>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.<p>Brilliant.
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.<p>[1] <a href="https://quad9.net/news/blog/italian-blocking-demands-following-a-bad-example/" rel="nofollow">https://quad9.net/news/blog/italian-blocking-demands-followi...</a>
> <i>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</i><p>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.
What's even worse: the court fined us because they claimed this use case was in some way in contempt of their ruling. Then, when we won the overall case, that money was never returned because it wasn't specifically referenced by the final court. The response from the lower court was effectively: "Well, you will need to sue the court to get that money back." <table flip><p>Edit: I'm with Quad9 (CTO)
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 federal LE agencies have been doing it for years. Threatening to put you on lists of wanted and sanctioned individuals as a basically islamic suicide bomber for not taking down tiny things globally.<p>That kind of thing isn't unheard of for police agencies with moral and oversight issues, though. Orgs start seeking for bigger reasons. A simple copyright issue creatively expounded into an imaginary global drug bombing cyber trafficking crime ring takedown creates a massive internal win. So they do that.
>So you're supposed to block VPNs as well? What's next, Tor exit nodes? New VPN and Tor nodes as they pop up?<p>Trivial to do nowadays: <a href="https://focsec.com/" rel="nofollow">https://focsec.com/</a><p>>I really don't like where this is going.<p>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).
German courts and technology are not always the best friends
There's some irony in Germany using censorship for the purpose of ensuring people don't get into reading materials that might convince them to become... fascists who censor people
There is no irony. The German government <i>is</i> proto-fascist, and has been for a while, as are several other European governments. Apparently the UK now arrests more people per capita for online speech than China does.
On the Quad9 website:<p>>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.<p>This sounds dodgy. Surely that means Quad9 can poison my DNS?
I use Clouldflare DoT and enabled validation in systemd-resolved some time ago. Not because I would be particularly paranoid, but more out of curiosity how it works. I noticed no problems, except for with Atlassian. They use 2 second level domains (at least), one under .com signed and one under .net (unsigned) (IIRC). Most things worked like normal, but some Jira extension stopped working. Turned out that systemd did reject their signed subdomains. Could not figure out whether the rejection was justified or not. When I asked Claude 7 times about it, I also got 7 contradicting answers... Reported to Atlassian support that their signing is incorrect (some delegation missing). To my surprise they replied: Are you using systemd? And gave a bug number that systemd handles validation wrong in their case.<p>Haven't had time to study the bug and really understand the whole issue myself. Just left it there with the takeaway that local validation is currently not for non-experts.<p>(Sorry not at my computer. Details rather vague from memory.)
Not if Quad9 is using DNSSEC, no.<p>What's the specific threat you're envisioning? If it involves Quad9 themselves being malicious, what would DNSSEC on the forwarding prevent?<p>This page explains how all of this works in detail: <a href="https://quad9.net/news/blog/quad9-enables-dnssec-on-all-service-endpoints/" rel="nofollow">https://quad9.net/news/blog/quad9-enables-dnssec-on-all-serv...</a>
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".<p>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.
Wait, I must be misunderstanding you, because if you're resolving off Quad9, they can <i>definitely</i> poison your DNSSEC-signed records. Between a stub resolver and a recursor DNSSEC collapses down to a single "yes it was signed" bit in the header.<p>To protect yourself from an upstream resolver using DNSSEC, you need to be doing something akin to a full recursive lookup yourself. This is a flaw in the DNSSEC design and a reason why DoH took off instead.
I don't know the details but knot-resolver asks for DS records of the domain being looked up when forwarding to avoid needing to do a full recursive lookup to validate DNSSEC. As I recall from what I've read this works almost everywhere, including Quad9, but not Google DNS due to a bug that they claim to have identified three years ago but haven't fixed. But as I understand it this is not how recursive resolvers validate so it is extra data that the forwarding server needs to request and cache.
> To protect yourself from an upstream resolver using DNSSEC, you need to be doing something akin to a full recursive lookup yourself. This is a flaw in the DNSSEC design and a reason why DoH took off instead.<p>What? I don't see how you can call that a flaw in DNSSEC when DoH is no better in this regard; it doesn't even attempt to protect against a malicious recursive resolver. The only way to do that is to validate DNSSEC on the client.
