Happy New Year! Spring-Clean Your Home Network To Keep Your Sanity zottmann.org

@czottmann I love NextDNS, and also subscribed even though I was under the cap because I truly believe in the service. I still use it in combination with 1Blocker in Safari, but perhaps that’s overkill at this point? I believe the only thing NextDNS can’t do is remove the white space when ads are blocked?

@pimoore I used to run my own pi-hole instance on a RaspberryPi but NextDNS beats it hands-down because it's so much less maintenance.

I believe the only thing NextDNS can’t do is remove the white space when ads are blocked?

True, some ad scripts will make room for the ad spots even though they can't be filled. I use Brave Browser and uBlock Origin to get rid of the blank spots. Basically, I just do cosmetic filtering in the browser. But I consider stopping even that.

The ads are annoying but for me the all-encompassing tracking is the silent killer. Do not want!

@czottmann what’s the advantage of nextDNS from other solutions? Eg., I have Tunnel Bear (got three years for dirt cheap a while ago), and was thinking about Firewalla so my wife’s phone and home devices are secure too. Is this something I’d do on top of instead of those?

@lukemperez They solve a different purpose. A VPN like Tunnel Bear is a good idea to secure your network traffic while out and about, but a VPN as such will neither prevent tracking by Google and ad providers nor stop intrusive ads. NextDNS is not a VPN and does the latter two.

In case you're not familiar with DNS as concept (if you are, please skip this paragraph): the DNS (Domain Name System) is used to resolve domain names like micro.blog or zottmann.org to a numeric server address (e.g., micro.blog → 104.200.22.215). Between your hitting the Return key after entering a link address and the successful connection is the browser querying a DNS server for the numeric server address for the link you've just entered.

NextDNS is a service to provide this information but the beauty is that they allow selective blocking in the process. Take my example above: I told NextDNS that I don't want Facebook at all so when a browser is asking for a FB address (website, tracking, ads, whathaveyou), NextDNS simply says "no idea", and the request ends right there. And they have huge lists of tracking and ad services readily available. (Check their website for a selection.) So you basically just tell your router or device to use NextDNS for DNS lookups, and in your NextDNS account you specify what should be blacklisted, and that's it. Next time the device needs to lookup a domain name, NextDNS will take care of the rest.

HTH, if not, let me know :)

@czottmann ahh yes. Makes perfect sense.

I’m familiar with DNS but more or less conflated it and VPN, or had been thinking of them as solving similar problems rather than, as you put it, different ones.

Might ping you later if I get stuck. For now, I have some reading up to do. Cheers. 🤙🏽