Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

185

mmywacaday about 4 hours ago 69 commentsRead Article on mullvad.net

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Discussion (69 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

pbhjpbhj•about 3 hours ago

>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.

Brilliant.

assumed_throwaw•about 2 hours ago

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.

[1] https://quad9.net/news/blog/italian-blocking-demands-followi...

loup-vaillant•about 1 hour ago

> 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.

jwitthuhn•about 1 hour ago

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.

sparkling•about 1 hour ago

>So you're supposed to block VPNs as well? What's next, Tor exit nodes? New VPN and Tor nodes as they pop up?

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).

oofdere•about 3 hours ago

Quad9 doesn't have an adblocking DNS service though, so it's not really a replacement.

ripdog•about 1 hour ago

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.

sgc•about 1 hour ago

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.

Brybry•about 1 hour ago

I use Mullvad's adblocking DNS server on my phone which is not always behind my home router.

ornornor•about 2 hours ago

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.

Maybe it’s time to try nym.com?

1970-01-01•about 2 hours ago

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.

cortesoft•about 2 hours ago

For blocking, I would much rather run my own service.

pbhjpbhj•about 3 hours ago

On the Quad9 website:

>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?

Arainach•about 3 hours ago

Not if Quad9 is using DNSSEC, no.

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...

zamadatix•about 3 hours ago

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.

thenewnewguy•about 2 hours ago

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).

seany•about 3 hours ago

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.

drnick1•about 1 hour ago

> 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].

[0] https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists

pprotas•about 1 hour ago

You can't compare running a single service in your home network with the operations it takes to serve a public DNS

drnick1•about 1 hour ago

This is a scaling problem, not an intrinsic difficulty. Mullvad already had the infrastructure in place. I suspect the real reason is cost-cutting.

anvuong•2 minutes ago

What is intrinsic difficulty? A product at scale has many intrinsic dimensions, not just technical. Saying scaling is not an intrinsic difficulty is pretty weird given a highly scalable product usually looks nothing like their 1-user counterpart even when they have the same functionality.

morserer•27 minutes ago

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.

SirSavary•about 1 hour ago

How much traffic is your public DNS serving?

mentalgear•about 3 hours ago

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.

autoexec•about 2 hours ago

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.

morserer•7 minutes ago

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.

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.

ajjahs•about 2 hours ago

> and what currently would prevent them from doing so if they haven't already

they arent gods. some people actually have moral standards and dont just do whatever a foreign agency wants them to do

greyface-•about 2 hours ago

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.

tancop•about 1 hour ago

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.

iamnothere•about 2 hours ago

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.

ianmurrays•about 3 hours ago

Does anyone know of good alternatives that also block ads? Seems Quad9 doesn't.

Dezvous•about 3 hours ago

NextDNS https://nextdns.io/

ornornor•about 2 hours ago

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)

mgrunwald_•about 3 hours ago

https://controld.com/free-dns

ripdog•about 1 hour ago

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/releases

Trivial to self-host, and gives you full control of blocking.

hexfish•about 3 hours ago

https://joindns4.eu/for-public#resolver-options

rdme•about 2 hours ago

I'm using numa(https://github.com/razvandimescu/numa) for ad filtering and odoh mode for privacy (shameless plug)

SamDc73•about 3 hours ago

nextdns.io might be an option

https://adguard-dns.io/kb/general/dns-providers/ have a list of options that some of them have ad blocker

brettdav•about 2 hours ago

What about Cloudflare’s public DNS? https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/setup/#1111-for-fa...

  1.1.1.2
  1.0.0.2
  2606:4700:4700::1112
  2606:4700:4700::1002

koeliga•about 2 hours ago

Cloudflare DNS does not block ads, it only blocks malware

sparkling•about 1 hour ago

Several (European) alternatives are available: https://eualternative.eu/categories/public-dns/

immortalist•43 minutes ago

dot.sb

leumon•about 2 hours ago

dns.adguard-dns.com

1vuio0pswjnm7•about 3 hours ago

These was one of the fastest DoH services for pipelined queries over single TCP connection

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

kennethrc•about 2 hours ago

They lost me as a customer when they got rid of port forwarding, which is nice to have on the high seas

stutstev•about 1 hour ago

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.

ornornor•about 2 hours ago

Curious what alternative you found as a replacement. Could you share?

RamRodification•about 2 hours ago

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.

erxam•about 1 hour ago

I've heard AirVPN being mentioned around, if it interests you.

UltraSane•34 minutes ago

I switched to ProtonVPN which has a heavy emphasis on port forwarding.

0xbadcafebee•15 minutes ago

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.

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.

em-bee•about 3 hours ago

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.

prmoustache•about 1 hour ago

There is always the option of running your own locally.

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.

DemiGuru•about 3 hours ago

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.

nullmatrix•about 3 hours ago

Their founder supports Nazis.

erxam•about 1 hour ago

Pretty unapologetically, too. He's still doing it and will keep doing it the more you give him money.

PufPufPuf•about 1 hour ago

Source?

snatekay•about 1 hour ago

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.

MrDOS•4 minutes ago

And “donated money” here means “his donations amounted to 72% of the party's entire 2025 revenue”[0].

[0]: https://www.flamman.se/techprofil-ger-miljoner-till-orebropa...

mschuster91•about 1 hour ago

First I thought it must be the usual Israel-related dogwhistle, but nope, it's legitimate and related to Swedish far-right Örebropartiet [1].

(Next time, might be worth to add a source yourself to prevent downvotes)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1uivm45/mullvad...

iamnothere•about 1 hour ago

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.)

csb6•14 minutes ago

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.

mschuster91•18 minutes ago

Whoever openly spouts the concept of "remigration" [1] has no business being called anything else but far-right.

> 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."

In particular, the "population replacement" is the most clear sign. That's as antisemitic and far-right as it gets [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party#Immigration_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement_conspiracy_t...