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).
Quad9 doesn't have an adblocking DNS service though, so it's not really a replacement.
My setup goes like this:<p>Fiber ONT -> Proxmox x86 -> OpenWRT -> Adguard Home -> unbound -> Quad9.<p>Browser: Firefox + ublock origin & privacy badger & strict privacy setting & Https-only.<p>My internet is rock solid and super fast, extra low latencies. OpenWRT shapes my traffic to 90% of line speeds, so zero bufferbloat on my end. All my devices connect to this setup. The proxmox box is just an old dual core mini-pc with 8gb ram and 2x 1gbps NIC's and a wifi 6 module for 2.3gbps wireless (only 5Ghz, no 2.4Ghz). I want to replace this box with a new one to get 2.5gb ethernet & better power efficiency as my box is a 51W cpu, but total powerdraw is about 20w without causing wifi to drop. Aggressive power saving can make wifi unstable.
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.
<p><pre><code> > That's something people should run themselves. I run Adguard Home on my router.
</code></pre>
I'll second this. People should really be flashing their routers. OpenWRT is simple enough that if you're on HN I think you'll easily be able to do it. And like most routers, you set it up and forget it.<p>But you'll also get a bunch more benefits from OpenWRT, to make it worth your while.<p><pre><code> - I was able to buy a router for <$100 that was WiFi 7 capable (W1700K[0]) and had better hardware than most consumer routers. You can find plenty of cheaper routers that are flashable and more capable.
- Adguard Home
- Split tunneling/VLANs: Since we're talking Mullvad, you can put devices behind Mullvad on a VLAN. So activate Mullvad by changing SSIDs.
- Trivial to put IOT devices on a VLAN (can make one directional too so you can access from your main network but they can't reach back. I throttle everything IOT)
- Tailscale
- QoS (Control the speed and prioritization of different connections)
- It's a fucking computer, you can even run shell scripts
</code></pre>
[0] You don't need something like this unless you're getting >1Gbps from your ISP. Big thing I wanted is the 2 10G ports.
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.
I use Mullvad's adblocking DNS server on my phone which is not always behind my home router.
If you're on Android, FF supports add-ons.<p>If you're on an iPhone, uBlock is now supported: <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698">https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...</a><p>There's also Orion browser, but I found it to be a bit more glitchy, especially around sites like YouTube (fuck the app, I'm not watching videos there): <a href="https://orionbrowser.com/" rel="nofollow">https://orionbrowser.com/</a>
Yes, I use Firefox on Android with ublock origin, it works great. But using adblocking DNS on your phone will also block most in-app ads which is a big quality of life improvement.<p>I could also use a VPN to keep my phone always on my home network and thus behind my own ad blocking DNS but Mullvad's adblocking DNS was really nice and convenient.
Really? I never found it effective unless I messed with certs on my phone.<p>For example, DNS blocking isn't going to block YouTube ads if you're using the app since they don't need to respect your DNS, but it will if you're in browser because they can't control that.<p>For apps I always use revanced.
Ads from providers like Google AdMob and AppLovin are blocked. Apps could bundle their own DNS or DoH resolver or use hardcoded static IP addresses but in my experience most do not.<p>Youtube ads do not get blocked by DNS adblock because Youtube ads are served from the same domains as the content and thus DNS blocking would be counterproductive. I don't think it has anything to do with respecting DNS.<p>I don't have the Youtube app installed to test but the Internet suggests that at least in 2023 it was very possible to block the Youtube android app (content and all) via DNS, which hints it does not bypass system DNS. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://superuser.com/questions/713289/blocking-youtube-android-app-from-router" rel="nofollow">https://superuser.com/questions/713289/blocking-youtube-andr...</a>
It's not the same thing at all. Mullvad DNS blocks all ads across the system.
