Sorry to get on to a related topic, since the NextDNS team may be looking at these comments. Is there any plan at all to revive the iOS app (last updated in 2020) so that the toggle in the app actually works? I don’t like installing a NextDNS profile because it doesn’t offer the flexibility to turn it off or on as needed. The app used to work pre-2020, but doesn’t now.
On my iPhone, at any given date and time, it’s just a random occurrence of whether NextDNS (with the app) works or not. Visiting test.nextdns.io may show “unconfigured” or a NextDNS endpoint.
Various posts on the forums by several people over the years have not been responded to.
I’d like to know if the team is ever going to work on this. If not, just remove the app from the App Store so that people don’t assume that it works when it doesn’t.
Hey @nextdns team. I'm a long time customer of NextDNS. I've been using your service for a few years now, but it seems a large amount of your primarily offered services & blocklist offerings are SEVERLY out of date. I detailed that here on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nextdns/s/IX2mUogHPK
Your input on this thread would be greatly appreciated, as the community wants NextDNS to be the best service it can be.
I do appreciate the addition of the Age Verification Bypass, though. Many users on r/nextdns are trying to guess how it works. Proxing specific domain requests to show the user is from another country is our best guess. But I would still be very interested in the specifics.
It may not be effective in the long term, but I think it's very much worth doing. The privacy nightmare of uploading government docs is appalling and should be resisted by all who can, so I think you're doing great work. If it provokes regulators to push harder, they might just get enough attention from voters to motivate a change. That would be my hope anyway
It's a great idea to get rid of, I'm shocked a company is this brave to do this. It's not in the interest of any adult to upload their ID so the government can track their web browsing. I didn't want to expose my kid to porn when they were 5, somehow it wasn't a problem because the avg browser use was guided by me, but also the browser blocked porn. When they were a bit older, a teenager, I also lightly guided their computer use.
Oh yeah, that IS a good point, this verification technique is even stupider than CC number validation in the late 90s!
Then again, these laws aren't about censoring children's access, they're about censoring EVERYONE'S access (and it blows my mind that conservative leaders will come right out and say it, but the average layperson doesn't seem to care or comprehend what a massive slippery slope censorship is -- porn is just the start)
You don't have to sell it like that. The bill that needs to be passed is default presumption that all websites on the internet not explicitly marked as such and who voluntarily accept a higher legal burden and standard of moderation may contain content not suitable for children. And that is up to parents to control their child's internet access to limit their usage to only these sites.
Because I don't actually care about pornography, if it magically disappeared I wouldn't really care, it's all the other "not suitable for kids" content I care about that will get caught up in these laws. I don't want to give gross concern troll political groups moralizing about their precious hypothetical children the legal tools to ban what they don't like.
Ive had massive amounts of trouble convincing people that pornography is just the tip of the iceberg. That's why it's such an effective tool for broaching massive-scale surveillance: the architects of these laws have said that they want to be able to police all content with these laws, and anyone who tries to speak out against them can be painted as a pervert who hates the safety of kids.
Even if this was a good idea, ID verification technology should not be outsourced to private parties. This is a service governments themselves must provide. I shouldn't need to upload an ID because the government already has it!
If they simply wanted age verification, the dumb and lazy way is to SSO through a government managed portal with OAUTH2 and you only share your age with the third party. You do a one time account setup (you already have to do this in the US for many government services at the federal level) with age verification, that's your gov portal login. This means the government will now which naughty sites you visit of course, but like I said, it is the lazy approach, and if you think about it, if they respect the laws then a law can be passed to prevent them from storing or using that association, if they didn't, they could still sniff your traffic and wiretap you.
A slightly smarter approach would be to directly auth against a government portal and be given a 24h expiring code for age verification, and the government will publish an updated list of codes to trusted businesses. Those codes could be leaked, but making it a felony should deter most cases, because who wants to go to prison to let some kids watch porn?
Smarter people than me can come up with smarter solution, that is really my point. Involving third-parties and requiring you to upload documents is done either out of extreme incompetence or opportunistic malice by elected officials (bribery).
South Korea has implemented something similar, but through private corporations, not directly by the government.
When you sign up with a South Korean online service that might contain age-restricted content, you provide your name, date of birth, and phone number. The service operator uses a special telecom-provided API to have a 6-digit code sent to your phone. (The code is generated by the telecom, not the service operator.) When you enter the code, the telecom confirms the name and date of birth. No need for random online services to ask for government IDs, because they're allowed to pass the burden of proof to telecoms who have already verified it offline.
You could probably do something similar via banks, schools, the social security system, or any other regulated industry that has KYC rules.
Do not promote or use NextDNS, it's essentially abandoned. You will not get any support from the developer when something breaks, and it will break. I tried for a year to contact him before abandoning it. Just check the help forums.
As a remark, not a criticism, such a deliberate promotion is probably illegal in the UK market,
> "But Ofcom says platforms required to introduce "highly effective" methods to check user age must not host, share or permit content that encourages use of VPNs to get around age checks. The government has also told the BBC it would be illegal for platforms to do so."
NextDNS isn't a content platform required to have age checks, so no, that prohibition doesn't apply here and promoting the bypass feature isn't 'probably illegal'.
That only applies to those platforms that are required to do "highly effective age checks".
i.e. the top category of "harmful" site cannot point people to VPNs as a way to avoid age verification. Everyone else can tell people about VPNs as a way to avoid age verification. The media have been doing so for a start.
> must not host, share or permit content that encourages use of VPNs to get around age checks. The government has also told the BBC it would be illegal for platforms to do so
Holy. Crap. I knew the UK was going off the deep end with these laws, but this actually looks like China-level government reach.
You need to introduce an invasive great firewall before you can effectively ban VPNs, since there's so many different ways to hide traffic.
