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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

For those willing to set up DNSCrypt, I strongly recommend it. DNSCrypt.eu is my current favourite provider (OpenDNS has been pretty worthless) and is available over ipv6 too!

https://dnscrypt.eu/

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To use DNSCrypt you have to add an additional third party to the list of third parties who can potentially see and log and MITM what you are doing on the Internet. A better (and easier) thing to do would be to run your own local caching recursive resolver.

As far as I can see on their page, they're just not competing in the same spot. DNSCrypt is a DNS, OpenDNS is a DNS + DNS Usage Monitor + DNS whitelist/blacklist + whatever

I for one has been pretty happy as a home user with OpenDNS: dead simple DNS filters to make sure kids don't surf on youporn and youreligion

Could you comment more on what you don't like about OpenDNS?

I abandoned OpenDNS because they kept trying to shove down my throat parental and paid services, for which I have no use. Their use their free service as a vehicle to get you to buy stuff isn't a problem - but highjacking the free service to shove down ads in your pages, thanks but no thanks.

Especially when 8.8.8.8 works so smoothly, with a backup on my ISP's service.

I re-evaluated my DNS provider choice a couple days ago (good timing, apparently, as I was using Google before then). Switched back to OpenDNS because their servers responded faster than Google's, and they no longer do the ad/search page redirection thing, as of June 6 2014.

http://www.opendns.com/no-more-ads/

I used GRC's DNS benchmark tool to discover this. Also the particular OpenDNS servers which responded faster were different from the two that they tell you to use, so the fast response is probably helped by low load (fewer people using these undocumented servers). Going from memory because I'm at work, I think they ended in 202.222 and 222.202 and 202.123, whereas the officially listed ones end in 222.222 and 220.220.

Interesting. I've been using OpenDNS for years, and I've never noticed it doing anything at all besides providing a DNS service. My only complaint is that they used to serve a Guide page (with ads) for NXDomains, but they don't do that any more.

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