SezMe
post-pre-born
I read gerdbonk
Penultimate Amazing
Skimmed through the info. It's a DNS service just like every other DNS service EXCEPT they promise not to track your IP. Also they claim to be really fast, but only real-world usage will attest to that.
Those are the two things they offer. As a consumer you can decide if either of those is important. As for speed, a DNS lookup occurs only when your browser sends a request to a new IP location, so it will have no effect on downloading, uploading, streaming, etc.
Those are the two things they offer. As a consumer you can decide if either of those is important. As for speed, a DNS lookup occurs only when your browser sends a request to a new IP location, so it will have no effect on downloading, uploading, streaming, etc.
plague311
Great minds think...
To boil it down, DNS changes www.website.com into an IP address. ISP's and some dns services track where you go in hopes of selling it. 1.1.1.1 is a cool service, I'd use it if I didn't run my own DNS at home. I use cloudflare for other things and they're a big name in net security.
Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk
SezMe
post-pre-born
I'm still not clear on how I'd use it.
BowlOfRed
Master Poster
You use some DNS server every time you look at a different web page. It's just for a lot of people, the DNS server is run by their internet provider.
That's a good service for them to offer, but in that position they can do things like remember every site you look up and keep a log of when you did so.
If you trust the cloudflare folks and their stance more than your internet provider, you might tell your computer to use their server instead. On Windows, you just change the DNS setting in your network control panel and override it.
smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
OK, not that I don't think this sounds like really good idea, but the first thing that made me "suspicious" was that when I clicked the INSTALL button to go to the setup instructions it took me straight to the Windows instructions. That means they performed a "reverse DNS" to find which OS I was using.... that really goes against what they are advertising.
GodMark2
Master Poster
It means their web server looked at the ID code (the User Agent String) your web browser sent to that server when requesting a web page, which includes your browser and OS (including version info) by default. Example:
Code:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/7B405
or
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0ddt
Mafia Penguin
No, they didn't do a reverse DNS for that. Reverse DNS would not tell them what platform you're running.
When your browser fetches a web page, one of the "headers" it sends to the web server is "User Agent". The web server can use that to serve different pages for, e.g., a Firefox user or a Chrome user or an Internet Explorer user. (especially the last one was notorious for not adhering to the web standards and so they needed different style sheets to get the same effect).
The User Agent string a typical browser sends also includes the type of platform it's running on, so they can use that to determine whether you're using Windows, MacOS, Linux or something else.
And they did it wrong. I got the instructions for MacOS, while I'm running Linux.
GodMark2
Master Poster
Your computer doesn't know where www.internationalskeptics.com is on the web. So it has to ask someone for directions. But, the computers being asked only know where numeric addresses are, not names. So you have to ask someone what numeric address is used for that 'name' you have. This someone is a Domain Name Server, which is identified by a numeric address.
It's like asking where "Joe's bakery" is, but nobody knows. You then look it up in the phonebook and find out it's at 123 Fake St. Then you can ask people on the street where 123 Fake Street is, and they can point you in the right direction, even if they don't know there's even a bakery in town.
So, your computer has, in it's network settings, a note remembering where that "name to number' lookup book is. By default it probably uses whatever your ISP wants you to use. But you can change it to something like 8.8.8.8 to use Google's lookup, or you can change it to these guys. As it's already a number address, your computer can find it from anywhere to use it's service.
The 'problem': when you ask the 'phonebook' on the internet, it *might* keep a recording of you asking for www.howtomakebombs.net or www.ineedtoenlargemytool.org or something embarrassing. These guys promise to never, ever, not-for-a-billion-dollars, do that, honest, pinky swear.
Childlike Empress
Banned
Another thing is that you can use it to avoid the more primitive form of censorship when you are in an eight star country. Some tend to give the national providers lists of addresses they aren't allowed to translate to their customers. Maybe because they don't like Joe's bread or something.
So with this, you simply ask out of country and they will have heard of Joe.
Good that there's an easy to remember alternative to google's service, as one really doesn't want to give that behemoth even more data.
I tried it and it's clearly slower than my ISP's DNS service, so the only reason why I would want to use it doesn't apply.
So with this, you simply ask out of country and they will have heard of Joe.
Good that there's an easy to remember alternative to google's service, as one really doesn't want to give that behemoth even more data.
I tried it and it's clearly slower than my ISP's DNS service, so the only reason why I would want to use it doesn't apply.
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CORed
Penultimate Amazing
The probably didn't do a "reverse DNS". Most likely they simply used the "User agent" string in the http or https request sent by your browser. Like it or not, you announce your browser version and OS every time you access a web site.
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CORed
Penultimate Amazing
I use Goolge's DNS rather than my ISP's, because my ISP redirects any request for an unresolvable domain (one it can't find an IP for) to a crappy little ad farm pretending to be a search engine, instead of complying with standards and returning a message that it can't resolve the name. This annoys me.
Goole's DNS does, i believe, track your requests to further their advertising empire (as they do with searches or just about any other interaction with their products). I don't care enough about that not to use their services, if they meet my needs, but if you are bothered by that this service is an alternative.
Goole's DNS does, i believe, track your requests to further their advertising empire (as they do with searches or just about any other interaction with their products). I don't care enough about that not to use their services, if they meet my needs, but if you are bothered by that this service is an alternative.
phunk
Illuminator
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2007
- Messages
- 4,127
Indeed. If you ever wondered how a website that looks different on mobile browsers knows that you're on mobile, that is it.
Childlike Empress
Banned
Thanks to the Patriot Act everything Google knows, the NSA knows as well, which is a bit more delicate than ad business. You just share more data in addition to all the other data these "services" already collect on you, making your "virtual you" even more defined. I avoid that as much as possible, not least out of principle.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
I'm curious: Where did you get this idea about reverse DNS?
Dancing David
Penultimate Amazing
CORed
Penultimate Amazing
Good question. A reverse DNS, as somebody actually mentioned, doesn't actually give that information. What it actually does, is, given an IP address, return the domain name(s) assigned to that address.
CORed
Penultimate Amazing
That's probably a little bit (but only a little bit) of an exaggeration. I won't say that I really like it, but I strongly suspect that any NSA agent looking at my information would be in serious danger of dying of boredom.
paulhutch
Master Poster
Tor adds a lot of unavoidable overhead to your web requests especially latency and speed reduction. A DNS server with a privacy focus adds no latency or speed reduction.
BTW GRC has a nice tool to check the performance of your currently set and other DNS servers. https://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm
I found that the new 1.1.1.1 servers are significantly slower for me than my ISP's servers. In fact my ISP's servers are the fastest servers I can use.