Unlike banning porn, banning VPNs has no political value because the technically inept voters who support these age verification policies don't know what a VPN is.
> "content that encourages use of VPNs to get around age checks"
I think "...to get around age checks" is controlling. It isn't illegal to promote VPN's in that country; it's illegal to promote their usefulness in circumventing other laws.
"Under no circumstances should you use Mullvad VPN (https://mullvad.net/en), available for 5Eur/mo - also payable in Bitcoin, to avoid our age verification checks!"
That’s a bold move. Handing over IDs to random sites is definitely a privacy nightmare, so I get why you built this. The real question is whether it buys time for users or just accelerates the push for stricter regulation. Either way, it sparks an important conversation
At least outside of countries that already limit their citizens access to the internet, censorship regulations tend to apply only to providers, not end users, so it would be extremely difficult to go after an extraterritorial VPN provider. In the US, extraterritorial jurisdiction includes not just providers outside of the country, but providers outside of the state. For example, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquette_National_Bank_of_Min....
> Handing over IDs to random sites is definitely a privacy nightmare
They just need to leak all of the elected official internet usage. You'll see this rolled back faster than it was implemented.
I really can't wait for the video titles of the porn our government officials watch to be read out loud by newscasters. That's going to be such sweet karma.
As a subscriber of NextDNS I say, first, this is cool, but second, don’t do it. I don’t want NextDNS to face some sort of judgment that will get it shut down. Just publish the “DNS tricks” so that people can DIY but don’t make it part of your service.
This sounds like a company using DNS to direct _other_ peoples' web traffic through _their_ proxies. Cloudflare started this way. That's why signing up for Cloudlfare requires using _Cloudflare's_ DNS servers
The so-called "DNS trick", which is defintely not a trick, is to redirect traffic though a proxy server. Whoever operates the proxy, e.g. Cloudflare, NextDNS, etc., has control over the HTTPS traffic and _could_ have access to the contents
HN commenters and other online commenters have criticised Cloudlfare in the past because it decrypts ("terminates") TLS connections and _could_ thereby have access to the contents of customers' traffic
For any doubters, this access was confimed some years ago when a coding mistake by someone at CF in a scanner generated with ragel caused customers'_decrypted_ web traffic contained in memory on Cloudflare's proxies to spill out all over the web. Leaked data became publicly available and remained discoverable via web search for a while; the data had to be scrubbed from search engines and web archives which took several days at least
NextDNS purports to be a "DNS service" but proxying HTTPS opens a new can of worms
NB. This comment is not claiming that NextDNS or anyone else does or does not do anything, nor that anyone will or won't do anything. This comment is about _what becomes possible through control over DNS_. The possibilities it allows for control are why I do not use third party DNS service and prefer to control own DNS; having control can be very useful
Glancing at the front page, it looks like this product also has enforced SafeSearch and restricted mode to protect children, so... seems fine? They're doing the same thing themselves, and it's probably better since it's a local solution.
If you're running a product like this, it should be officially allowed to bypass age verification.
> the age verification or age estimation must be of such a kind, and used in such a way, that it is highly effective at correctly determining whether or not a particular user is a child
Unfortunately, it's hard to tell what this passage means, and I suspect it doesn't apply here. (But does that mean there's no law covering age-verification bypassing services? That seems like an unlikely oversight, and the Online Safety Act's badly-drafted enough that I'm not comfortable making a broad assertion here.) Hopefully case law sorts this out a little.
I wish they would add a dropdown box where I can select English as the main language.
If they pretend they're a product targeted at anyone in the DACH region by offering the pages only in German, then they also must add an imprint: who they are, who is responsible, where they are, how I can contact them via email and phone.
It likely overrides DNS resolution to CDN/POPs in countries which don't require age checking, or routes the traffic through TCP proxies so your traffic appears to come from a different country without these laws.
This will increase the latency of all traffic to that site though.
Sure they can. When your browser resolves a host, they replace the actual IP with the IP of a proxy that is configured to forward traffic according to the Host HTTP header.
I'm a parent, and I try to keep my kids from the Internet in general, but adult parts in particular.
VPN's are great for this. Just install the VPN, have it block access to adult sites, and have it alert me of any suspicious attempts.
It's bewildering how VPN companies have branded their technology as "anti-censorship" and "privacy-focused." VPN's are a censor's best friend.
DNS services are taking the opposite approach: they start by having a censorship feature (blocking malware, adult ads, etc), and now are adding anti-censorship options.
There's nothing about connecting to a different network, or using a different DNS provider, that is anti-censorship.
> There's nothing about connecting to a different network, or using a different DNS provider, that is anti-censorship.
In a sense, it allows you to pick your censors, or no censors. "Anti-censorship" doesn't necessarily mean that nothing is blocked; it means you get to control what's blocked for yourself.
> VPN's are great for this. Just install the VPN, have it block access to adult sites, and have it alert me of any suspicious attempts.
> It's bewildering how VPN companies have branded their technology as "anti-censorship" and "privacy-focused." VPN's are a censor's best friend.
You're already using a router. That's where you would normally implement blocks.
A VPN necessarily does the same thing, and so you can implement routing blocks there too. But this is like saying that a virtual machine is a great technology to run software. OK. Why do you want a virtual one?
VPNs have nothing to do with it. I guess yours has some kind of filtering service, but that's not at all related to a VPN. It's like buying a V8 engine because you wanted a turbo. V8's can have turbos, but it has nothing to do with being a V8.
Free VPNs are also at the top of the UK App Store. All of them look extremely dodgy, probably ran by foreign adversaries seizing the opportunity to slurp data.
I don't have a strong opinion here, but I did want to say thank you for your service! I was previously running a pi-hole but switched my family and my household to NextDNS. Great $20/home spent
I use NextDNS to BLOCK porn sites, etc from my kids’ devices. I hope you aren’t changing your ethos as a company, although I don’t know, maybe your customers are changing and causing you to pivot.
