DNS – The IT Blog

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 fix: Android Connected, No Internet with Pi-Hole

Since quite a while I was running a Pi-Hole DNS server in my network to block ad- & tracking requests for all devices in the network (more info about Pi-hole are on Wikipedia).

All was great until at some time our Android devices suddenly couldn’t connect to the WiFi anymore. They reported “Connected, No Internet“. All other devices, connected via LAN or WiFi were just fine: PCs, FireTV Stick, other PIs – no issues. When I disabled the use of PiHole, they were able to connect again.

How to get simple DNS Protection

Malware sites are the plague of the century! And it’s so easy to fall for them. Phishing, hacked website content, or malware-ads – one click and you are on a website you shouldn’t be.

One way to deal with the issue is to block malicious domains at DNS resolver level. The advantage is that you do not have to do any modification at the devices!