Two years ago on April 1 Cloudflare introduced 1.1.1.1: what they called the fastest, privacy-first consumer DNS service… that was also free. I did some tests, found that for my location it indeed was faster than Google DNS, Open DNS and Quad9, so I switched.
Well, they’re doing it again on April 1. This morning they introduced a filtering service that comes in a few flavors…
1.1.1.2 (No Malware)
1.1.1.3 (No Malware or Adult Content)
(Full info in blog post, with secondary DNS addresses listed.)
They don’t mention ad or tracker blocking (yet?) but do say, “In the coming months, we will provide the ability to define additional configuration settings for 1.1.1.1 for Families. This will include options to create specific whitelists and blacklists of certain sites. You will be able to set the times of the day when categories, such as social media, are blocked and get reports on your household’s Internet usage.”
Good to see that they quickly reacted to adjusting the blacklist/whitelist as needed. No product is perfect out of the gate, and at least they’re moving fast, within minutes of hearing valid complaints.
I switched to the anti-malware version and so far so good.
Someone on Twitter noted that the ‘No Malware or Adult Content’ DNS automatically sets Google Search and YouTube into Safe Mode, nice if you have kids.
I don’t need to pay $24/yr for NextDNS’s ad blocking (my ad blockers on macOS/iOS work very well), and I don’t personally need more granularity. So of all the free choices I still find Cloudflare to be the best choice for me, and the malware protection is a nice add-on. I also feel even more comfortable relying on it given KPMG’s recent privacy audit.