Because I don’t want any chance of this stuff affecting the blocks we use for minors, etc.
> We’re curious how the HN community feels about this. Is it the right way to protect privacy online, or will it just provoke regulators to push harder?
Both. May the mouse forever elude the cat in this game!
If you’re proxying all traffic, that’s going to get expensive and - in theory - makes you as easy to block as VPN providers. I wish you the best of luck!
At least for my discord, I still can't access channels marked NSFW, instead of showing me the verification screen it just says "failed to load messages".
I am a user of nextdns and okay, this is really neato team! I find this really interesting.
If I may ask, what are the dns tricks, is there a blog post about what you added, I am sooo curious about what sorcery is nextdns using.
Edit: I searched on ddg and there was a ghacks.net link and a alternativeto.net article and sadly ghacks was taking a long time to load and I just read the alternativeto.net article and it was kinda cool, let me paste it here
NextDNS has introduced a new DNS-level feature that allows users to bypass age verification checks commonly found on adult websites. This update enables users to avoid submitting personal documents, such as photos or government-issued IDs, to unfamiliar websites when accessing age-restricted content.
To enable the feature, users can activate it directly within the NextDNS settings. The technical approach is straightforward: the DNS resolver intercepts requests to target websites and routes traffic through proxy servers in countries where age verification is not required by law. This means that while users visit the same websites, the sites perceive the traffic as originating from a country without mandatory ID checks.
These changes are particularly relevant for individuals in the European Union and the United Kingdom, regions where certain governments have introduced strict ID requirements for accessing adult content websites. Looking at community reaction, user feedback on Reddit and social media has been largely positive since the announcement, with some users ironizing that “NextDNS developers know their clientele!”.
---
TLDR/my-thoughts: Nextdns can use something similar to vpn and I am wondering how much more efficient is this for this usecase compared to a vpn, like I am sure that vpns can be banned by a country, see china.
But nextdns.io is still available in china?, how would that work, and so can this feature be actually expanded to make it a general purpose vpn too if need be but honestly a lot of vpn use cases might be for bypassing verification itself, so basically the only few use cases I can think of vpn is to bypass censorship and maybe verification and also changing vpn for lets say watching content that's available in other country
Can nextdns add other features too, like imagine you can use nextdns with netflix and change it to anime mode and you can get netflix as in of japan, I don't have netflix but I am just giving an example because that's a lot of times what I hear from all those youtube vpn shills
Or can they provide some vpn service itself while at it, and since nextdns still uses dns and dns can operate over https. I imagine that it might be even harder to detect such vpn traffic because I know for sure that some vpn's can be tracked implementation wise (as in wireguard)[i can be wrong, i usually am] but I am pretty sure that https can't be tracked in the same manner, and we can use dns over https in nextdns using this feature..
Can you guys maybe comment on what you think about it? adding general purpose vpns / japan/country switching/enabling vpns itself though I guess it might make you a vpn app which can have its own logs/rules and regulations and I am currently fine/really happy with protonvpn which I also think can run on top of https with their proxy option atleast in browser and maybe even in their apps I am not sure.
I've been using Getflix for years to have my location spoofed to another country. It is a pay product though. I've used it on Amazon and mainly use it for BBC Iplayer. I couldnt ever get netflix to play nice using it or a vpn, so for it I just tunnel to my traffic to a residential address i have in mexico
The way this works is, for preset domains, you always answer with the IP of your SNI proxy, which then forwards the connection to the real IP based on the domain in TLS's SNI extension. This "trick" only works for TLS connections that send SNI in the clear, and will not work with QUIC (HTTP/3) or with TLS v1.3 with ECH (encrypted client hello). For non-TLS connections, like cleartext HTTP/2 or HTTP/1, the proxy would look at the Host header. Similar heuristics may exist for other popular cleartext protocols.
If you own enough public IPs (like a /64 IPv6 or a /22 IPv4), you can vend time-limited unique IP per domain per client IP and support all transport protocols (and not just TLS/HTTP).
Presenting government ID to random entities is literally what government ID's exist for. Paranoia about this is silly.
Additionally, intentionally aiding someone (especially a minor) in circumventing the law is very likely to not be legal, especially when legality is largely determined by a jury, and especially^2 when the facts of the case against you are the most egregious that the government can find, especially^3 when you are profiting from it. It will be something like a 12yo using your service to access something absolutely shocking, and you or someone else will be forced to read a detailed text description of it in front of a jury. This doesn't even begin to address civil liability.
I'm not saying what you are doing is 'wrong', I'm saying you should talk to a lawyer who specializes in this sort of thing before you are forced to.
showing a plastic card in a store to buy the yearly Cum Companion Calendar or whatever is one thing, because the clerk likely is not a savant with eidetic memory, whereas online there's this little thing happening called data processing which starts with the only thing we usually don't want with our ID. copying.
I wonder what the legality would be for the brick and mortar stores (especially the big chain ones) to just start asking customers for ID and then swiping them through scanners that can do all of the eidetic memory work for them?
Having had to deal with some clients with slightly sensitive data, I wish. Photocopies and printed screenshots lying around in the open, CC data copy-pasted manually to other fields or to generic excel sheets because otherwise "it disappears and we can't book late fees" etc.
Not even only the "random third-party" companies vetted and specialised in ID verification, but then they get a new support contract down the road, and a fourth- or fifth-party agent who had the cheapest offer now has remote admin access to those desktops.
Probability is low, true. But all it takes is one compromised access.
>Nearly every app, social media platform or website asks you for at least some personally identifiable information. But this data can be stolen or misused. That’s why it’s important to keep it as private and secure as possible. If you have to share it, make sure it’s only used by trusted services with your knowledge and consent.
