>We want a public service to be available. Going forward, we will support Quad9 instead of running it ourselves. Running a privacy-focused public DNS service is a highly specialized undertaking, and the Quad9 Foundation is the undisputed leader in the field. Rather than duplicating their efforts to achieve only part of what they do, we're putting those resources toward financially supporting Quad9 instead.
Unfortunately, Quad9 is censoring some domains in Europe (notably in France and Italy) following injunctions issued by rights holders [1]. That was not the case with Mullvad's DNS.
> The German courts entirely disregarded our use of geo-IP lookups on queries, and asserted that since tests via a VPN were able to resolve the domain, we were in breach of court orders
Seriously, what the fuck? So you're supposed to block VPNs as well? What's next, Tor exit nodes? New VPN and Tor nodes as they pop up? I really don't like where this is going.
The entire point is that it can't be reasonably enforced with any granularity. Rights-holders want it to be like that so a copyright win in a single country means something has to be taken down globally.
German courts think the internet revolves around German laws. There are some really insane cases, sometimes they will consider a website to fall under German jurisdiction simply for having a German-language version (somehow ignoring that Austria and Switzerland exist, ignoring German-speaking minorities in other countries, ignoring that a fully automated translation in 100+ languages is now possible at the click of a button).
>Since Quad9 already performs DNSSEC validation, DNSSEC being enabled in the forwarder will cause a duplication of the DNSSEC process, significantly reducing performance and potentially causing false BOGUS responses.
This sounds dodgy. Surely that means Quad9 can poison my DNS?
DNSSEC validation on your forwarder would prevent a maliciously modified record from Quad9 (or others) from being accepted locally - i.e. "Quad9 can poison my DNS".
I've always been of two minds on this. On one hand, that concern is beyond any reasonable level of security/performance/reliability tradeoff for most any user. At the same time, it is a bit of a shame DNS doesn't have a more scalable & performant approach to security which can just always be done without having to consider it a tradeoff, however minor in practice.
Technically yes, in practice the odds your local resolver is validating DNSSEC is slim (and if you're intentionally configured it to do so, switch to a provider that isn't Quad9).
That's something people should run themselves. I run Adguard Home on my router. Unlike the main Adguard product, Adguard Home is fully FOSS. It's been rock-solid for me, and improves on pi-hole in various ways - like full IPv6 support.
It's probably the software I trust the most on my network to 'just work', and with the local caching I can use slower upstream dns providers and still have sub 1ms average latency (no performance worries by excluding google and cloudflare). I don't use it for dhcp, but it is a good fit that it's available as well. Couldn't be happier.
Mullvad had adblocking, malware blocking. And they didn’t block websites from governments blacklists in France and Italy. None of these features are available on Quad9.
This is a very important detail. Adblock in 2026 is necessary and DNS will transparently do a lot of that work for you. It isn't just about lightning fast lookups and five-nines uptime anymore.
I've been loving the Pihole setup I just set up. It uses Quad9 as the upstream provider and then I do all the blocking myself. I used to use NextDNS but this is so much better and free!
I'm all for supporting quad9; but what if we just disable dnssec instead, it really solves nothing and continued support of it just makes it show up in compliance guides unnecessarily.
> Running a privacy-focused public DNS service is a highly specialized undertaking
This seems like an overstatement: I have been running my own recursive DNS with Unbound for years and never thought it was a "highly specialized undertaking." It took perhaps a couple of hours to set up in the pre-AI age. I filter ads and trackers using an aggressive blacklist[0].
It's a legal problem (granted, you could still call that both a scaling problem and a cost problem), not a technical nor infrastructural one. That's where Quad9 has specific experience with public hosting that Mullvad doesn't.
I'm sure that the time, effort, money, and exposure that goes into responding and adhering to legal requests for a publicly offered service is something Mullvad wasn't expecting and would rather not be doing considering it's not their core focus.
