No matter what, copyright and patents should *never* continue past death.
There have to be some exceptions - I shouldn't be able to have someone assassinated and then be able to legally sell my own copies of his recently copyrighted stuff.
Or you can accept that everyone is moderately untrustworthy and google's level of untrustworthiness is acceptable so far.
That would require a radical shift in (read: complete reversal of) my worldview. I prefer to assume people are trustworthy until proven otherwise; you appear to assume the opposite.
I trust my (human) friends because they have thus far not broken my trust; I don't see any other way to maintain a friendship. You can't make friends by mistrusting everyone you meet. I don't see why Google should be treated differently.
No, thinking that a multi-billion dollar corporation are the good guys because they say they are is naive.
It's only naive if that's the reason I'm trusting them. It's lame of you to act like that's my reason, because I've explicitly stated why I trust them. Since you missed before, here it is again:
They have thus far proven trustworthy.
What does a company have to do to prove themselves trustworthy to you, if keeping their promises over a decade isn't enough?
I'm not specifically saying I distrust them. I'm saying I don't trust them. There's a line in between the two.
Not really, in this case. Either you trust them with your data, or you don't; you say you don't, but you immediately turn around and say you use their services, thus proving that you do trust them with your data.
Using Gmail is trusting Google with your e-mails. Using Google's search is trusting Google with your search history. Etc.
You either trust Google with your data, or you don't use their services; you can't have it both ways.
I just said that people who explicity trust google because they haven't done anything evil with all the information they collect yet, are at best somewhat naive.
So.. trusting someone because thus far they've been trustworthy is naive? Man, I'd hate to live by that philosophy.
Now they don't really have any particular need to be collecting this information.
What information do you think they're collecting? They don't associate your DNS queries with you; they don't attach them to your Google accounts. They don't even keep the majority of the queries long-term. (Their privacy policy says they keep an anonymous, random subset of the queries.) They even explicitly state that they don't share it with other Google divisions (e.g. the advertising division), and they don't share it with any other company, so as long as they're following their current spec there's absolutely nothing "nefarious" they can do with what little DNS information they're keeping.
I use google products, I might even use this DNS service, but I don't trust google
If you don't trust them, why do you use their services? That seems inconsistent to me.
Maybe they're just worried about ISPs hijacking NXDOMAIN requests (slightly reducing Google's search marketshare). But I don't see why they can't just be doing something nice, because they feel like being cool.
Your paranoia is a little tiring. As long as Google gives me no reason to mistrust them, I'm not going to be paranoid about their offerings. Sure, I read their privacy policy first - that covers the "what are they doing with this data" worry that you're bringing up - but since the worry is satisfied, there's no reason to cling to your paranoid fantasies about Google's evil plan for world domination.
They might anonomize it, but why on earth are they even collecting it. What do they plan to do with it, and what do we do if they stop anonmizing it or if it isn't as anonymous as we think(they only say they purge the IP address as far as I can tell).
Perhaps you should actually read their privacy policy, but I'll quote it for you for convenience:
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. 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.
The above link also includes a complete list of the data that gets permanently stored.
So they're not really "collecting" anything. And if they do for some reason change their privacy policy, do you really think it will be that hard to switch your DNS settings back to someone else?
I'm betting you're wrong and that there IS a 'data collection and analysis' angle.
Only if you believe their Public DNS privacy policy is a complete and utter lie. Google may be ginormous, but as far as I'm aware, they've never lied in their privacy policies, and they've never given me a reason to think they're going to start lying now.
if there is a freebie, there's an angle that you are simply not seeing.
This may be slightly off-topic, but I think that attitude is a little lame. The other day I was playing Champions Online, and I had some spare 18-slot bags. I announced to the zone that I was giving them away for free to the first person who responded. Rather than a bunch of people saying "I want them!", I got a bunch of people saying "what's the catch?"
Why is it so odd to just be generous? Why must generosity have some hidden motive? Can't a person (or a company) just be nice once in a while?
If this were Microsoft announcing a free public DNS service, sure, I'd be wary, but Google hasn't given me reason to mistrust them.
If that's what you want, you're free to use OpenDNS, but personally, if I type in a nonexistent domain, I'd rather get an error instead of an ad-filled "is this what you mean?" page.
By all appearances, this is just a cool thing they're doing for kicks. (Perhaps they're concerned about the DNS query hijacking and want to ensure that somebody is actually following the DNS spec, but that's hardly a bad thing.)
I'd hardly call DNS resolution "absolute power". "power", maybe, if enough people use it, but if they stick to their privacy policy they can't do much with the data anyway. That is, they can't target ads at you any better, because they won't know who queried what domain name.
they want our data for a reason. they are not in this for love-of-fellow-man (no matter WHAT shiny things they 'give' you).
Fine... but what have they actually done that's evil? Or better, what are you basing your comment on?
Generally speaking, having the potential for evil is not, in and of itself, sufficient basis for mistrust. Based on my knowledge of Google's history, I have absolutely no reason to mistrust their stated motives. Do you have information that would be relevant?
