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A Look At the Safety of Google Public DNS
darthcamaro writes "Yesterday we discussed Google's launch of its new Public DNS service. Now Metasploit founder and CSO at Rapid7, H D Moore, investigates how well-protected Google's service is against the Kaminsky DNS flaw. Moore has put together a mapping of Google's source port distribution on the Public DNS service. In his view, it looks like the source ports are sufficiently random, even though they are limited to a small range of ports. The InternetNews report on Moore's research concludes: 'What Moore's preliminary research clearly demonstrates to me is that Google really does need to live up to its promise here. Unlike a regular ISP, Google will be subject to more scrutiny (and research) than other DNS providers.'"
My real concern with Google DNS is privacy. Your DNS records are extremely valuable to google, so I sincerely doubt google is not going to record them.
I'm not even entirely convinced about the benefit of using google's; your local DNS server hierarchy is going to be far more responsive, even if it does have a higher miss rate.
Why waste the power? A personal use DNS server is a waste; if your ISPs DNS is slow there are always alternatives (I used Verizon's DNS for years when living in an area where Comcast DNS performance was slow). I know DIY is fun, has geek cread and all that, but your local machine will cache frequently accessed sites anyway, and the benefit gained on uncached sites will be seen so infrequently that you're not benefiting.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Live Mesh, is pretty cool.. Live Writer is actually quite good, IMO, and produces very clean HTML (at least, in my brief tests with it with Wordpress... a custom install, too, with a custom theme and everything; integrated just fine and was a very good WYSIWYG editor). Skydrive - 25gb for free - isn't too shabby, either. I don't like hotmail, but it has sure been around for a while. Bing is actually pretty nice for some things. Microsoft's birds-eye-view is sometimes very useful, and it looks like they are doing a street view now, too.
I ran some tests against Google DNS and some other DNS providers to measure if Google DNS was actually faster than say OpenDNS, or my local ISP. The results showed OpenDNS completely outperformed Google, but Google did do better than two local ISPs. Read my blog entry about this.
Yes, it might be useful for people whose ISP DNS server is slow. That didn't happen to me since my dialup days. Besides, now I simply run my own caching DNS server. It's not hard to set up at all.
I wonder about this myself. Google is a marketing company so you would generally expect them to always appeal to the widest audience possible. As valuable as DNS service is, it's also not something that average users care about or think about. Most users who are dissatisfied with their DNS performance would say "the Internet is slow today" and not "I am experiencing unusually high latency from my ISP's DNS server". This is just a guess but they seem to be targeting two broad categories of user:
Personally, I just run my own caching nameserver.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Think about it. Eventually each of us will have our own DNS entry to identify our individual web presence. The things we make available to do business, social networking etc will be identified through DNS. Why wouldn't Google want to be in on this? Just because there is a profit motive doesn't necessarily mean it is nefarious. This will allow them to add value at a fundamental level. I can see a day when Facebook is irrelevant and people create there own ad-hoc social networks through their own web-presence.
What percentage of total users use DNS that is not assigned from their ISP? I would guess a good percentage of the /. crowd uses a DNS that is not assigned via their ISP. But out of the total population of internet users, using non-IPS DNS servers has got to be pretty small.