I've been using NextDNS [0] for a long time. It's worth the price because you can set up all kinds of different blocking profiles and have different ones on different devices, allows you to have overrides for local network items (or internals like on a Tailnet, Pangolin, Wireguard, etc) and a lot more. The ad blocking ends up working so well a lot not only are ads blocked on web pages but it works with some streaming audio ads as well as VoD that has ads injected. Highly recommend.<p>[0] <a href="https://nextdns.io" rel="nofollow">https://nextdns.io</a>
Up until the developers roll their host files into their app. That's why a pihole doesn't stop ads when you use the YouTube app.<p>Look, I still run AdGuard on my router, but it's not the same thing
The uBlock Origin lite that can run on iOS is very limited compared to the uBlock Origin that runs on Firefox Android.
I could, but DoH/DoT seems very involved to run yourself, and sometimes I need to give a recommendation to someone less tech-savvy.
I stopped recommending anything I host myself for those people. When it breaks I'm the support team, and I'd rather not be. NextDNS free tier is what I give them now, takes two minutes, and I never hear about it again.
I'd argue you don't need to run DoT/DoH yourself if it is just for your local network.<p>Setting up a local resolver, such as a Pi-Hole or Unbound on a firewall can serve unencrypted responses to your devices. Those resolvers in turn can use DoT/DoH with their upstream resolvers to encrypt the requests that go through untrusted networks on the Internet.<p>This is the best of both worlds, the simplicity of unencrypted DNS while encrypting traffic where it matters.
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.<p>Maybe it’s time to try nym.com?
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 using Control D and have been happy with it so far
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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 (<a href="https://www.mitnicksecurity.com/in-the-news/republicans-just-voted-to-let-internet-providers-sell-your-online-history-heres-what-that-means-for-you" rel="nofollow">https://www.mitnicksecurity.com/in-the-news/republicans-just...</a>). 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.
For clarification, this is completely true of the US, without needing to speculate, thanks to a combination of FISA 702, the ECPA, CALEA, EO 12333, and the CLOUD act. It all has legal footing in the States.<p>However, it's not at all the reality of a vast swath of other countries (or, at least, not yet; see Chat Control v2). The US is particularly foul (and effective) when it comes to this practice, but anything outside of US jurisdiction that doesn't have an office in the US can't be touched by laws like these, and the laws of most other countries tend to be significantly less invasive than American ones when it comes to data interception and the practices surrounding it.
> and what currently would prevent them from doing so if they haven't already<p>they arent gods. some people actually have moral standards and dont just do whatever a foreign agency wants them to do
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.<p>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.
For awhile I self-hosted adguard dns server. It supports iphone profiles thus forcing iOS DNS. I eventually disabled it due to timeout issues specific to iOS. Issue was something DNSSEC related.<p>While reproing the issue I noted the average recursor round trip time from my OVH server hosted in Oregon to the default upstream DNS - Quad9 - was around 70ms. When I changed it to Hurricane Electric the roundtrip dropped to a steady 20ms. Later I changed it again to Cloudflare and the roundtrip was a consistent 2 to 3ms.
It's not that I don't trust Quad9 or dns.sb or any of the others, it's just that I trust Mullvad more.<p>Sad to see this going away, but I assume this is so Mullvad can focus on their primary services.
Hi - I'm with Quad9 (CTO). I'm going to try to put together a single post replying to some of these topics.<p>First: We welcome the Mullvad users who will be shifted onto our systems, and we appreciate that Mullvad contacted us instead of doing this unilaterally. Since we have no signup process, they could have just moved users across but we very much appreciate their cooperation and communication, both with us and with the users of the service - this is exactly how an ideal transfer should go, at least from our perspective.<p>I'll try to make some short summaries of some of the points here, and a reply on each.<p>"You should just run your own DNS server - it's easy." - Yes, we agree that for a small company or home running your own recursive resolver is a reasonable solution. You probably won't get the threat mitigation depth of service that Quad9 offers, but you may not want that. Privacy also suffers a bit, since it's still the same IP address (your home "public" address) sending queries to authoritative servers, probably unencrypted. A good middle compromise is to run PiHole or AdGuard software, and forward your queries to Quad9 via an encrypted connection. (see below) This mixes your queries in with a large number of other users, and gets the potential improvements of having a much larger active cache nearby which will have "hot" answers.
