A kill switch is a VPN feature that watches the encrypted tunnel between a device and a VPN server, cutting internet access the moment that connection weakens or fails. This stops a device's real IP address or DNS requests from leaking during outages or server switches, restoring access automatically once the secure tunnel resumes. The feature comes in two forms: app-level, which blocks only chosen programs, and system-level, which halts all network traffic on the device.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-15
Quad9, a free public DNS recursive resolver service focused on blocking malicious domains, has reorganized its operations to be based in Switzerland, citing the country's strong privacy laws. Industry figures from organizations including the Center for Democracy and Technology, ProtonMail, RIPE, and Alta Associates praised the move as a step toward diversifying and strengthening privacy protections in core internet infrastructure.
quad9.net
· 2026-09-04
Mullvad announced it will shut down its public DNS-over-HTTPS servers, which it has operated since 2022, and redirect support to Quad9 instead. The company said running a privacy-focused public DNS service is highly specialized work best left to Quad9's dedicated team, and it will now fund Quad9 rather than duplicate its efforts. Mullvad Browser users on default settings will be automatically switched to Quad9, while manual configurations must be updated before November 2, 2026.
mullvad.net
· 2026-09-04
deSEC is a free DNS hosting service built with security as a core focus, running on open-source software and supported by the company SSE. It provides a control panel for managing DNS records, though this interface requires JavaScript to function, while the API documentation remains accessible without it.
desec.io
· 2026-09-04
A blogger detailed a workaround for obtaining a personal domain under .arpa, the top-level domain normally reserved for internet infrastructure and closed to public registration. By signing up for a free IPv6 tunnel through Hurricane Electric's tunnelbroker.net service, users can claim reverse-DNS records under ip6.arpa and repurpose them to host arbitrary DNS entries, effectively creating a working website address ending in .arpa.
hawksley.dev
· 2026-08-31
Wirewiki, a site for inspecting DNS records, delegation and email deliverability data, has built an autocomplete feature that predicts and prefetches results before a user finishes typing. By fetching suggestions for the current character plus every possible next character during the keyDown event, then rendering them on keyUp, the tool displays matches from a 240-million-domain index with almost no perceptible delay.
ruurtjan.com
· 2026-08-31
A study by Interisle Consulting Group found that at least 10% of new generic top-level domain registrations in 2025 had already turned up on security blocklists, with the true share of malicious registrations potentially reaching 20% once related but unlisted domains are counted. Interisle's Greg Aaron and Karen Rose presented these figures at the ICANN 86 Policy Forum, citing ICANN's own research that for every three blocklisted domains, two associated ones often go undetected. ICANN's Office of the CTO has since pushed back somewhat, arguing the numbers hinge heavily on how 'abuse' is defined.
labs.ripe.net
· 2026-08-30
Cloudflare reworked the Rust codebase powering its Big Pineapple DNS caching system, shrinking the average cache entry from 953 bytes to 420 bytes without adding any hardware. The changes—including replacing growable Vec and String types with fixed-size boxed slices and consolidating record storage into a single buffer—cut per-instance memory use from 9.3GB to 5.3GB while also boosting insert speed and lowering lookup latency.
techspot.com
· 2026-08-29
Cloudflare redesigned how DNS cache entries are stored in memory for its 1.1.1.1 resolver platform, Big Pineapple, cutting each entry's size from 953 bytes to 420 bytes. The changes, detailed by systems engineer Sebastiaan Neuteboom, involved five Rust-level optimizations including fixed-size data structures, merged record lists, and raw wire-format storage instead of padded fields.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-08-28
Cloudflare engineers made five successive changes to how DNS cache entries are stored in memory for Big Pineapple, the platform underlying 1.1.1.1 and related DNS services that hold over 250 billion cache entries at once. The changes shrank the per-entry memory footprint by more than half, freeing roughly 100 terabytes across the company's servers while also boosting insert throughput by 43% and cutting lookup latency by 19%.
blog.cloudflare.com
· 2026-08-27
AWS introduced Route 53 Files, a feature that exposes hosted zones as a standard file system so DNS records can be edited with ordinary UNIX tools like a text editor. Changes made through the file system, the AWS console, the API, or CLI all sync automatically, and the file system can be mounted on EC2 instances, ECS or EKS containers, and Lambda functions.
daemonology.net
· 2026-08-27
Google has built Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) directly into Android 17, making it the first major mobile operating system to support the standard at the platform level and turning it on by default. ECH hides the specific website or domain a device is connecting to, so internet providers can only see the content delivery network being used, not the actual destination. Alphabet's Jigsaw division, which developed the feature, says it addresses a long-standing gap in HTTPS privacy protections.
engadget.com
· 2026-08-27
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