NextDNS out of beta - privacy protection, circumvention of state censorship and ad blocking for the entire home network

Tuning NextDNS finally came out of beta and now officially offers free services to block advertising and other malware, the IP address at the DNS level. This is a simple and effective method of protection: NextDNS automatically filters traffic, does not keep logs, encrypts DNS queries, supports DNS over HTTPS (DoH), representing an alternative to the well-known DNS resolvers from Google, Cloudfalre and Yandex.

NextDNS is similar to browser extensions like uBlock Origin, it only blocks addresses at the DNS level, which in some cases seems to be a more convenient option, because NextDNS blocks unnecessary requests not only from the browser, but from other programs, for example, from Windows, MS Office Adobe and so on.

In addition, you can put a filter on the router in the home network. Thus, you remove ads from all computers and smartphones at once. Advertising disappears on any devices that are brought to your home and connected to your WiFi.

It supports a “children's filter” with safe search, filtering adult content on YouTube and other platforms. Although such a filter does not work perfectly. But you can directly blacklist specific sites and games, such as Facebook, Tinder, Fortnite, developers write.

NextDNS IP addresses are specified in the standard way in the settings of the router and the properties of IPv4 and Ipv6 in the operating system. After binding the IP address (see linked IP ), the service starts working.



In the NextDNS configuration panel, you can add additional block lists and individual domains to the general list. Or vice versa, unlock individual addresses.

Separate NextDNS blocklisters in the repository on GitHub The

service fully filters traffic to only 300 thousand DNS queries per month. After that, it turns into a regular DNS resolver without filtering, such as Google DNS or Cloudflare DNS. Therefore, for more efficient blocking, it makes sense to use NextDNS in parallel with other blockers, such as uBlock Origin.

In addition, NextDNS is not very clean cut ads from web pages, leaving ugly empty blocks. In such situations, they also recommend using uBlock Origin .

NextDNS is also available as a standalone application for Android, iOS, Windows, macOS and Chrome OS. From the application, the same analytics and tools are available as on the website. Here you can see from which addresses and from which countries they are following you. Here you can refuse to maintain logs completely for better privacy.

NextDNS Installation and Setup Guide

NextDNS was founded in May 2019 by two French entrepreneurs Romain Cointepas and Olivier Poitry. The first is known as the creator of Dailymotion, the largest video sharing service after Youtube. He is currently Director of Development at Netflix and is working on Open Connect, Netflix's own CDN, through which about 30% of all US Internet traffic passes.

Guys callthemselves "true supporters of net neutrality and privacy on the Internet." They believe that “unencrypted DNS resolvers managed by Internet providers are detrimental to these two principles.” Alternative solutions such as Google DNS or Cloudflare DNS are a great option, but "we believe that more entities should provide alternative services to avoid centralization."