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DNS4EU: a private, safe, and independent European DNS resolver

Recently I switched my DNS Resolver to one of the European public DNS resolvers | European Alternatives mainly for privacy reasons after reading Cloudflare’s blog post about analytics in their free-tiers.

But I missed the malware protection. But today I just got aware of DNS4EU For Public!

DNS4EU is an initiative by the European Commission that aims to offer an alternative to the public DNS resolvers currently dominating the market.
https://www.joindns4.eu/about

It offers 5 different flavours:

Unfiltered resolution
Protective resolution: Blocks access to known malicious and fraudulent websites
Protective Resolution With Child Protection
Protective Resolution Ad-blocking
Protective Resolution With Child Protection & Ad-blocking

And also with some step-by-step guidelines for configuring DNS settings on a variety of platforms.

Update 23.06: The article Datenschutz: Wie viel EU steckt in DNS4EU? analyzes the technical setup. which unfortunately shows quite some US-corps involved. On the other hand, DNS4YOU does not aim to analyze the traffic.

How to reduce AdTracking with Fritz!Box filter lists for mobile devices

Problem: I am using Pi-Hole on my network to block quite a few ADs and trackers. However, the blocking does not work reliably on Android devices on our WiFi (This thread suggests that this also concerns Apple devices – but we don’t have any at home, though).

I noticed this when I was researching some cycling products and my wife suddenly started getting cycling ADs in her Facebook stream on her tablet. We don’t share devices or accounts or anything – but we do share the same network and therefore the IP of our router.

SmartTVs going from bad to worse?

When we bought a new TV a couple of years ago, I was really to use all the Smart features from our SmartTV. But after a while the discomfort has outweighed the features. Recently we had the opportunity to “test” a newer SmartTV in a hotel and I must admit – it hasn’t gotten better! But I was surprised that the rabbit hole was even deeper and darker than I would have expected …