Saturday, December 5, 2009

Powered by Google: The Public DNS

So, I’m currently using Google’s newest service called “Public DNS“. This experimental service was created with the intention of making the internet faster — and you know what? Unless it’s psychological, my internet seems to be a bit zippier.

DNS is what makes using domain names  possible. When you type in www.google.com into your browser, DNS is what is responsible for translating it into an IP address — you can think of an IP address as a physical address that everything hooked up to a network needs in order to be connected.

I’m not exactly sure what makes this faster than my local DNS cache — but it’s not just that. This service is also an easy way to protect yourself from malicious hackers looking to serve up invalid DNS responses. Using Public DNS virtually guarantees that you will not fall victim to such an attack.

But what about privacy? Google is no doubt going to store, and use those DNS translation requests — now they can get some impressive aggregate data about almost anything that requires the internet. Does that worry me? Not really — you don’t need to log into anything to use this service, so the data they are collecting is relatively anonymous.

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