Comment by drnick1

8 hours 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

8 comments

drnick1

Reply
pprotas  8 hours ago

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

  • ApolloFortyNine  7 hours ago

    >https://freedns.afraid.org/

    This dude has been doing it for 25 years, and actually this is a dns provider for domain names which I'm decently sure makes it more complicated than public dns.

    They're allowed to say they don't want to pay for it anymore, I just think their logic is bad. Or maybe their lawyer said they're running risks just ignoring takedown and they didn't want to deal with it anymore.

    • blahlabs  4 hours ago

      > this is a dns provider for domain names which I'm decently sure makes it more complicated than public dns

      Can you expand on this? Isn't all DNS for domain names?

      1 reply →

  • drnick1  8 hours 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.

    • morserer  7 hours 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.

    • anvuong  7 hours 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.