Running a home resolver for yourself or even a few dozen (or even a few hundred) people is not difficult. But with all services, things change with scale. As the query volume and number of locations grow, you soon find yourself hitting all possible exception cases, instantly. Many millions of requests a second requires a lot of time, expertise, and money to ensure nearly 100% uptime. We are admittedly quite a small group - less than 10 full time - but even that is under-staffed for supporting more than 100 million daily users. We do quite a bit with a very small resource set, and I doubt it could be done less expensively with the same robustness for the same scale. Again, we appreciate Mullvad's sponsorship to help keep this expanding at our normal weekly growth rate of around 2%.<p>"I want ad blocking, and Quad9 doesn't do that" - Correct, Quad9 does not do ad blocking at this time. There are good solutions like PiHole or AdGuard extensions that provide this functionality, and getting local control and logging of your DNS queries is probably useful for power users. There are also commercial platforms that provide this capability, and they may provide significantly more "knobs" for what you want to block. Quad9 is a non-profit - we're not out to corner the market, and as long as privacy and security is increased for the end user, we're all for commercial solutions!<p>"Quad9 blocks domains in Germany" - Currently there are no mandatory blocks that Quad9 is integrating or enforcing on our DNS platform, from any external party. We did briefly block some domains as a result of legal actions against us in Germany. The good news is that we won that case in Germany, after two years and three appeals and an enormous amount of time and money (which despite Germany's "loser pays" rule, is not even close to expenditures.) <a href="https://quad9.net/news/blog/quad9-turns-the-sony-case-around-in-dresden/" rel="nofollow">https://quad9.net/news/blog/quad9-turns-the-sony-case-around...</a> The bad news is that the identical thing is happening now in France where we have a number of legal cases open against Quad9, and we do not see an end to this any time soon as long as there is an open question in the EU about what a content-neutral intermediary is and is not required to do.<p>"Mullvad exiting creates more centralization, and that is bad." On the fact that centralization is bad, we agree. DNS resolver centralization is not a great thing, and it seems to be trending in the wrong direction. It's not just large public resolvers - consolidation in the ISP industry is causing more and more of the world's internet-using population to utilize a smaller number of recursive servers. Those servers are operated (mostly) by law-abiding companies, and so there is a strong interest by various parties interested in control of content to "put a hand on the available throat" even though it's the wrong throat to choke. We're busy with some ideas of how to solve this, both from a legal defense position as well as a technology position - stay tuned in the coming months. In the meantime, you can contribute a few euros/francs/dollars to us and we'll have more funds to pay for legal defense in France and hopefully up to the EU courts. <a href="https://quad9.net/donate/" rel="nofollow">https://quad9.net/donate/</a><p>"Government agencies can tap data" - Quad9 is based in Switzerland. Despite what may be common knowledge from movies, there is a very formal and rigorous process for governments (Swiss or non-Swiss) to demand data. It is (ultimately) transparent, and managed in a way that is quite well structured - this is, after all, what the Swiss have been doing with financial data for many years. More importantly: Quad9 stores no user data about queries. There isn't anything to demand - the box of data is quite empty. Because of this technological decision and our wide announcement of it (<a href="https://quad9.net/about/transparency-report/" rel="nofollow">https://quad9.net/about/transparency-report/</a>) we have never received a request for data.
As for technological methods: Quad9 operates in 200+ widely-separated locations, with no backbone or central data transport network - it is intentionally 'islanded'. It would be a significant challenge to intercept data at all those locations, though we're certain that there are many queries that are observed due to their presence on various ISP or cable networks which are under surveillance.
We support all major DNS encryption methods today (even the two that run on QUIC - HTTP/3 and DOQ) and we encourage users to use one of those for their communications to us. We are also one of the few major resolvers experimenting with ADOx, which encrypts messages between the recursive resolver and authoritative server. (<a href="https://dnsprivacy.org/adox_status_and_deployment/" rel="nofollow">https://dnsprivacy.org/adox_status_and_deployment/</a>)
Does anyone know of good alternatives that also block ads? Seems Quad9 doesn't.
