
           | https://www.kraken.com/learn/what-is-ethereum-name-
           | service-e...
           | 
           | All the things that crypto true believers believed would
           | happen are slowly coming to pass. It wasn't all bored apes
           | and gambling. There was some legitimate developing going on,
           | and still is.
        
             | iamnothere wrote:
             | After the Samourai case, you shouldn't be so confident in
             | cryptocurrency-based solutions for things like this. If
             | devs can somehow stay anonymous and out of reach, maybe.
             | 
             | I'm not ideologically against cryptocurrency-based
             | solutions, but it isn't a magic bullet by any means. I
             | still think that the EU in particular isn't done making
             | life difficult for crypto users.
             | 
             | Not to discourage projects like ENS, I think it's good to
             | have alternatives, but I do think we need noncommercial
             | fallbacks to the current system as well. Anything involving
             | money will always have choke points.
        
           | dc396 wrote:
           | How does the access method matter?
        
         | belorn wrote:
         | As a sibling comment mentioned, the root servers are unlikely
         | to get such order since they deal with registries and not what
         | I would call end user domain names.
         | 
         | Registries do get block orders. When the Swedish registry got
         | that for piratebay they choose to treat it like a domain
         | dispute and gave ownership of the domain to the police, which
         | the police in turn could treat like any other taken property
         | and auction it out. The trouble is when the police wanted to
         | destroy it, as there isn't a good definition on how to destroy
         | a name so it can never be used again, and the registry was not
         | keen on allowing the concept of a block.
        
           | dc396 wrote:
           | The root servers do not deal with registries. They deal with
           | the Root Zone Manager (Verisign, under contract to ICANN)
           | only.
           | 
           | The way you "destroy" a name is either to not delegate it or
           | give it to the Registrar of Last Resort
           | (https://www.rolr.eu).
        
             | belorn wrote:
             | You can choose not to delegate it, but then how long and
             | who should maintain the list of names that should not be
             | delegated? Who should pay for the work to implement it, and
             | who should pay for the maintenance for said system, and for
             | how long? Should there be an appeal process or some kind of
             | oversight, and who should body those roles?
             | 
             | In theory the law makers could specify this in law as form
             | of registry regulation, but no one want to do that just to
             | address one or two court cases where this question comes
             | up. The registrar of last resort doesn't give any direct
             | answer to those questions either.
        
               | dc396 wrote:
               | These cases come up far more frequently than "one or two
               | court cases" -- many takedowns of botnet/malware (e.g.,
               | Avalanche) end up in ROLR. See "domain generation
               | algorithms".
               | 
               | In general, the vast majority of registries are fine with
               | marking particular domains as "allocated but not
               | delegated" as long as they get paid. ISTR ICANN waiving
               | their fees, so the costs of marking a domain as
               | undelegatable essentially turn in lost opportunity cost,
               | which most registries are willing to eat.
        
         | dc396 wrote:
         | No. While root servers are NOT sacrosanct, if such a court
         | action were to occur and a root server operator were to carry
         | it out, the change would fail DNSSEC validation in resolvers
         | that have DNSSEC enabled (which varies depending on where you
         | are, see https://stats.labs.apnic.net/dnssec), resulting in a
         | SERVFAIL. In such cases, resolvers generally try another root
         | server, until it gets a non-SERVFAIL answer, so for this to
         | have the desired effect, you'd have to get all the root servers
         | to implement the same change. This would be unlikely.
         | 
         | However, the root server operators merely publish what ICANN
         | (via the IANA functions) produces.
         | 
         | If the US (either federal or perhaps even the states of
         | California or Virginia) were to decide to "censor" a TLD in the
         | root zone, they would simply go to ICANN, PTI (the folks who
         | provide the IANA functions under contract to ICANN) or, more
         | likely, Verisign (who generate and publish the root zone under
         | contract to ICANN) and demand the root zone be modified.
        
       | fundatus wrote:
       | Many ISPs in Germany have stopped fighting this fight as well and
       | sadly have now even started to self-censor their DNS servers.[1]
       | 
       | [1] https://cuii.info/en
        
         | dewey wrote:
         | > have now even started
         | 
         | This has been the case for a very long time. Back when TBP was
         | popular this was already the case.
        
         | iamnothere wrote:
         | More people should run their own recursive resolvers with
         | unbound. There's no need to rely on centralized DNS anymore.
        
