cross-posted from: https://kerala.party/post/347631
which is more effective, useful, and efficient?
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
80 points (98.8% liked)
Privacy
32456 readers
533 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well, you will always need an upstream DNS server to surf the internet. Even your DNS server in your LAN needs an upstream DNS server or it can't resolve domain names. This means whatever upstream DNS server you use you need trust it. Imo NextDNS is a good choice here.
A DNS server can use root hints to resolve addresses rather than needing an upstream DNS server.
Source
This just means that your local DNS server doesn't need to use the root DNS servers to resolve domain names but instead uses other authorative DNS servers in the internet to resolve your queries. So anyway you have to trust an upstream DNS server owned by someone else in the internet. There's no way around it unless you use hyperlocal.
But tbh NextDNS is the least good one. I use pihole with 1.1.1.1 upstream. I mean Nextdns could literally remove a "sponsor" from ur blacklist without ur knowledge. On local blocker not
Yes, but they don't. That's where I have to criticize NextDNS. It feels like the devs just let it run but stopped development. They still even offer a block list called "Energized" which is dead with all entries removed since I think 2021. They just don't care about updating anything. Don't get me wrong because I still like NextDNS very much. It's working completely fine as it is right now but it's just not getting updates (anymore).
My problem with a Pi-hole is that it only works in your LAN. You can't make use of it on your phone when you're not at home. This is where NextDNS is better. You might wanna use NextDNS only on your mobile devices. 300,000 queries per month are free anyway. Or just use RethinkDNS which is completely free right now but you need their app to have a white- and blacklist.
You can usea VPN to connect to your home network and use your pihole there.
You can just host pihole on a cloud server and get it with that ;)
True but a VPN connection drains your phone's battery quite well. That's why I never liked that option and prefer just using a DNS server with adblocking feature since it has 0 impact on your phone's bettery life.
Not really as long as you use some VPN that's not braindead stupid like OpenVPN. Wireguard is the perfect protocol, there's almost no overhead since it doesn't need keepalive packets or anything and there's no handshake beyond the initial connection either.
I've read reports of 3% to 10% battery usage with Wireguard on smartphones. To me even 1% would be too much but maybe that's not the case for you. I don't mind paying 2 bucks a month for a great product that is extremely simple to set up. If you prefer the way with Wireguard + Pi-hole than that's of course fine. To each their own.