I've had to upload my ID card to send money, open a bank account online, verify my identity for a dating app, book an international flight, and ironically to register for the app to have an electronic version of my id on my phone, and weirdly to pay a traffic ticket (why do they care who pays it?), get a discount on my Amazon Prime subscription, and finally to reset my password for my ID.me login for government websites. So all of those are 'fine' I guess, but god forbid you upload it to a third party verification service (the same one that was used for one or more of the above cases where I uploaded my id) to watch pornography, that's where we draw the line?
You are being absurd.
I don't agree with this requirement, but I'm also not so dishonest that I would pretend that it's a security issue.
If you were able to do all of those things to prove your identity using your ID.. then any identity thief with a copy of your ID could use it to impersonate you in every one of those venues.
That means that somebody else can send your money wherever they wish.. create bank accounts to perform nefarious deeds that tie back to you.. book flights, and subscribe to services on your dime or on a stolen credit card behind your name so that after the chargebacks all debt collection activity aims at you. And finally convince the government to send your tax refunds to them.
In light of this what is absurd about being parsimonious with who and how we share copies of our ID, and why should virtually every website online be deputized into keeping copies of them to provide dog standard content services that might not always be suitable for all audiences?
Bro already has a disease, doesn't care if everyone else gets it too. What kind of argument is ... I already sent my ID all over the internet multiple times?
Its not the 'voluntary' services that may or may not want to see your ID, its the existence of any and all Mandatory legislation, which would be a nightmare.
This is a tech site so I imagine the average user has some deeper understanding than most(technically), but I guess imagination is off the table.
What this would do (requiring all sites) is basically be the end for any and all attempts against identity fraud protection. Indulge a bit of imagination for a moment. If EVERY site is now required to do some form of verification, than everyone's infrastructure now becomes prime targets for PII and troves of identity information, and wherein amazon, banks, and ID.me can be considered to be at or near the top (i'd hope) for keeping their machines tied down, the reality is that EVERYONE'S servers ARE NOT so will maintained.
They WILL be attacked, and shims inserted to steal such identity information, as people have ZERO idea, as they're being shunted around to all thees angel-invested ID startups, as to what is or isn't legit, during signup. Wholly, identical pages/domains, as are often seen to steal traditional PCI information, will now be repurposed to this. Its not that the reputable ones are likely to fall, its the small vendors who don't understand that once a customer is EXPECTED to fork over ID to sign up, any hiccup in the process will be unnoticed, and it'll be ripe for abuse if the server/service is ever compromised.
It would be a great thing, because it would finally force us to have somthing better than "I can present a piece of plastic with my picture and some numbers on it" as proof of identity.
ID verification is done by 3rd parties. Nobody wants to hold a photo of your ID because it's a compliance nightmare. You aren't uploading your ID to some porn site, you are uploading it to some real-person verification company.
Out of curiosity, I wanted to see how the five most popular porn sites handled age verification since I live in Florida. One of the states that require it. I started here (safe for work - just list of the most popular websites overall - not porn sites)
Sorry to get on to a related topic, since the NextDNS team may be looking at these comments. Is there any plan at all to revive the iOS app (last updated in 2020) so that the toggle in the app actually works? I don’t like installing a NextDNS profile because it doesn’t offer the flexibility to turn it off or on as needed. The app used to work pre-2020, but doesn’t now.
On my iPhone, at any given date and time, it’s just a random occurrence of whether NextDNS (with the app) works or not. Visiting test.nextdns.io may show “unconfigured” or a NextDNS endpoint.
Various posts on the forums by several people over the years have not been responded to.
I’d like to know if the team is ever going to work on this. If not, just remove the app from the App Store so that people don’t assume that it works when it doesn’t.
Hey @nextdns team. I'm a long time customer of NextDNS. I've been using your service for a few years now, but it seems a large amount of your primarily offered services & blocklist offerings are SEVERLY out of date. I detailed that here on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/nextdns/s/IX2mUogHPK
Your input on this thread would be greatly appreciated, as the community wants NextDNS to be the best service it can be.
I do appreciate the addition of the Age Verification Bypass, though. Many users on r/nextdns are trying to guess how it works. Proxing specific domain requests to show the user is from another country is our best guess. But I would still be very interested in the specifics.
Thanks.
It may not be effective in the long term, but I think it's very much worth doing. The privacy nightmare of uploading government docs is appalling and should be resisted by all who can, so I think you're doing great work. If it provokes regulators to push harder, they might just get enough attention from voters to motivate a change. That would be my hope anyway
It's a great idea to get rid of, I'm shocked a company is this brave to do this. It's not in the interest of any adult to upload their ID so the government can track their web browsing. I didn't want to expose my kid to porn when they were 5, somehow it wasn't a problem because the avg browser use was guided by me, but also the browser blocked porn. When they were a bit older, a teenager, I also lightly guided their computer use.
> More and more sites (especially adult ones) are now forcing users to upload IDs or selfies to continue.
> they might just get enough attention from voters to motivate a change
Unfortunately, guaranteeing anonymous internet porno is a terrible political beachhead to motivate "voters" to do anything.
> Unfortunately, guaranteeing anonymous internet porno is a terrible political beachhead to motivate "voters" to do anything.
Reworded press release: "We protect children from being forced to upload their photos (on their IDs) to adult web sites"
Another rewording:
"...to upload your photos (on your IDs)..." :D
Oh yeah, that IS a good point, this verification technique is even stupider than CC number validation in the late 90s!
Then again, these laws aren't about censoring children's access, they're about censoring EVERYONE'S access (and it blows my mind that conservative leaders will come right out and say it, but the average layperson doesn't seem to care or comprehend what a massive slippery slope censorship is -- porn is just the start)
You don't have to sell it like that. The bill that needs to be passed is default presumption that all websites on the internet not explicitly marked as such and who voluntarily accept a higher legal burden and standard of moderation may contain content not suitable for children. And that is up to parents to control their child's internet access to limit their usage to only these sites.