           | kavouras wrote:
           | Isn't this putting unsustainable load on the root servers?(on
           | the scenario that many people do that)
        
             | seethishat wrote:
             | https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8806
             | 
             | Abstract
             | 
             | Some DNS recursive resolvers have longer-than-desired
             | round-trip times to the closest DNS root server; those
             | resolvers may have difficulty getting responses from the
             | root servers, such as during a network attack. Some DNS
             | recursive resolver operators want to prevent snooping by
             | third parties of requests sent to DNS root servers. In both
             | cases, resolvers can greatly decrease the round-trip time
             | and prevent observation of requests by serving a copy of
             | the full root zone on the same server, such as on a
             | loopback address or in the resolver software. This document
             | shows how to start and maintain such a copy of the root
             | zone that does not cause problems for other users of the
             | DNS, at the cost of adding some operational fragility for
             | the operator.
             | 
             | This document obsoletes RFC 7706.
        
             | belorn wrote:
             | If we are talking about the actually root servers, there
             | are 13 redundant names spread out (thanks to anycast) on
             | around 1700 servers located around the world, and the
             | lookup a user would do is cached for 2 days. That mean the
             | highest amount of traffic a system will generate is one
             | request per unique TLD (like .com) per 2 days, and it will
             | fit a single UDP package.
             | 
             | We can then do some guesses about size for questions like
             | "what is the nameservers for .com". Those are a bit larger
             | than most dns queries since the answer is a bit bigger than
             | most, since .com has a lot of nameservers, so lets put it
             | down to 800 bytes. Every 2 day a average use might then,
             | using some guessing, generate maybe 10 kb of traffic, or
             | about 0.015 seconds of watching a 1080p video on youtube.
        
             | Bender wrote:
             | Everyone used to query the root servers directly from their
             | ISP or corporate edge servers until the big platforms
             | wanted to gather more of everyone's data in the name of _"
             | keeping people safe"_ from _" bad ISP's"_. As with any
             | manipulation campaign there are a few incidents corporate
             | propagandists can site to say, _" See! We are protecting
             | you!!"_ forcing people to debate the issue and knowing the
             | majority will accept the default settings. Blocking all the
             | DoH/DoT resolvers would be trivial for any ISP to do just
             | as I have been doing at home since the inception of DoH.
             | 
             | The root Anycast clusters are absolutely designed to handle
             | the entire internet querying them which I do from Unbound.
             | If one wishes to help reduce load they can enable large
             | memory caches and rewrite min-ttl to something sane to
             | protect the root servers from Amazon EC2's default 5 second
             | ttl and others like them. Blocking known spam and tracking
             | domains also helps reduce the total number of queries.
             | Groups of friends can even further reduce the load by
             | setting up their own DoH/DoT servers using Unbound DNS and
             | sharing the cache and using cron to keep their favorite
             | domains hot in the cache and increasing private by making
             | the crond queries from a VPS node.
             | 
             | Here's my cache stats for a 3 day uptime:
             | total.num.cachehits=18149         total.num.cachemiss=2300
             | total.num.prefetch=4561
             | 
             | Memory usage _permitting up to 1.5 GB_ :
             | Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used Program         343.1 MiB
             | + 523.5 KiB = 343.6 MiB unbound
        
             | ectospheno wrote:
             | RFC 7706. Even has config file examples.
        
           | giantg2 wrote:
           | Seems like a great use case for Pi-hole to add include lists
           | - have files with lists of DNS entries that are delisted in
           | some areas. Of course a VPN is probably more beneficial in
           | general though.
        
           | celsoazevedo wrote:
           | Regarding censorship, that works only if there's no network
           | side blocking, otherwise the unencrypted requests to root
           | servers also get intercepted. That's why some people use DoH
           | as the upstream for their resolver.
           | 
           | Not all countries or ISPs do this, but some do.
        
             | iamnothere wrote:
             | True, DNSSEC should tell you if requests are being
             | rewritten or blocked, but it will not help you circumvent
             | this.
        
         | kidmin wrote:
         | In Japan the PM's office once considered to block online piracy
         | websites[1] with DNS in 2018. Japanese tech community fought
         | against it[2][3][4] and it wasn't implemented.
         | 
         | The telco authority currently considers to block online casino
         | websites[5] (gambling is illegal in Japan).
         | 
         | [1]
         | https://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/singi/titeki2/tyousakai/kensho_h...
         | [2] https://www.nic.ad.jp/ja/topics/2018/20180625-01.html [3]
         | https://www.wide.ad.jp/News/2018/20180912.html [4]
         | https://www.nic.ad.jp/ja/materials/iw/2018/proceedings/d3/d3...
         | [5]
         | https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_sosiki/kenkyu/online_casino/ind...
        
