Introducing Google Public DNS. ⇒
4 December 2009, mid-morning
Google is running their own DNS servers. They are supposed to be much faster and secure than those operated by your ISP. (They also have cool IP addresses: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.) OpenDNS responds to Google entering the 3rd-party DNS market. I think the big win over OpenDNS and several shitty ISPs (i.e. Rogers) is the following: “Google Public DNS complies with the DNS standards and gives the user the exact response his or her computer expects without performing any blocking, filtering, or redirection that may hamper a user’s browsing experience.” There are privacy concerns, of course. You are essentially telling Google the name of every site you visit when you use their DNS servers. This is more than a little creepy.
This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.
I remember people raised a big fuss too that Gmail was going to display keyword ads based on your e-mail content, but everyone seems to have forgotten that and switched over now. I don’t think Google being able to track your DNS requests is too much worse (in the context of them knowing what sites you visit) than them knowing what searches you performed.
I also don’t understand why Google DNS is any scarier than DNS from any other 3rd-party provider.
that said, I can’t really see a good reason to switch to Google DNS — why wouldn’t I just use my own ISP’s? They’ll always be the fewest hops away.
by Weiguo on December 4 2009, 4:28 pm #
Google makes it sound like their system is way faster. They have all sorts of crazy caching, and servers all over the place. I haven’t tried it out yet to see if it makes a big difference or not. Probably test it out this weekend.
by ramanan on December 4 2009, 5:59 pm #
I wonder though if the response time is dominated by lookup time, or “ping” time. I can’t imagine Google’s “all over the place” could be any faster (latency-wise) than “within one’s own ISP”. But maybe a lot of people already depend on 3rd-party DNS servers, so for them the benefit would be clear.
by Weiguo on December 4 2009, 8:23 pm #
You’re probably right. I think the bigger win is for people who have an annoying ISP like Rogers. At some point I’ll try and write a script to test this using the
hostcommand, since that will tell you how long lookups take at particular servers.by ramanan on December 5 2009, 10:18 am #
rogers, other 3rd-party DNS guys or public DNSes probably were making money selling statistics on site visits, quite possibly with IPs, so i am not sure the level of privacy is much different.
by jody on December 6 2009, 12:21 am #
Ram: what does Rogers do? I haven’t used them in close to 10 years so even if their annoyingness is something obvious, I haven’t heard about it.
jody: is that based on the TOS or speculation?
by Weiguo on December 7 2009, 3:01 pm #
I also haven’t used Rogers in a million years, but they apparently redirect you when you mistype a URL. So, it’s regular DNS hijacking.
by ramanan on December 7 2009, 5:03 pm #