Because I don't actually care about pornography, if it magically disappeared I wouldn't really care, it's all the other "not suitable for kids" content I care about that will get caught up in these laws. I don't want to give gross concern troll political groups moralizing about their precious hypothetical children the legal tools to ban what they don't like.
Ive had massive amounts of trouble convincing people that pornography is just the tip of the iceberg. That's why it's such an effective tool for broaching massive-scale surveillance: the architects of these laws have said that they want to be able to police all content with these laws, and anyone who tries to speak out against them can be painted as a pervert who hates the safety of kids.
It's not about porn. It's about setting a legal beachead to force websites to deanonymize users.
Even if this was a good idea, ID verification technology should not be outsourced to private parties. This is a service governments themselves must provide. I shouldn't need to upload an ID because the government already has it!
If they simply wanted age verification, the dumb and lazy way is to SSO through a government managed portal with OAUTH2 and you only share your age with the third party. You do a one time account setup (you already have to do this in the US for many government services at the federal level) with age verification, that's your gov portal login. This means the government will now which naughty sites you visit of course, but like I said, it is the lazy approach, and if you think about it, if they respect the laws then a law can be passed to prevent them from storing or using that association, if they didn't, they could still sniff your traffic and wiretap you.
A slightly smarter approach would be to directly auth against a government portal and be given a 24h expiring code for age verification, and the government will publish an updated list of codes to trusted businesses. Those codes could be leaked, but making it a felony should deter most cases, because who wants to go to prison to let some kids watch porn?
Smarter people than me can come up with smarter solution, that is really my point. Involving third-parties and requiring you to upload documents is done either out of extreme incompetence or opportunistic malice by elected officials (bribery).
South Korea has implemented something similar, but through private corporations, not directly by the government.
When you sign up with a South Korean online service that might contain age-restricted content, you provide your name, date of birth, and phone number. The service operator uses a special telecom-provided API to have a 6-digit code sent to your phone. (The code is generated by the telecom, not the service operator.) When you enter the code, the telecom confirms the name and date of birth. No need for random online services to ask for government IDs, because they're allowed to pass the burden of proof to telecoms who have already verified it offline.
You could probably do something similar via banks, schools, the social security system, or any other regulated industry that has KYC rules.
Do not promote or use NextDNS, it's essentially abandoned. You will not get any support from the developer when something breaks, and it will break. I tried for a year to contact him before abandoning it. Just check the help forums.
As a remark, not a criticism, such a deliberate promotion is probably illegal in the UK market,
> "But Ofcom says platforms required to introduce "highly effective" methods to check user age must not host, share or permit content that encourages use of VPNs to get around age checks. The government has also told the BBC it would be illegal for platforms to do so."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn72ydj70g5o
NextDNS isn't a content platform required to have age checks, so no, that prohibition doesn't apply here and promoting the bypass feature isn't 'probably illegal'.
That only applies to those platforms that are required to do "highly effective age checks".
i.e. the top category of "harmful" site cannot point people to VPNs as a way to avoid age verification. Everyone else can tell people about VPNs as a way to avoid age verification. The media have been doing so for a start.
> must not host, share or permit content that encourages use of VPNs to get around age checks. The government has also told the BBC it would be illegal for platforms to do so
Holy. Crap. I knew the UK was going off the deep end with these laws, but this actually looks like China-level government reach.
Ignore the government crying. It is irrelevant when we spread the tech to get around their useless spying laws.
next step is to try to make VPNs illegal (or require age verification for them, of course)
You need to introduce an invasive great firewall before you can effectively ban VPNs, since there's so many different ways to hide traffic.
Unlike banning porn, banning VPNs has no political value because the technically inept voters who support these age verification policies don't know what a VPN is.
Age verification for VPNs would be awesome. I would rather hand ID over to a VPN provider than individual sites I visit.
This would ensure you couldn't tie an Identity to an activity\user on a service which is of course why it's not where they're going
The VPN provider should hook into the existing government identify service.
who cares, its a tiny market in a backwater economy.
Can VPN/DNS providers independently market their services, if content providers cannot advertise VPN providers?
> "content that encourages use of VPNs to get around age checks"
I think "...to get around age checks" is controlling. It isn't illegal to promote VPN's in that country; it's illegal to promote their usefulness in circumventing other laws.
The law reads like it applies to platforms required to do the checks rather than third party service providers.
* https://legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/contents
Which section of the Online Safety Act 2023 is that in, please?
For people who don't live in the UK, why should they care about UK law?
NextDNS is a company not a person. The have infrastructure in the UK and presumably have UK customers, so they should care about UK law.
The US also has multiple states that have enacted similar laws.
"Under no circumstances should you use Mullvad VPN (https://mullvad.net/en), available for 5Eur/mo - also payable in Bitcoin, to avoid our age verification checks!"
That’s a bold move. Handing over IDs to random sites is definitely a privacy nightmare, so I get why you built this. The real question is whether it buys time for users or just accelerates the push for stricter regulation. Either way, it sparks an important conversation
At least outside of countries that already limit their citizens access to the internet, censorship regulations tend to apply only to providers, not end users, so it would be extremely difficult to go after an extraterritorial VPN provider. In the US, extraterritorial jurisdiction includes not just providers outside of the country, but providers outside of the state. For example, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquette_National_Bank_of_Min....
> Handing over IDs to random sites is definitely a privacy nightmare
They just need to leak all of the elected official internet usage. You'll see this rolled back faster than it was implemented.
