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Comment by tazjin | Hacker News Reader

Agree - my initial reaction to this was "oh no", or to quote someone from IRC "millions of kids can now learn how to configure DNS".

FWIW, it seems like 1.1.1.3 doesn't block sites like Twitter where a lot of the kink community moved after Tumblr shut down.

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If you think of this as putting Playboy and Penthouse on the top shelf of the magazine rack behind an opaque cover more so than locking them inside a drill-proof, pick-proof safe, maybe it makes more sense? (You know, back when they still had print editions.)

It just seems obvious that making porn slightly harder to get to than disney.com is a smart move if you're a parent. Make it so that a typo in a URL doesn't splash hardcore porn in one click.

And sure there are lots of ways to accomplish this. Cloudflare is just providing one more and I personally like that. Even as a techie, I really hate doing network stuff at home and will be taking a close look at this at least after the configuration options become available.

I currently use AdGuard's DNS offering that blocks many surveillance IPs plus adult content. Will have to compare offerings.

I totally understand the critique of this from the political war zone they're diving into, but not from a "it's not perfect so it's stupid" perspective.

> to quote someone from IRC "millions of kids can now learn how to configure DNS".

That's why you set up your router/pihole to do DNS hijacking. Any DNS request gets rerouted to the DNS server of your choosing.

Theres an easy way to get around this too, firefox has the option to do dns over https, encrypting your dns queries, and if you force encrypted SNI, theres no way your DNS queries are getting hijacked and the router cannot see what sites you are visiting. And no, this doesn't require someone to be technical, and a kid could do it easily. Whats even more interesting is that schools and other public internet places can no longer block certain websites or content, and logs are no longer effective since even the website address is encrypted. You can stop ESNI by disabling https altogether, but obviously that wouldn't be a reasonable solution.

Source: my dad did this on the home router.

Then again the goal is to not completely lock down the system so that no one could ever abuse it. Its more like the lock on your front door; it can be worked around (ie. picked, broken, etc.) but you still install it.

I’m amazed how well twitter works to prevent leaking adult content into main feed. I guess facebook and reddit does that too, but they are much more likely to have disinformation posts. That said twitter ruined topics by removing some important groups and autofollowing some totally random groups.

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