       | dengolius wrote:
       | Does anyone use Mullvad DNS servers?
       | https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls#... I
       | found them more acceptable.
        
         | b3lvedere wrote:
         | Didn't know they have publicly available DNS servers. Thanks.
         | 
         | I've also started using/testing the DNS4EU servers:
         | https://www.joindns4.eu/
        
         | Tadpole9181 wrote:
         | I have had nothing but problems with their DNS service. Outages
         | what feels like a daily basis.
         | 
         | But the VPN itself is great!
        
         | kristofferR wrote:
         | They're pretty slow for me, 350ms on average:
         | 
         | https://i.imgur.com/7CeydnY.png
        
         | LeoPanthera wrote:
         | I do (as a fallback), but they're extremely slow.
         | 
         | Did you know Wikimedia also runs a public DNS service?
         | 
         | https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_DNS
        
       | 0xbadcafebee wrote:
       | Re: "Cisco has decided to leave france":
       | (https://web.archive.org/web/20250614052849/https://support.o...)
       | Effective June 28, 2024: Due to a court order in France issued
       | under Article L.333-10 of the French Sport code and a court order
       | in Portugal issued under Article 210-G(3) of the Portuguese
       | Copyright Code, the OpenDNS service is not currently available to
       | users in France and certain French territories and in Portugal.
       | We apologize for the inconvenience.              July 23, 2024:
       | Cisco's OpenDNS service has been reactivated in Portugal and is
       | currently available following a decision by the Lisbon Court of
       | Appeal.
       | 
       | It's laudable that Quad9 want to fight censorship, but they too
       | could block French requests in this way. Maybe redirect to an
       | HTTP/HTTPS IP that tells users about the issue and gives them
       | contacts to their government representatives?
        
         | sudopsuedo wrote:
         | > _Other companies, such as Google and Cloudflare, have the
         | technical means to restrict the blockades to France, but not
         | all providers can do so easily. That includes Quad9, which had
         | no other choice than to apply the French blocking request
         | worldwide._
         | 
         | Just quoting the article, can anyone weigh in on the
         | costs/complexity of a public DNS resolver implementing geo-
         | fencing?
        
           | 0xbadcafebee wrote:
           | There are multiple free and paid geoip databases, from $0 to
           | $1000 a year, depending. Then an hour to write a script to
           | add iptables rules from the database for the country of
           | choice. (Example: https://gist.github.com/asheroto/934e056a30
           | 2adda334077f0c85c...)
           | 
           | I don't know what is unique about Quad9 that they couldn't do
           | this, but it's possible they have some technical limitation
        
             | strictnein wrote:
             | There's likely a performance impact that is significant at
             | that scale. If they're blocking 670M DNS requests a day,
             | they're likely doing 10-100x that overall.
             | 
             | Have you implemented something at that scale to say this is
             | no big deal for them to do? And what about when 180
             | countries want their own list and maybe even states,
             | providences, etc do as well?
        
               | walletdrainer wrote:
               | You seriously underestimate how fast modern CPUs are,
               | especially considering how many distributed servers
               | OpenDNS runs on. There's no meaningful performance impact
               | to be found here.
               | 
               | Also keep in mind we're talking about Cisco here and not
               | some Ruby on Rails shop.
               | 
               | Anyway, I'm a big fan of the "fuck country $x" approach
        
           | mike_d wrote:
           | > can anyone weigh in on the costs/complexity of a public DNS
           | resolver implementing geo-fencing
           | 
           | I was a small part of the original team that built OpenDNS. I
           | also operate a less well known public resolver now.
           | 
           | DNS is extremely latency sensitive. You have basically a 20ms
           | budget to work with, which includes the time the request and
           | response traverse the internet. It is also extremely high
           | volume, a large public service like Quad9 could easily see
           | single digit millions of requests per second.
           | 
           | There is nothing that technically prevents you from doing
           | geofencing. Cisco has the money to absorb the costs of the
           | additional overhead - but I could not. My first stab at the
           | problem would be to simply shut down my servers in France to
           | try to get out of the legal jurisdiction. I don't know if
           | that would be sufficient without paying for a lawyer.
           | 
           | Quad9 absolutely has a valid argument here and it pushes more
           | of our public infrastructure into the centralized hands of a
           | small number of players because people like me can't afford
           | to just run free shit on the internet anymore.
        