I really can't wait for the video titles of the porn our government officials watch to be read out loud by newscasters. That's going to be such sweet karma.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bork_tapes
As a subscriber of NextDNS I say, first, this is cool, but second, don’t do it. I don’t want NextDNS to face some sort of judgment that will get it shut down. Just publish the “DNS tricks” so that people can DIY but don’t make it part of your service.
This sounds like a company using DNS to direct _other_ peoples' web traffic through _their_ proxies. Cloudflare started this way. That's why signing up for Cloudlfare requires using _Cloudflare's_ DNS servers
The so-called "DNS trick", which is defintely not a trick, is to redirect traffic though a proxy server. Whoever operates the proxy, e.g. Cloudflare, NextDNS, etc., has control over the HTTPS traffic and _could_ have access to the contents
HN commenters and other online commenters have criticised Cloudlfare in the past because it decrypts ("terminates") TLS connections and _could_ thereby have access to the contents of customers' traffic
For any doubters, this access was confimed some years ago when a coding mistake by someone at CF in a scanner generated with ragel caused customers'_decrypted_ web traffic contained in memory on Cloudflare's proxies to spill out all over the web. Leaked data became publicly available and remained discoverable via web search for a while; the data had to be scrubbed from search engines and web archives which took several days at least
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudbleed
NextDNS purports to be a "DNS service" but proxying HTTPS opens a new can of worms
NB. This comment is not claiming that NextDNS or anyone else does or does not do anything, nor that anyone will or won't do anything. This comment is about _what becomes possible through control over DNS_. The possibilities it allows for control are why I do not use third party DNS service and prefer to control own DNS; having control can be very useful
Glancing at the front page, it looks like this product also has enforced SafeSearch and restricted mode to protect children, so... seems fine? They're doing the same thing themselves, and it's probably better since it's a local solution.
If you're running a product like this, it should be officially allowed to bypass age verification.
Arguably, the UK's Online Safety Act already allows these products to bypass age verification: see s. 12(6) https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/section/12/6):
> the age verification or age estimation must be of such a kind, and used in such a way, that it is highly effective at correctly determining whether or not a particular user is a child
Unfortunately, it's hard to tell what this passage means, and I suspect it doesn't apply here. (But does that mean there's no law covering age-verification bypassing services? That seems like an unlikely oversight, and the Online Safety Act's badly-drafted enough that I'm not comfortable making a broad assertion here.) Hopefully case law sorts this out a little.
Easily one of the best $20 I spend a year. Makes iOS so much more usable and I really love supporting the vision of the developers from NextDNS
Same here. I'd previously been using a Pi-Hole and Next is just so much simpler -- especially on the go.
Same. I absolutely love NextDNS.
I wish they would add a dropdown box where I can select English as the main language.
If they pretend they're a product targeted at anyone in the DACH region by offering the pages only in German, then they also must add an imprint: who they are, who is responsible, where they are, how I can contact them via email and phone.
I love NextDNS. Can you explain what exactly the DNS tricks are and where they do/don’t work?
How does this "DNS trick" work? That to me is a much more interesting detail.
It likely overrides DNS resolution to CDN/POPs in countries which don't require age checking, or routes the traffic through TCP proxies so your traffic appears to come from a different country without these laws.
This will increase the latency of all traffic to that site though.
A DNS provider can not route your traffic through TCP proxies, so it must be the former.
Sure they can. When your browser resolves a host, they replace the actual IP with the IP of a proxy that is configured to forward traffic according to the Host HTTP header.
That’s really cool. I thought you guys had stopped development altogether.
Same; I switched to ControlD when it appeared NextDNS was on autopilot without support or fixes.
I'm a parent, and I try to keep my kids from the Internet in general, but adult parts in particular.
VPN's are great for this. Just install the VPN, have it block access to adult sites, and have it alert me of any suspicious attempts.
It's bewildering how VPN companies have branded their technology as "anti-censorship" and "privacy-focused." VPN's are a censor's best friend.
DNS services are taking the opposite approach: they start by having a censorship feature (blocking malware, adult ads, etc), and now are adding anti-censorship options.
There's nothing about connecting to a different network, or using a different DNS provider, that is anti-censorship.
> There's nothing about connecting to a different network, or using a different DNS provider, that is anti-censorship.
In a sense, it allows you to pick your censors, or no censors. "Anti-censorship" doesn't necessarily mean that nothing is blocked; it means you get to control what's blocked for yourself.
Making your own filter choices should not be referred to as "censorship". Censorship is when the choice is taken away.
I'm taking the choice away from my kids.
> VPN's are great for this. Just install the VPN, have it block access to adult sites, and have it alert me of any suspicious attempts.
> It's bewildering how VPN companies have branded their technology as "anti-censorship" and "privacy-focused." VPN's are a censor's best friend.
You're already using a router. That's where you would normally implement blocks.
A VPN necessarily does the same thing, and so you can implement routing blocks there too. But this is like saying that a virtual machine is a great technology to run software. OK. Why do you want a virtual one?
VPNs have nothing to do with it. I guess yours has some kind of filtering service, but that's not at all related to a VPN. It's like buying a V8 engine because you wanted a turbo. V8's can have turbos, but it has nothing to do with being a V8.
Better than that at least in the UK, they are not handing the data to the government, but to unregulated, diverse third parties - what could go wrong.
Free VPNs are also at the top of the UK App Store. All of them look extremely dodgy, probably ran by foreign adversaries seizing the opportunity to slurp data.
it's all gonna get leaked every quarter
I don't have a strong opinion here, but I did want to say thank you for your service! I was previously running a pi-hole but switched my family and my household to NextDNS. Great $20/home spent
I use NextDNS to BLOCK porn sites, etc from my kids’ devices. I hope you aren’t changing your ethos as a company, although I don’t know, maybe your customers are changing and causing you to pivot.
Because I don’t want any chance of this stuff affecting the blocks we use for minors, etc.