I'm always wondering whether those centralized privacy services are not the easiest first target for three-letter-agencies to infiltrate to gain access to the most relevant users to track - and what currently would prevent them from doing so if they haven't already ? Maybe, as with the case of many TOR nodes , they might be running them.
I don't think there's any company with useful information on the American public that isn't being forced to regularly hand over that data. That's probably been true to some extent for a long time (see Room 641A) but it's certainly gotten worse. At this point you can't check out a book from the library without the feds demanding that your librarian turn over a list of everything you've ever read, or rent a hotel room for a night without the hotel being forced to provide your information to the government.
Use an online service that's new enough and small enough and it might not be compromised, but the moment it gets popular men with guns and national security letters with gag orders will show up to install hardware on their prem, take over entire offices, or just demand reports.
VPNs and secure DNS services aren't there to keep your data from the NSA, ICE, or even the police. They are useful for keeping your ISP from selling your browsing history to anyone willing to pay them (https://www.mitnicksecurity.com/in-the-news/republicans-just...). It'll help keep a little of what you do online away from data brokers, keep your ISP from sending you DMCA notices, and not much else.
Adversaries don't always ask nicely. Sometimes they break in and silently take the data. These services centralize traffic flows and make it so that an adversary only needs to tap one or two circuits to get a full picture for all users of a service.
CIA is not stupid enough to break into a guarded data center in Switzerland or one of the less America friendly EU countries. They tell the NSA to look for security holes and spread narratives that only criminals use VPN hoping that a politician will notice and try to ban them, like what's happening in the UK.
Big tech services are less private than you think but almost every provider who cares about privacy is safer than you expect. Most of the people who work there are committed to their mission, and if they ever get a gag order someone will leak it in no time because they know exactly how to do it without exposing their identity.
Why would they serve a secret subpoena and gag order, when instead they can just drive to a secluded location 5km away from the super secure datacenter, dig a few meters down, passively tap a strand or two, facility and service operators none the wiser?
Quad9 is a reasonable choice given the stance on privacy and the similar jurisdiction (Mullvad would probably face the same takedown orders as Quad9), but really anyone who cares about bypassing national blocking orders should run a local caching recursive resolver. Unbound is a great choice.
Unbound can also be used to block malware and advertising domains using shared public lists, or you can build your own list. Your resolver’s DNS queries could be piped through Mullvad or Tor if you want additional privacy.
Been using them for years. The price is reasonable too. It’s the only way I found to block ads everywhere on iOS (except the YT app, Mullvad’s Albania wireguard did that)
I stopped using Mullvad when they discontinued OpenVPN support (another one to add to the parent list). OpenVPN, if nothing else, provides a wider array of connection options that have a better chance of fulfilling your specific network needs. It supports both UDP and TCP, unlike WireGuard.
I say this respectfully, but Mullvad is perhaps “dumbing down” their VPN service in an effort to simplify their operations and cater to a wider and more general audience.
I'm not the person you are responding to, but Proton VPN? That's what I switched to after it turned out one of the two Mullvad founders took my money and gave it to a local lunatic politician.
disappointing, because alternatives matter too. quad9 and other well known servers are potentially blocked by some countries, so the more lesser known services there are the better.
Mullvad talks a lot about decentralization, then hands its resolver users to one of the biggest resolvers going. Quad9 is a good operator, and they actually fought Sony in German court instead of quietly complying. They still got ordered to block. That's the problem. A blocking order only hurts as much as the resolver it lands on is used, so every operator that shuts down and sends its users to Quad9 makes the next order a better deal for whoever files it.
Translation: one of Mullvad’s two cofounders has donated money to Örebropartiet, a left-leaning Swedish political party that promotes strict and restrictive immigration laws.
They are not far right, AFAICT they are “right” Marxists, probably most similar to Albanian Hoxhaism.
If you aren’t familiar with splits inside Marxism-Leninism, the “left” is most often represented by Trotskyism with the “right” tendency being more like Stalinism and North Korean Juche. (Note that these left/right terms aren’t universally used or applied because every faction claims to be correct.)
