My only gripe with nextdns is the 100000 query limit for each free account. Also logs by default is iffy but other than that excellent

$20 a year is cheaper than $10 a month for a VPN 👍

And me here thinking you passed 18 ... 🤣🥳🤪

I've had a tough life, I'm younger than I look 😂

Fair enough

Man I really need to set up a pi hole. Thanks for the reminder.

After 3 years of use, mine died about an hour before we were due to go on holiday. I was using the ISPs DNS until I switched to CloudFlare, then saw somebody mention NextDNS, it's cool, but there's nothing like running your own services. I might get another pi-hole up and running some time. Umbrel has the app, but I think it's better to use a dedicated device.

I'm always looking for a new project with raspberry pi's. Currently trying to build a semi-smart phone with a 2G wavshare modem and some code which was stolen from this project:

GitHub

GitHub - evanman83/OURS-project: Step-by-step instructions to build a smartphone that is open-source, upgradeable, repairable, and Big Tech free.

Step-by-step instructions to build a smartphone that is open-source, upgradeable, repairable, and Big Tech free. - evanman83/OURS-project

Kinda stuck though as while I can text and call - I can't make the audio work in either direction. Might be time to give up, and work on setting up a pi-hole at the router. Would love to remove those ads network wide!

From experience, Brave browser is far more successful at removing ads then Pi-hole was. Most companies, like YouTube or Facebook don't have separate servers to serve their ads and so Pi-hole's DNS approach is not very effective. Pi-hole did work well on less popular sites that outsource their ads to external companies tho.

I've turned this off for now, it seems to cause general DNS resolution issues 😞 View quoted note →

any idea what they are doing to bypass it?

A few things: For sites that use external verification services, they block the DNS of this verification site, instead replacing the handoff to return a valid ID status to the originating server. For others, they fake your IP to make it look like you're coming from a country that doesn't need ID. i.e. similar to a VPN, but not actually routing via that country or creating a tunnel. The problem, I think, is that it is using these systems for sites that don't explicitly need it, such as Google search, meaning that sometimes you fail to reach that site because it doesn't know where to send the return traffic. They do say it is "Beta" right now and uses AI, so you should expect issues. It's probably best to use a VPN, until they do more work on this.