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Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

mullvad.net

61–70 of 268 posts

Re: Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

Re: Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

#63
post #57
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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.

Re: Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

#64
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would they serve a secret subpoena and gag order, when instead they can just drive to a secluded location 5km away from the super secure datacenter, dig a few meters down, passively tap a strand or two, facility and service operators none the wiser?

The data would/should be encrypted; while the NSA did successfully tap Google's inter-datacenter traffic before the Snowden leaks, since then it is encrypted, too. Hopefully other providers won't fall for that trick anymore, either.

Re: Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.)

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...

Re: Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

#66
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.

Re: Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.)

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.

Re: Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

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…

Is Kim Jong Un far right? Seems like a stretch. (North Korea’s immigration policies are even more restrictive than what they want.)

Btw, Malcom Kyeyune, who has a podcast with the party’s founder, is a black child of an immigrant, adopts an avatar on Twitter of Kim Jong Un’s sister, and semi-ironically stans for North Korea on a regular basis.

Re: Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

#69
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would they serve a secret subpoena and gag order, when instead they can just drive to a secluded location 5km away from the super secure datacenter, dig a few meters down, passively tap a strand or two, facility and service operators none the wiser?

They’ve already done both. When they can get a cooperative party (AT&T, for example), they colocate their splitter equipment. When they can’t, they tap undersea and overland cables.

When it’s a hostile environment entirely, they hack and do secret operations and bribe.

Re: Shutting down our public encrypted DNS

#70

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.

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 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.

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