NextDNS <a href="https://nextdns.io/" rel="nofollow">https://nextdns.io/</a>
<a href="https://controld.com/free-dns" rel="nofollow">https://controld.com/free-dns</a>
<a href="https://joindns4.eu/for-public#resolver-options" rel="nofollow">https://joindns4.eu/for-public#resolver-options</a>
I have a router with adguard on it so I can locally filter everything.<p>Sometimes you need to unblock things to ensure something works properly, so having it be local is better in my opinion.
<a href="https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/releases" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/releases</a><p>Trivial to self-host, and gives you full control of blocking.
nextdns.io might be an option<p><a href="https://adguard-dns.io/kb/general/dns-providers/" rel="nofollow">https://adguard-dns.io/kb/general/dns-providers/</a> have a list of options that some of them have ad blocker
I'm using numa(<a href="https://github.com/razvandimescu/numa" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/razvandimescu/numa</a>) for ad filtering and odoh mode for privacy (shameless plug)
Several (European) alternatives are available: <a href="https://eualternative.eu/categories/public-dns/" rel="nofollow">https://eualternative.eu/categories/public-dns/</a>
dot.sb
dns.adguard-dns.com
What about Cloudflare’s public DNS? <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/setup/#1111-for-families" rel="nofollow">https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/setup/#1111-for-fa...</a><p><pre><code> 1.1.1.2
1.0.0.2
2606:4700:4700::1112
2606:4700:4700::1002</code></pre>
These was one of the fastest DoH services for pipelined queries over single TCP connection<p>IME, it was much faster than Quad9 for this purpose<p>First Mullvad shuts down its Google search proxy<p>Now its DoH service<p>What's next
They lost me as a customer when they got rid of port forwarding, which is nice to have on the high seas
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 <i>and</i> TCP, unlike WireGuard.<p>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.
Curious what alternative you found as a replacement. Could you share?
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.
I've heard AirVPN being mentioned around, if it interests you.
Switched to Windscribe at the time, quite cheap.
I switched to ProtonVPN which has a heavy emphasis on port forwarding.
I did too, but I really miss Mullvad's static port forwarding system. It's a pain having to continually run a NAT-PMP client, and it doesn't work when you're connecting to ProtonVPN on your router.
I've found DoH was pretty unusable for me on Windows because the TCP connection doesn't seem to stay open between queries. No idea if it's a software or network issue, but big unpredictable delays on DNS queries broke all kinds of weird unexpected stuff.
NB. I don't use Windows and I don't use "Private DNS". I'm referring to using HTTP/1.1 pipelining^1 with a TCP client plus TLS forward proxy or HTTP/2 with an ldns-based client to fetch DNS data in bulk, outside the browser, from the command line. I got some incredible speeds from Mullvad<p>1. Not every service still supports 1.1, RFC recommends H2
Also had a ChatGPT alternative with less surveillance<p>Discontinued
I used to use Mullvad's DoH Service because of ad blocking, it worked quite well with SoundCloud etc.<p>Are there any alternatives?
This obviously isn't for everyone, but the solution I use is: my own DNS server at home + wg to access it when I'm away.
nextdns. I wonder why people use anything else at all
Quad9 has horrible latency and frequent query failures, I hope Mullvad encourages them to improve their routes
Their DoH going down for hours multiple times is what forced me back to cloudflare, i don't trust cloudflare more but at least it works consistently.<p>Additionally the default of blocking 'malware' doesn't jive with uncensored internet - that should be an opt in and not a default on their flagship address if they want to be taken seriously as unfiltered provider.<p>If the encrypted endpoint can go down for extended periods and they curate list of 'malware' they are not something that should be considered a gateway to uncensored and open internet.
I compared pings recently and was getting like 200-300ms to the closest mullvad DoH server. Quad9 has an adblocking DoH DNS with decent latency.
What does everybody here think about Daniel Berntsson, founder and co-owner of Mullvad, personally donating 5 million Swedish krona to the populist Örebro party, criticized for its stances on race & immigration?<p>I'm not trying to start an unhealthy discussion about this topic, genuinely curious about your opinion on the matter.