         | Dylan16807 wrote:
         | Blocking a growing list of entire countries also sounds like an
         | existential threat.
        
       | sschueller wrote:
       | This is also why it is important for Switzerland to not sign the
       | deal with the EU next year. The 8k+ page deal would also require
       | Switzerland to pull the line with EU regulation regarding
       | copyright. The freedom we have right now to download would fall
       | away. Doesn't matter if you are left or right, the deal is bad
       | for all of us.
        
       | Havoc wrote:
       | Another side effect of law makers yoloing legislation on things
       | they don't seem to understand
        
       | styanax wrote:
       | Hoping the HN DNS savvy reading this can help me understand a
       | Quad9 thing I ran into. I was debugging (as in scratching my
       | head) a bank website login problem and ended up doing some DNS
       | checks against their domain, usual stuff, while using Quad9 as my
       | DNS provider.
       | 
       | While testing, I was using Google and Cloudflare as well, and
       | started noticing something - Quad9 does not return all A records
       | listed for a domain, the same way Google/Cloudflare do.
       | dig -t A google.com @8.8.8.8 +short (6x IPs)         dig -t A
       | google.com @1.1.1.1 +short (6x IPs)         dig -t A google.com
       | @9.9.9.9 +short (1x IP)
       | 
       | This gave me a weird feeling; I get there's a lot of DNS geo
       | magic and 8.8/1.1 serve 2 different subnets, and 9.9 a third.
       | But... where did the other 5 expected IPs from Quad9 get off to?
        
         | tom1337 wrote:
         | interestingly, i only get one IP from each command:
         | 
         | $ dig -t A google.com @8.8.8.8 +short
         | 
         | 142.250.184.206
         | 
         | $ dig -t A google.com @1.1.1.1 +short
         | 
         | 216.58.206.46
         | 
         | $ dig -t A google.com @9.9.9.9 +short
         | 
         | 142.250.185.238
        
           | styanax wrote:
           | I'm sure geo has something to do with it - my connections
           | generally terminate in Austin, TX but it varies around
           | Central US. I have T-Mobile Home Internet and our IPs show up
           | to remotes under the same general ASNs as the traditional
           | mobile network (big huge CGNAT, my IP can change 5 times a
           | day or whatnot and it doesn't reflect where I actually am
           | located).
           | 
           | Edit: in case useful to someone reading, right now I have an
           | IP assigned out of this block:                   NetRange:
           | 172.32.0.0 - 172.63.255.255         CIDR:
           | 172.32.0.0/11         NetName:        TMO9         NetHandle:
           | NET-172-32-0-0-1
           | 
           | Edit edit: in the network record is a link to the self-
           | reported geo data, I missed that.                   Comment:
           | Geofeed https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmobile/tmus-
           | geofeed/main/tmus-geo-ip.txt
        
             | toast0 wrote:
             | If you're behind a big CGNAT and Google knows it, they
             | might intentionally return multiple addresses to have more
             | capacity.
             | 
             | Each service port (IP:Port) can only receive 64k
             | connections from each NAT IP, returning more IPs from DNS
             | makes more connections available. Google is a very popular
             | service, so it makes sense to do. (Less so for v6, though)
             | 
             | Alternately, if they can't get a good feel for where you
             | are, returning A records for multiple locations makes
             | sense, too.
             | 
             | No idea why 4 AAAA vs 6 A; Google runs dual stacked and I'd
             | expect the same number of records for both; IIRC, 8 AAAA
             | will usually fit in a 512 byte udp reply, and anyway DNS64
             | might expand As into AAAAs, so you have to gauge sizes with
             | those anyway.
        
         | b3lvedere wrote:
         | Isn't that because Quad9 does (more) filtering than the other
         | two?
        
           | styanax wrote:
           | I actually do (did, I demoted it for now) use the unfiltered
           | service (9.9.9.10) but find the same result on both, so I
           | used .9 here to keep the chat more streamlined. But, could
           | still be relevant somehow?
        
         | laz wrote:
         | I see a single IP for all 3
         | 
         | While I'm here: Google uses edns0 client subnet to geo target
         | your client IP.
         | 
         | Try a dig -t txt o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @8.8.8.8 vs the others
         | to see the src IP of the packet sent to Google's DNS server,
         | and any edns0 info that came along with it.
        