Brilliant.
[1] https://quad9.net/news/blog/italian-blocking-demands-followi...
Seriously, what the fuck? So you're supposed to block VPNs as well? What's next, Tor exit nodes? New VPN and Tor nodes as they pop up? I really don't like where this is going.
Trivial to do nowadays: https://focsec.com/
>I really don't like where this is going.
German courts think the internet revolves around German laws. There are some really insane cases, sometimes they will consider a website to fall under German jurisdiction simply for having a German-language version (somehow ignoring that Austria and Switzerland exist, ignoring German-speaking minorities in other countries, ignoring that a fully automated translation in 100+ languages is now possible at the click of a button).
>Since Quad9 already performs DNSSEC validation, DNSSEC being enabled in the forwarder will cause a duplication of the DNSSEC process, significantly reducing performance and potentially causing false BOGUS responses.
This sounds dodgy. Surely that means Quad9 can poison my DNS?
What's the specific threat you're envisioning? If it involves Quad9 themselves being malicious, what would DNSSEC on the forwarding prevent?
This page explains how all of this works in detail: https://quad9.net/news/blog/quad9-enables-dnssec-on-all-serv...
I've always been of two minds on this. On one hand, that concern is beyond any reasonable level of security/performance/reliability tradeoff for most any user. At the same time, it is a bit of a shame DNS doesn't have a more scalable & performant approach to security which can just always be done without having to consider it a tradeoff, however minor in practice.
Maybe it’s time to try nym.com?
This seems like an overstatement: I have been running my own recursive DNS with Unbound for years and never thought it was a "highly specialized undertaking." It took perhaps a couple of hours to set up in the pre-AI age. I filter ads and trackers using an aggressive blacklist[0].
[0] https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists
I'm sure that the time, effort, money, and exposure that goes into responding and adhering to legal requests for a publicly offered service is something Mullvad wasn't expecting and would rather not be doing considering it's not their core focus.
Use an online service that's new enough and small enough and it might not be compromised, but the moment it gets popular men with guns and national security letters with gag orders will show up to install hardware on their prem, take over entire offices, or just demand reports.
VPNs and secure DNS services aren't there to keep your data from the NSA, ICE, or even the police. They are useful for keeping your ISP from selling your browsing history to anyone willing to pay them (https://www.mitnicksecurity.com/in-the-news/republicans-just...). It'll help keep a little of what you do online away from data brokers, keep your ISP from sending you DMCA notices, and not much else.
they arent gods. some people actually have moral standards and dont just do whatever a foreign agency wants them to do
Big tech services are less private than you think but almost every provider who cares about privacy is safer than you expect. Most of the people who work there are committed to their mission, and if they ever get a gag order someone will leak it in no time because they know exactly how to do it without exposing their identity.
Unbound can also be used to block malware and advertising domains using shared public lists, or you can build your own list. Your resolver’s DNS queries could be piped through Mullvad or Tor if you want additional privacy.
Trivial to self-host, and gives you full control of blocking.
https://adguard-dns.io/kb/general/dns-providers/ have a list of options that some of them have ad blocker
IME, it was much faster than Quad9 for this purpose
First Mullvad shuts down its Google search proxy
Now its DoH service
What's next
I say this respectfully, but Mullvad is perhaps “dumbing down” their VPN service in an effort to simplify their operations and cater to a wider and more general audience.
This is probably service you can host locally with the lowest maintenance and hardware requirements so it isn't even a hassle to do it yourself.
(Next time, might be worth to add a source yourself to prevent downvotes)
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1uivm45/mullvad...
If you aren’t familiar with splits inside Marxism-Leninism, the “left” is most often represented by Trotskyism with the “right” tendency being more like Stalinism and North Korean Juche. (Note that these left/right terms aren’t universally used or applied because every faction claims to be correct.)