Furthermore, they've explicitly stated that they delete IP address information after 24 hours, they do not correlate DNS queries with any Google account, and they do not share their data with other Google divisions (like the advertising division). Given those restrictions, I can't think of anything "evil" they could do with that data.
Or do you have reason to believe they won't stick to their own privacy policy? (I don't mean a reason based on paranoia, I mean an actual concrete reason.) If you do, please share.
Google's privacy policy explicitly states that they don't preserve IP address information beyond 24 hours, nor do they associate your DNS queries with any Google account information.
In other words, they would be completely unable to comply with such a request, because they won't have that data.
He implies that Google will sell your DNS data (by not mentioning Google's privacy policy and then mentioning their own). Google's privacy policy explicitly states that a) they purge all IP information after 24 hours, b) they don't sell your data to other companies, and c) they don't even share data with other Google divisions. If the response is "well Google could change their privacy policy", I'll respond with "so could OpenDNS", so that's not a reason to trust OpenDNS over Google.
He says that Google is doing this to "control your internet experience". If they're giving you valid DNS responses, then they're not controlling anything - especially given that by their own privacy policy they can't share this data with e.g. Google's advertising division. OpenDNS is in just as good a position to "control" the internet experience of its users as Google is, and OpenDNS gives me no reason I should trust them over Google.
He says... well, I'll quote him:
it’s not clear that Internet users really want Google to keep control over so much more of their Internet experience than they do already — from Chrome OS at the bottom of the stack to Google Search at the top, it is becoming an end-to-end infrastructure all run by Google, the largest advertising company in the world. I prefer a heterogeneous Internet with lots of parties collaborating to make this thing work as opposed to an Internet run by one big company.
Even if I'm running Chrome OS querying Google Public DNS to connect to Google Docs, it's still not "an Internet run by one big company". It's "a couple of services run by one company that I happen to be using". Google wouldn't be running all the other hundred servers I connect to regularly. In other words, it's just fearmongering.
Frankly, I'm more inclined to trust my DNS queries to Google than to OpenDNS - especially since Google's servers are going to be closer to me and more reliable. Google can afford better service.
Sorry but because of this, I am having a hard time reconciling that with your statement about this being "an enormous amount of extra work." I may be missing something, or you may have genuinely encountered difficulties that did not happen in my case. Can you explain this discrepancy please?
You apparently don't dual-boot with Windows (e.g. for gaming), or if you do you don't care that Windows doesn't use your own personal DNS server. You also apparently don't have any other machines on your network.
Running your own DNS server on a non-trivial network is a relatively significant investment in time, equipment, or both. Why should my wife's laptop be unable to resolve sites while I'm rebooting or shut down for the night? Why should I have to maintain *two* DNS servers (one in Windows and one in Linux) if I want to dual-boot? Why should I have to set up a separate physical machine to run DNS (to avoid the multi-machine problem), which adds energy and maintenance costs?
The potential costs of your proposition are far greater than the benefits, especially when someone else (Google) is doing it all for free. And yet you think it's trivial.
Can you explain that discrepancy, please?
On second thought, don't bother - you obviously think "it's easy for me in my situation" is equivalent to "it's easy for everyone in every situation".
Why would I invest two hours and a spare machine into setting up my own DNS server when I can spend thirty seconds changing a setting on my router?
As for maintenance... Why should I invest time updating the software that runs these servers every time a new security vulnerability is discovered? Why should I even have to check for updates, when someone else is doing it all for free? Why should I pay for the electricity to run the additional machine? (You're going to say "run it on your desktop", but what if I dual-boot? Why should my wife's laptop be unable to resolve sites while I'm rebooting or shut down for the night?) And so on and so forth.
Maybe you like spending your free time dealing with all of that crap. Most of us don't.
As for "most consumer-grade routers have a DNS server built-in", I'm not sure you know what you mean. Sure, most have a caching DNS server built-in, but they merely defer to your ISP's DNS server when they don't have the address cached, which means you're going to be querying your ISP's DNS servers every $TTL anyway - so if your ISP is redirecting NXDOMAIN queries to ad pages, you're still going to get them.
Other companies, perhaps. But when has Google ever made their ToS more evil?
As far as I'm concerned, Google has done nothing to undermine our trust in their sincerity. If you have examples, though, I'm more than willing to dig in to it.
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People buy books that are out of copyright all the time.
Except that there are inheritance laws which explicitly state that if you murder someone you stand to inherit from, you don't get the inheritance.
That is, you don't just go to jail for murdering your great aunt, you lose the inheritance as well, and those are separate laws.
No matter what, copyright and patents should *never* continue past death.
There have to be some exceptions - I shouldn't be able to have someone assassinated and then be able to legally sell my own copies of his recently copyrighted stuff.
What's funny is that half of the time, they seem to do this:
"Next up, are your children eating POISON with their food? Find out, after this commercial break."
{commercials}
"And now, our feature story: Are your children eating POISON with their food? Reporter Jim Smith investigates."