           | styanax wrote:
           | Interestingly, I get 3 different source IPs, BUT! The one
           | from Quad9 is IPv6 and the ones from 8.8/1.1 are IPv4. Google
           | returns an extra TXT record as well with "edns0-client-subnet
           | 172.56.95.0/24". I'm not a DNS pro, so not sure what to make
           | of it.
           | 
           | As 9.9 returned an IPv6, I tested with AAAA records just now
           | - 1.1/8.8 respond with 4x IPs, 9.9 only 1x so it mirrors the
           | A records in spirit.
        
         | df0b9f169d54 wrote:
         | I used quad9 as the primary upstream DNS for my home. about 11
         | days ago I wasn't able to send any query to quad9, kinda
         | blocking. Their status page was green I suspected my ip was
         | blocked. Now I'm on quad1 :(
        
         | miyuru wrote:
         | Have you tested it with a static domain with multiple IPs?
         | 
         | Using google is bad way to test this scenario, since they use
         | EDNS and many other DNS load balancing methods to distribute
         | the load.
        
         | Sanzig wrote:
         | I really wanted to like Quad9, and used it for a while, but
         | there have been constant issues in the northeast with random
         | SERVFAILs for months now. I had to switch back to Cloudflare.
        
       | seethishat wrote:
       | This all started, in earnest, with Response Policy Zones being
       | added to BIND. RPZ allow DNS resolvers to lie to clients by
       | returning (nxdomain or redirects to other domains) and the client
       | does not know it is being lied to.
       | https://www.isc.org/docs/BIND_RPZ.pdf
       | 
       | At first, RPZ was used to block known malicious domains (drive by
       | malware downloads, etc.). Then, the security weenies started
       | using RPZ to block other things like TikTok (for
       | administrative/legal reasons). That's when the DNS became a big
       | lie.
       | 
       | I guess some day, one political party will use it to block the
       | websites of other political parties, etc. That's stupid to say (I
       | know) but that seems to be the slippery slope we are sliding
       | down.
        
       | mzajc wrote:
       | Does Quad9 run a resolver with DNSSEC but _without_ "malware"
       | blocking? So far I've had multiple instances (twice for a torrent
       | tracker, once for gist.github.com) where they blocked a non-
       | malware domain for a short while, which is really annoying to
       | deal with.
        
         | input_sh wrote:
         | Unfortunately no, they run 9.9.9.10, which is without "malware"
         | blocking _and_ without DNSSEC.
        
       | estimator7292 wrote:
       | Kind of wild that we're approaching a decentralized internet not
       | for the virtue of decentralization, but because of insane
       | authoritarian censorship.
        
         | qqvga wrote:
         | ironically/appropriately[?] a virtue of decentralization would
         | be combatting insane authoritarian censorship
        
         | jMyles wrote:
         | > insane authoritarian censorship
         | 
         | Sanity, liberty, and censorship-resistance are virtues.
         | 
         | (before mental wellness people get up in my grill, by "sanity",
         | I mean the preconditions likely to make sanity widespread)
        
         | xboxnolifes wrote:
         | I consider conser resistance _the_ defining virtue of
         | decentralization.
        
       | BikiniPrince wrote:
       | I just run my own name server. DNS blocking is no longer an issue
       | unless they get to the root name servers. With a little domain
       | warming from the top 5000 domains it's pretty snappy most of the
       | time.
        
         | lokar wrote:
         | Or block outbound 53 on residential networks
        
         | JdeBP wrote:
         | More realistically, DNS blocking is no longer an issue unless
         | "they" get to the registries for the top-level/second-level
         | domains. It's easy to make yourself immune to things injected
         | by the root content DNS servers, with at least two mechanisms
         | for combatting this (the better one being just running your own
         | private root content DNS server) having existed for most of
         | this century.
        
       | mlhpdx wrote:
       | Are we heading to a place where there will be many DNS resolvers
       | just to get a "full" picture of the internet? Or perhaps topical
       | upstream resolvers?
        
         | immibis wrote:
         | Easier to run your own uncensored resolver, no?
        
         | dc396 wrote:
         | See RFC 8806
        
       | charcircuit wrote:
       | if (geoip[sourceIp] === "France") {         if
       | (geoblocks["France"][sourceIp]) {           return NOT_FOUND;
       | }       }
       | 
       | I don't think the cost of writing the above code is an
       | existential threat.
        
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       (page generated 2025-11-10 23:01 UTC)