Just a quick note for the unsuspecting:
I run two local DNSes, one recursive and one forwarding.
The forwarding one uses few services, like 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, 9.9.9.9, etc.
One day I noticed inconsistent responses and started investigating. Turns out that by default 9.9.9.9 have "protection" and for your safety will lie and return NXDOMAIN or something else, for some dangerous domains, taking into account their definition of "dangerous". I am not saying that this is bad, probably lots of non-HN people don't want to run their DNS or anything related and just want a tablet that works because they don't even have laptop. It just hit me hard because I did not expected filtering on these servers.
Instead of CloudFlare's 1.1.1.1 I like CloudFlare's 1.1.1.3: it filters known porn and known malware sites.
By now I expect many sites to be filtered out: too much crap out there.
Then I also run my own DNS (unbound) and after seeing a warning from one of my banks about a phishing site where one letter differed in the domain name from the real bank's site, I went ballistic: I did generate hundreds of thousands (maybe millions by now) of variations of the names of banks/brokers domains I use, with every single variation of one character and many variations of up to two characters and I nullroute those too (in addition to known porn and known malware sites).
And I nullroute every single Unicode domain name. I don't care. I don't care if you disagree with this: too many homoglyph attacks. Too risky. And the Web Just Works [TM] without accessing any Unicode domain.
I null route tens if not hundreds of TLDs.
Filtering out every single domain name using any Unicode char is a bit more involved but it's doable (I do it since years, but today you can ask LLMs if you want to do it or patch a DNS software to do it).
I know some go further and by default disallow everything and then only allow domains they want to use but I find that a bit too tricky.
Now... Should there be something I really want, say I want a shady torrent tracker to download some dubious file, I can always use a VM/container with a more lenient DNS.
I'm using such a setup since years. My unbound DNS runs on a Pi 3 that's on 24/7.
Works flawlessly.
P.S: on another subject I also blocklist entire IP blocks, including entire countries. Same thing: the Web still works totally fine.
I ended up getting rid of unbound, stubby, and a technitium instance and just moving to numa.rs everywhere i needed dns. It simplified my life a lot. Now laptops run it with forward*ng that makes sense for their use case (ie home dns to my home dns vms running numa, work dns forwarded to work dns servers, everything else was recursive resolving but i swi5ched it to their odoh and it worked great while probably being more private
To be thorough, you should check your domain names for any characters that can be changed by a single bit flip. It probably will not look right as far as spelling, but the idea is that eventually something like a cosmic ray will pass through a memory chip and flip that single bit for a connection, and they get redirected to another site set up to handle the request. It's a thing. It takes patience, but but does work. People were doing this to fbcdn.com and other large targets years back.
That is the point and business of Quad9. It's not their fault for you not knowing what Quad9 is.
I don't want my family to get malware from sketchy websites. Quad9 offers a simple solution for these usecases. I'll take the false positive anyday over unfiltered DNS.
I noticed few commenters mention something like a rule: If you say your domain is for sale, they will take it from you because..... And was wondering, few years back, twitter was sold to mr Elon. I will just say it like this: Did they lose all their trademarks and rights to all domains, if someone register twitter.cc or twitter.it or similar, because twitter is for sale and they did not need the trademark for business anymore?
The concern is if you own a domain that you don’t own the trademark for.
Twitter owned both the domain and all trademarks so it’s a non issue.
Basically in fairly limited circumstances you can have your domain taken off you if someone else holds a matching trademark. Saying you are selling it can go some way to demonstrating you are not holding it in good faith.
I had registered trademark, and when you register one they ask you what are you doing. I was selling clothes, shoes, fashion stuff. I wanted to get the domain with that name, and it was already taken by someone who sells industrial manufacturing machines. Heavy equipment. They also had registered trademark with the exact same name. The idea is that you as a customer won't be confused who is selling something when you enter a shop and see that name.
I now get what you're saying, but then this can be turned against everyday people. Imagine you have a domain that is your personal blog, vacation photos, stuff like that. No ads, nothing to sell there. Then you receive a message "We from Microsoft/Sony/IBM/Amazon are willing to give you 10Mil for this domain, because we have plans for it, if you won't use it for something bigger ofc"
And then show your reply in court saying "He want to sell it". Even if you run a successful business, they can troll you and say "We offer 1bil - you and your family will not have to work for the rest of your life", and then say "His business is fake, he is selling the domain".
I don't know if this is possible but if it is, then the whole system is wrong I guess.
Being willing to sell isn’t the only test, otherwise domain squatting would be very difficult. You can generally accept these offers without much risk if done via a lawyer (I’m sure a lawyer isn’t strictly necessary but beyond 5 figures is likely worth it!)
