Google Launches Public DNS

[fab]

This is quite interesting -

Google Launches Public DNS to Speed Up Web
In an unusual move, Google announced Google Public DNS on Thursday, a new means by which users can utilize the Google DNS servers to access the Internet.

Google has even added telephone support for those who choose to make the switch.

For many, the DNS settings that lie at the heart of a user's router rarely need to be touched. When a user types in "www.pcmag.com", for example, the user's PC contacts the DNS server via the router and asks for the numerical IP address of the site, somewhat like 1-800-FLOWERS actually connects to a numerical telephone number.

Google's motivation, according to the company, is to both speed up Web browsing as well as provide enhanced security. "We believe that a faster DNS infrastructure could significantly improve the browsing experience for all web users," Prem Ramaswami, of Google's Public DNS Team, wrote in a blog post. "To enhance DNS speed but to also improve security and validity of results, Google Public DNS is trying a few different approaches that we are sharing with the broader web community."

Users who want to try out the new Google DNS servers can change their DNS settings to 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4, as its instructions describe. Google strongly recommends, however, that users copy down their existing settings. Interestingly, Google also provides telephone support for its Public DNS as well.

The new DNS settings are not for ISPs to use, as Google does not have a service-level agreement (SLA) in place. The project is characterized as "experimental".

The new DNS settings can be used by any user worldwide, although performance increases will be fastest for users who are in close proximity to a Google data center. Those data centers are located worldwide, although Google hasn't specified exactly where they are physically located.

Although DNS servers are maintained by a user's ISP, the OpenDNS project has maintained a similar open resolver project for a number of years. Ramaswami said in an interview that the Google will encourage other open resolvers to engage it in dialogue and to adopt some of the techniques Google's Pubic DNS used to better improve the Web.

Ramaswami emphatically denied that the company would in any way monetize the data it collected, referring to its privacy policies. "This is abotu making the Web faster, not about the data," he said. "We've gone out of the way to make this true."

From a speed perspective, the Google DNS servers use prefetching, Google said, refreshing the record on a particular network request continuously, asychronously and independently of user requests for a large number of popular domains before the record expires. This allows Google Public DNS to serve many DNS requests in the round trip time it takes a packet to travel to our servers and back, the company claimed.

Google Public DNS was also put into place to prevent the sort of DNS poisoning attacks that were disclosed last year. The system can also prevent so-called DNS "amplification attacks" that attack the DNS server itself, and then use them to route other PCs to attack target sites in an orchestrated distributed denial-of-service attack.

But will users want to trust Google with their each and every request to the Internet? In an attempt to defuse concerns, Google also added a privacy page describing how it handles its records.

Google said that it does keep a user's unique IP address, but only for a short time, to detect and prevent a denial-of-service attack. Afterward, Google begins "burning the logs," in Ramaswami's words.

"Google Public DNS stores two sets of logs: temporary and permanent. The temporary logs store the full IP address of the machine you're using," the company said. "We have to do this so that we can spot potentially bad things like DDoS attacks and so we can fix problems, such as particular domains not showing up for specific users. We delete these temporary logs within 24 to 48 hours.

"In the permanent logs, we don't keep personally identifiable information or IP information. We do keep some location information (at the city/metro level) so that we can conduct debugging, analyze abuse phenomena and improve the Google Public DNS prefetching feature. We don't correlate or combine your information from these logs with any other log data that Google might have about your use of other services, such as data from Web Search and data from advertising on the Google content network. After keeping this data for two weeks, we randomly sample a small subset for permanent storage."

Google representatives referred questions about privacy to the privacy page, but said that the company would make executives available for comment later Thursday morning.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2356618,00.asp

[ksinclair]

Seems really interesting. Will they stop once their experimenting is over?

google likes volume. i read that youtube does not cost them much at all anymore, since they have such huge volume, they use it to get better contracts with the telecoms and they can resell some of their excess capacity. maybe this dns offer will eventually have some kind of benefit for google. surely they will mine it for information.

[south]

Kiss a lot of typo traffic goodbye if people start using it. I can see it now. "did you mean dnforum.com"

[tekz999]

It is the google era. Google will have access to all searches all internet users make, which yields to a very soon, monopoly. Google will be bigger than YHOO and MSFT.

[afloat.com]

Just another step in their plan to assimilate averybody into the Gborg.
I welcome our new overlords!

[H2FC]

Google already is now or soon will be the largest company in the history of the world.

I believe CNBC has a story on that tonight at 9pm est.

[Domainate.com]

British East India Company was large/powerful enough to cause Britain to start wars with countries like China that tried to stave them off. Hell, there were even laws in Britain named after the damn company! Not sure Google is up that high yet, or to the level MS had been at where practically every computer's operation depended on them.

[Bodis.com]

It is the google era. Google will have access to all searches all internet users make, which yields to a very soon, monopoly. Google will be bigger than YHOO and MSFT.

Err...they are already about 10x-20x bigger than Yahoo in terms of value. Possibly quite more as they have more potential value than Yahoo has. Yahoo is a decline, Google isn't.

Market CAP in billions:

Yahoo $21
Google $185
MSFT $264

The top companies are mainly oil companies. Exxon is the company with biggest market value at $356 billion.

It's all nice and sweet now, but no company can ever last at the top forever. Not even Google. No matter what they do, something will happen down the line. Whether the government splits it up, or they crumble themselves - something will happen.

That is not to say there will be a good number of years Google will have a total monopoly. It will be about 10-20 years, I bet. There is not a lot stopping them right now. They are more than fine.

[Acro]

Earlier this year, Google bought Google So now they are twice as big.

[mark]

Here's what PC World had to say about it:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/18367...r_privacy.html

[Credit]

Here's what PC World had to say about it:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/18367...r_privacy.html

Here's the quote from the article that I believe summarizes Google's move very well, "You have to remember they are also the largest advertising and redirection company on the Internet," he says. "To think that Google's DNS service is for the benefit of the Internet would be naive. They know there is value in controlling more of your Internet experience, and I would expect them to explore that fully."

[CanSpace]

Very very interesting news. They already had access to all your search history when using google. Now they'll know pretty much every website you ever visit (well.. the domains they are on at least).

It would be nice if they would also provide a free dns Hosting service like everydns...

[katherine]

Everybody can run one's own DNS server, and alternatives have been available for some time anyway.

[Poohnix]

I've been using my own dns servers for browsing for several years now; It started grew tired of my ISP not respecting the zone TTL settings when I updated DNS zones for my domains, but it turned out to work better for all other browsing too.

[fab]

I've been using my own dns servers for browsing for several years now; It started grew tired of my ISP not respecting the zone TTL settings when I updated DNS zones for my domains, but it turned out to work better for all other browsing too.

That sounds interesting, how do you do that?