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Strange excess activity in CHEF-KOCH's HOSTS Spotify Ad-Filter List with inaccessible or wrong reference link in NextDNS #223

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@ArindamBagchi

CHEF-KOCH's HOSTS Spotify Ad-Filter List is blocking entire India .in TLD. This blocks amazon.in, Indian government sites, Indian railways site irctc.co.in and every bank operating in India because they are mandated to be hosted on .bank.in. What is the relation between these blocks with Spotify????
Worse it is updating more frequently than any of the top ad, tracker block lists and yet the repo link listed on the nextDNS privacy tab https://gitlab.com/CHEF-KOCH/cks-filter list go nowhere. Almost like it is internally scraping other lists and stealthily doing the work of the old suspicious NSABlocklist by the same user. I want to say I saw other non .in, spotify domains were also being blocked by the list but the nextDNS logs and analytics tabs are very unhelpful in scouring through hours old data

Initially I thought of raising this issue only on metadata nextdns/metadata#1471 but the more I keep reading about CHEF-KOCH the more he appears a malicious actor to me #105 (comment). This PR should have merged long ago. Or rather this repo needs some transparency as to how nextDNS is able to query frequently that blocklist despite the urls mentioned are inaccessible, or which other link nextDNS is actually checking for the list

Activity

  1. Mireli5656 commented on Jun 14, 2026

    @Mireli5656

    CHEF-KOCH's HOSTS Spotify Ad-Filter List" is currently blocking the entire .in TLD. This breaks legitimate and critical Indian services with zero connection to Spotify:
    amazon.in
    All Indian government websites (.gov.in)
    Indian Railways (irctc.co.in)
    Every major bank in India (
    .bank.in — legally required)
    The source link shown in NextDNS (https://gitlab.com/CHEF-KOCH/cks-filter) has been dead for years. The list updates extremely frequently despite having no working public source. The same author previously maintained NSABlocklist, which was removed after similar problems.
    This exact issue was already reported in metadata#1471 and remains unresolved. There is no justification for keeping a broken, unmaintained list that causes this level of collateral damage.
    Please remove this list from NextDNS blocklists and close this issue.

  2. romaincointepas commented on Nov 5, 2026

    @romaincointepas
    Member

    CHEF-KOCH Spotify has been removed.

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