Thank you for doing this! You are helping spread freedom. If everyone were to create more tools like this, it would shape the future to our liking.
Seeking DNS with 'furry exemption' for fully clothed furries.
> We’re curious how the HN community feels about this. Is it the right way to protect privacy online, or will it just provoke regulators to push harder?
Both. May the mouse forever elude the cat in this game!
If you’re proxying all traffic, that’s going to get expensive and - in theory - makes you as easy to block as VPN providers. I wish you the best of luck!
Where is the setting configured? I just looked through my admin page and didn't see any switch for it
i can see this in the settings page for a profile under the section "Bypass Age Verification"
https://my.nextdns.io/$id/settings
At least for my discord, I still can't access channels marked NSFW, instead of showing me the verification screen it just says "failed to load messages".
Likewise, unable to get it working myself (tested with reddit and bluesky - both ask for verification still).
Will be keeping an eye on this though, hopefully this can be an alternative to my Irish VPN in the future.
Does this create any new liability for the sites that are legally required to check ID?
amazing... we need more of this on the dns level
Handing over Government IDs to private websites and apps is a highly risky and attractive target for identity theft and fraud.
I love you guys, even before this.
Features that are only aimed at breaking the law will tend to backfire...
I am a user of nextdns and okay, this is really neato team! I find this really interesting.
If I may ask, what are the dns tricks, is there a blog post about what you added, I am sooo curious about what sorcery is nextdns using.
Edit: I searched on ddg and there was a ghacks.net link and a alternativeto.net article and sadly ghacks was taking a long time to load and I just read the alternativeto.net article and it was kinda cool, let me paste it here
here is the article link : https://alternativeto.net/news/2025/8/nextdns-rolls-out-new-...
NextDNS has introduced a new DNS-level feature that allows users to bypass age verification checks commonly found on adult websites. This update enables users to avoid submitting personal documents, such as photos or government-issued IDs, to unfamiliar websites when accessing age-restricted content.
To enable the feature, users can activate it directly within the NextDNS settings. The technical approach is straightforward: the DNS resolver intercepts requests to target websites and routes traffic through proxy servers in countries where age verification is not required by law. This means that while users visit the same websites, the sites perceive the traffic as originating from a country without mandatory ID checks.
These changes are particularly relevant for individuals in the European Union and the United Kingdom, regions where certain governments have introduced strict ID requirements for accessing adult content websites. Looking at community reaction, user feedback on Reddit and social media has been largely positive since the announcement, with some users ironizing that “NextDNS developers know their clientele!”.
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TLDR/my-thoughts: Nextdns can use something similar to vpn and I am wondering how much more efficient is this for this usecase compared to a vpn, like I am sure that vpns can be banned by a country, see china.
But nextdns.io is still available in china?, how would that work, and so can this feature be actually expanded to make it a general purpose vpn too if need be but honestly a lot of vpn use cases might be for bypassing verification itself, so basically the only few use cases I can think of vpn is to bypass censorship and maybe verification and also changing vpn for lets say watching content that's available in other country
Can nextdns add other features too, like imagine you can use nextdns with netflix and change it to anime mode and you can get netflix as in of japan, I don't have netflix but I am just giving an example because that's a lot of times what I hear from all those youtube vpn shills
Or can they provide some vpn service itself while at it, and since nextdns still uses dns and dns can operate over https. I imagine that it might be even harder to detect such vpn traffic because I know for sure that some vpn's can be tracked implementation wise (as in wireguard)[i can be wrong, i usually am] but I am pretty sure that https can't be tracked in the same manner, and we can use dns over https in nextdns using this feature..
Can you guys maybe comment on what you think about it? adding general purpose vpns / japan/country switching/enabling vpns itself though I guess it might make you a vpn app which can have its own logs/rules and regulations and I am currently fine/really happy with protonvpn which I also think can run on top of https with their proxy option atleast in browser and maybe even in their apps I am not sure.
I've been using Getflix for years to have my location spoofed to another country. It is a pay product though. I've used it on Amazon and mainly use it for BBC Iplayer. I couldnt ever get netflix to play nice using it or a vpn, so for it I just tunnel to my traffic to a residential address i have in mexico
IIRC there was this service called Tunlr which offered VPN-like location spoofing with similar DNS tricks.
so does it work like this?:
- Client makes a DNS request to ageblockedsite.com using NextDNS server
- NextDNS server returns an IP to a proxy server they control
- Client connects to the site through the proxy server
That's actually pretty neat. I thought they need software running on the client to do the proxying but this scheme doesn't need it.
> If I may ask, what are the dns tricks, is there a blog post about what you added, I am sooo curious about what sorcery is nextdns using.
It is likely they use some form of SNI-based proxy, similar to: https://github.com/celzero/midway
The way this works is, for preset domains, you always answer with the IP of your SNI proxy, which then forwards the connection to the real IP based on the domain in TLS's SNI extension. This "trick" only works for TLS connections that send SNI in the clear, and will not work with QUIC (HTTP/3) or with TLS v1.3 with ECH (encrypted client hello). For non-TLS connections, like cleartext HTTP/2 or HTTP/1, the proxy would look at the Host header. Similar heuristics may exist for other popular cleartext protocols.
ControlD, a similar DNS provider, has supported redirections for a long time now: https://controld.com/features/traffic-redirection
If you own enough public IPs (like a /64 IPv6 or a /22 IPv4), you can vend time-limited unique IP per domain per client IP and support all transport protocols (and not just TLS/HTTP).
Presenting government ID to random entities is literally what government ID's exist for. Paranoia about this is silly.