Irrespective of political affiliations, I felt that Mullvad addressed the outrage in a mature and non culture war manner. Because of how they handled the situation, I have a lot more respect for the company.<p>It's great that they didn't try to cancel the guy or get seduced into driving a wedge into their team. It is great they chose their principle over pleasing the crowd in such a transparent way.<p>I have been a customer for many years. I once even used the cash payment option out of curiosity.<p>Here is their statement:<p><a href="https://mullvad.net/en/blog/donation-controversy" rel="nofollow">https://mullvad.net/en/blog/donation-controversy</a><p>They even linked his (Swedish language) private blog on which he wrote on the issue:<p><a href="https://dberntsson.info/" rel="nofollow">https://dberntsson.info/</a>
He is in his full right to support whatever party he wants?<p>Those parties exists for a reason, a response to certain pressures. Nothing happens in isolation. If you zoom out a bit and if you can for a second try to empathize with both sides, you will often find that both sides of an issue is correct, reasonable & rational from their own perspectives. It is often more an emotional response than one of pure survival.<p>The more you force things on people or suppress them, the more they will resist & push back. The rise of the far-right is not random or just pure evil manifesting out of thin air. It is like a acute inflammatory/immune system response. Obviously it can be exploited by bad actors to further inflame/divide & accelerate certain agendas. Often times extremism takes hold when certain justices are denied (which is in fact evil).<p>Life is best if you assume the guy on the other side (90% of a group) is just a bro trying to survive & have no real bad intent towards you, they don't know you or have been in your shoes, and the other way around too. Thus it is very important to become non-reactive, become observant who is trying to stoke the flames, who benefits from the chaos and so on.
I have no insights in Swedish politics. His actions could be really bad, or mean nothing at all. Without proper context, it’s hard to say.
> Running a privacy-focused public DNS service is a highly specialized undertaking<p>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].<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists</a>
That's a shame, even if I remember their DNS service being a bit unstable (it would at various points not be able to resolve or flat out it was down).
The old heads out there might remember a time when, rather than everyone using one service provider (ex. for Linux binaries/source), we all mutually agreed to use independently run mirrors closer to us. We sort of had to because of bandwidth and latency limits. But it meant that there were a thousand different people providing the same service. Impossible to censor everyone, everyone shares the load, too many places to hack if you wanted to massively compromise, and the users won.<p>DNS is harder to do that way because it's hard to have limits on DNS. Perhaps DNS could be adapted with QUIC, to allow fast, encrypted DNS that's easier to rate-limit, and then it'd be easier for average people to run public mirrors with limits.
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.
There is always the option of running your own locally.<p>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.
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.
Their founder supports Nazis.
Pretty unapologetically, too. He's still doing it and will keep doing it the more you give him money.
Source?
First I thought it must be the usual Israel-related dogwhistle, but nope, it's legitimate and related to Swedish far-right Örebropartiet [1].<p>(Next time, might be worth to add a source yourself to prevent downvotes)<p>[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1uivm45/mullvad_founder_unveiled_as_biggest_funder_of/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1uivm45/mullvad...</a>
They are not far right, AFAICT they are “right” Marxists, probably most similar to Albanian Hoxhaism.<p>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.)
I think it is more accurate to think of them as syncretic. (that is what Wikipedia has them listed as) Their main focus seems to be on nationalism/anti-immigration rather than socialism. Many fascist parties historically flirt with socialist policies as a way to make inroads with working class voters so it is not always straightforward.
Whoever openly spouts the concept of "remigration" [1] has no business being called anything else but far-right.<p>> In its political program for the 2026 Swedish general election the Örebro Party writes that they want to "stop the ongoing population replacement" and make Sweden a monocultural society, rather than a multicultural one. The party also writes that this "will be a Sweden where ethnic Swedes are once again the clear majority."<p>In particular, the "population replacement" is the most clear sign. That's as antisemitic and far-right as it gets [2].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party#Immigration_and_remigration_policy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party#Immigration_...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement_conspiracy_theory" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement_conspiracy_t...</a>
Is Kim Jong Un far right? Seems like a stretch. (North Korea’s immigration policies are even more restrictive than what they want.)<p>Btw, Malcom Kyeyune, who has a podcast with the party’s founder, is a black child of an immigrant, adopts an avatar on Twitter of Kim Jong Un’s sister, and semi-ironically stans for North Korea on a regular basis.
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