Quad9 Foundation

That'd be a great option.

You can also use Quad9 DNS servers, 9.9.9.9.

So the bigger point is every ad you see is the result of an auction, right? So where your devices, details are broadcasting to different companies that you've never heard of.

And most just want to sell you something.

And then what we offer almost uniquely is we offer actual free tools that provide operational protection.

So like a protective DNS service like Quad9, a service that anybody, so simple, you can download in your machine, in your network.

It will prevent you from connecting with a website that has a known malicious domain name.

So it will literally reduce the aperture of what's coming at you from phishing.

Yeah.

And we won't go too into the weeds on this, but this is about a company called Quad9 that does DNS resolving.

We talked about DNS resolvers and how when there's sort of attempts to censor speech on the internet, people, companies, governments, including the US government in the case we talked about a few weeks ago, look for sort of the choke points, and that can be sort of deep within the network stack, and that can affect the speech of many, many people.

In this case, we're talking about Quad9 that does DNS resolving, and they faced issues with the oldest...

Well, maybe not the oldest, but one of the oldest content moderation questions that comes up having to do with copyright infringement, and the copyright holders who want to block sites entirely that are engaged in sort of some sort of infringement, and they've been targeting deeper and deeper into the network stack.

And in this case, in France, they're trying to get the DNS resolver to block access to certain sites, and Quad9 has refused to do that and basically saying that's overkill to block access to sites, which would sort of be a global censorship regime.

Mm.

And they're unwilling to do it, and now they're talking about moving out of France entirely.

So if you want to do something to give back, support the EFF.

The really important case study I also want to highlight to really speak to the issues of these bills is actually from Quad9.

I just interviewed Quad9 on our sister podcast just a couple weeks ago.

It's a wonderful interview.

You've got to go watch that one if you haven't already.

They dealt with a very similar situation in Germany.

But even more relevant is that in France in 2024, a broadcaster actually won blocking orders.

And because Quad9 doesn't track its users, it couldn't block only in France, right? And so they actually had to block that website on Quad9 to the whole world.

I don't know.

Well, I think Cloudflare and Quad9 are like, Quad9 is more privacy centric.

Cloudflare is not bad, but they're very open, like very transparent with their people.

Anyways, you can see it's number three.

So anybody who's utilizing VirusTotal as a CTI source at endpoint level, at at the SIEM level, at the firewall level, we'll never be able to access that infrastructure, communicate with it.

And then we have major DNS providers like Quad9 who work with us, and they will block that infrastructure immediately at the DNS level.

So any user of Quad9 will no longer be able to access that infrastructure.

So there are a number of other providers that we also work with, but the goal is... between prediction and weaponization is to diminish the reputation as much as possible of that infrastructure across the internet so that the attacker's ROI is harmed.

We want the attacker to say, you know what, why did I even mess with this?

And I found out because of using these resolvers with my legal clients that there were some law firm sites that still could not be reached because of those resolvers.

So I just decided, let me do a search for the 10 fastest resolvers what they are, because I've used some of these other ones, you know, Quad9 and the Cloudflare are the ones we talk about the most.

DNS filter is one that gets used a lot.

Next DNS is one that we've used.