Additionally, intentionally aiding someone (especially a minor) in circumventing the law is very likely to not be legal, especially when legality is largely determined by a jury, and especially^2 when the facts of the case against you are the most egregious that the government can find, especially^3 when you are profiting from it. It will be something like a 12yo using your service to access something absolutely shocking, and you or someone else will be forced to read a detailed text description of it in front of a jury. This doesn't even begin to address civil liability.
I'm not saying what you are doing is 'wrong', I'm saying you should talk to a lawyer who specializes in this sort of thing before you are forced to.
showing a plastic card in a store to buy the yearly Cum Companion Calendar or whatever is one thing, because the clerk likely is not a savant with eidetic memory, whereas online there's this little thing happening called data processing which starts with the only thing we usually don't want with our ID. copying.
I wonder what the legality would be for the brick and mortar stores (especially the big chain ones) to just start asking customers for ID and then swiping them through scanners that can do all of the eidetic memory work for them?
Kroger already does this, they will get sued for millions and millions of dollars when they have a data breach.
> Paranoia about this is silly.
Having had to deal with some clients with slightly sensitive data, I wish. Photocopies and printed screenshots lying around in the open, CC data copy-pasted manually to other fields or to generic excel sheets because otherwise "it disappears and we can't book late fees" etc. Not even only the "random third-party" companies vetted and specialised in ID verification, but then they get a new support contract down the road, and a fourth- or fifth-party agent who had the cheapest offer now has remote admin access to those desktops.
Probability is low, true. But all it takes is one compromised access.
We all choose our battles probably.
>Presenting government ID to random entities is literally what government ID's exist for.
Wrong lmao. All forms of Government ID are PII and should be treated as sensitive.
https://www.esafety.gov.au/young-people/protecting-your-iden... Heres basic information from a government looking to enact these same laws.
>Nearly every app, social media platform or website asks you for at least some personally identifiable information. But this data can be stolen or misused. That’s why it’s important to keep it as private and secure as possible. If you have to share it, make sure it’s only used by trusted services with your knowledge and consent.
Wow thats great advice.
Is it though? Unfortunately this could have been implemented much better with a decentralised approach.
Its not the showing the ID its having it potentially tied to your accounts and usage. Having your ID tied to your selfie which could be leaked.
Please post a link to a picture of your national ID. /s
I've had to upload my ID card to send money, open a bank account online, verify my identity for a dating app, book an international flight, and ironically to register for the app to have an electronic version of my id on my phone, and weirdly to pay a traffic ticket (why do they care who pays it?), get a discount on my Amazon Prime subscription, and finally to reset my password for my ID.me login for government websites. So all of those are 'fine' I guess, but god forbid you upload it to a third party verification service (the same one that was used for one or more of the above cases where I uploaded my id) to watch pornography, that's where we draw the line?
You are being absurd.
I don't agree with this requirement, but I'm also not so dishonest that I would pretend that it's a security issue.
So think through what you've just said.
If you were able to do all of those things to prove your identity using your ID.. then any identity thief with a copy of your ID could use it to impersonate you in every one of those venues.
That means that somebody else can send your money wherever they wish.. create bank accounts to perform nefarious deeds that tie back to you.. book flights, and subscribe to services on your dime or on a stolen credit card behind your name so that after the chargebacks all debt collection activity aims at you. And finally convince the government to send your tax refunds to them.
In light of this what is absurd about being parsimonious with who and how we share copies of our ID, and why should virtually every website online be deputized into keeping copies of them to provide dog standard content services that might not always be suitable for all audiences?
Bro already has a disease, doesn't care if everyone else gets it too. What kind of argument is ... I already sent my ID all over the internet multiple times?
Its not the 'voluntary' services that may or may not want to see your ID, its the existence of any and all Mandatory legislation, which would be a nightmare.
This is a tech site so I imagine the average user has some deeper understanding than most(technically), but I guess imagination is off the table.
What this would do (requiring all sites) is basically be the end for any and all attempts against identity fraud protection. Indulge a bit of imagination for a moment. If EVERY site is now required to do some form of verification, than everyone's infrastructure now becomes prime targets for PII and troves of identity information, and wherein amazon, banks, and ID.me can be considered to be at or near the top (i'd hope) for keeping their machines tied down, the reality is that EVERYONE'S servers ARE NOT so will maintained. They WILL be attacked, and shims inserted to steal such identity information, as people have ZERO idea, as they're being shunted around to all thees angel-invested ID startups, as to what is or isn't legit, during signup. Wholly, identical pages/domains, as are often seen to steal traditional PCI information, will now be repurposed to this. Its not that the reputable ones are likely to fall, its the small vendors who don't understand that once a customer is EXPECTED to fork over ID to sign up, any hiccup in the process will be unnoticed, and it'll be ripe for abuse if the server/service is ever compromised.
It would be a great thing, because it would finally force us to have somthing better than "I can present a piece of plastic with my picture and some numbers on it" as proof of identity.
ID verification is done by 3rd parties. Nobody wants to hold a photo of your ID because it's a compliance nightmare. You aren't uploading your ID to some porn site, you are uploading it to some real-person verification company.
You don’t see the difference between it getting out some place I travelled to, opened a bank account to, etc than if I visit grandmamidgetporn.com?
Nobody uploads their ID to some porn site, they work with some reputable id verification company.
Out of curiosity, I wanted to see how the five most popular porn sites handled age verification since I live in Florida. One of the states that require it. I started here (safe for work - just list of the most popular websites overall - not porn sites)
https://conversion.ag/blog/top-websites-in-the-world/
Do any of these alternatives seem like something you would want to use?
#10 doesn’t require any age verification.
#12 doesn’t allow you to sign in at all unless you are a creator
#14 no verification needed
#25 requires you to use your Google or Twitter account or an email address.
#61 requires you to log in with your Google account.
#69 wants you to upload your drivers license or passport to a site called
https://saas-onboarding.incodesmile.com/multimedia214/flow/6...