{Jim Smith interviews food processing plant owner}
"So no, your children are not eating poison with their food. Next up, is your cell phone giving you cancer?"
Do you seriously think nobody actually likes Google without being on their payroll?
Or you can accept that everyone is moderately untrustworthy and google's level of untrustworthiness is acceptable so far.
That would require a radical shift in (read: complete reversal of) my worldview. I prefer to assume people are trustworthy until proven otherwise; you appear to assume the opposite.
I trust my (human) friends because they have thus far not broken my trust; I don't see any other way to maintain a friendship. You can't make friends by mistrusting everyone you meet. I don't see why Google should be treated differently.
No, thinking that a multi-billion dollar corporation are the good guys because they say they are is naive.
It's only naive if that's the reason I'm trusting them. It's lame of you to act like that's my reason, because I've explicitly stated why I trust them. Since you missed before, here it is again:
They have thus far proven trustworthy.
What does a company have to do to prove themselves trustworthy to you, if keeping their promises over a decade isn't enough?
I'm not specifically saying I distrust them. I'm saying I don't trust them. There's a line in between the two.
Not really, in this case. Either you trust them with your data, or you don't; you say you don't, but you immediately turn around and say you use their services, thus proving that you do trust them with your data.
Using Gmail is trusting Google with your e-mails. Using Google's search is trusting Google with your search history. Etc.
You either trust Google with your data, or you don't use their services; you can't have it both ways.
I just said that people who explicity trust google because they haven't done anything evil with all the information they collect yet, are at best somewhat naive.
So.. trusting someone because thus far they've been trustworthy is naive? Man, I'd hate to live by that philosophy.
Now they don't really have any particular need to be collecting this information.
What information do you think they're collecting? They don't associate your DNS queries with you; they don't attach them to your Google accounts. They don't even keep the majority of the queries long-term. (Their privacy policy says they keep an anonymous, random subset of the queries.) They even explicitly state that they don't share it with other Google divisions (e.g. the advertising division), and they don't share it with any other company, so as long as they're following their current spec there's absolutely nothing "nefarious" they can do with what little DNS information they're keeping.
I use google products, I might even use this DNS service, but I don't trust google
If you don't trust them, why do you use their services? That seems inconsistent to me.
Maybe they're just worried about ISPs hijacking NXDOMAIN requests (slightly reducing Google's search marketshare). But I don't see why they can't just be doing something nice, because they feel like being cool.
Your paranoia is a little tiring. As long as Google gives me no reason to mistrust them, I'm not going to be paranoid about their offerings. Sure, I read their privacy policy first - that covers the "what are they doing with this data" worry that you're bringing up - but since the worry is satisfied, there's no reason to cling to your paranoid fantasies about Google's evil plan for world domination.
They might anonomize it, but why on earth are they even collecting it. What do they plan to do with it, and what do we do if they stop anonmizing it or if it isn't as anonymous as we think(they only say they purge the IP address as far as I can tell).
Perhaps you should actually read their privacy policy, but I'll quote it for you for convenience:
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. 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.
The above link also includes a complete list of the data that gets permanently stored.
So they're not really "collecting" anything. And if they do for some reason change their privacy policy, do you really think it will be that hard to switch your DNS settings back to someone else?
I'm betting you're wrong and that there IS a 'data collection and analysis' angle.
Only if you believe their Public DNS privacy policy is a complete and utter lie. Google may be ginormous, but as far as I'm aware, they've never lied in their privacy policies, and they've never given me a reason to think they're going to start lying now.
if there is a freebie, there's an angle that you are simply not seeing.
This may be slightly off-topic, but I think that attitude is a little lame. The other day I was playing Champions Online, and I had some spare 18-slot bags. I announced to the zone that I was giving them away for free to the first person who responded. Rather than a bunch of people saying "I want them!", I got a bunch of people saying "what's the catch?"
Why is it so odd to just be generous? Why must generosity have some hidden motive? Can't a person (or a company) just be nice once in a while?
If this were Microsoft announcing a free public DNS service, sure, I'd be wary, but Google hasn't given me reason to mistrust them.
If that's what you want, you're free to use OpenDNS, but personally, if I type in a nonexistent domain, I'd rather get an error instead of an ad-filled "is this what you mean?" page.
You basically asserted that you could not conceive of a situation in which it would be difficult to set up and maintain your own DNS server.
You weren't thinking very hard.
Except they don't share DNS query information with their ad division, so how does this benefit their ad division?
By all appearances, this is just a cool thing they're doing for kicks. (Perhaps they're concerned about the DNS query hijacking and want to ensure that somebody is actually following the DNS spec, but that's hardly a bad thing.)
Rumors abound that L3 intends to shut off public access to their DNS servers at some point.
No, I have no source, but if anyone else does, please share.
I'd hardly call DNS resolution "absolute power". "power", maybe, if enough people use it, but if they stick to their privacy policy they can't do much with the data anyway. That is, they can't target ads at you any better, because they won't know who queried what domain name.
they want our data for a reason. they are not in this for love-of-fellow-man (no matter WHAT shiny things they 'give' you).
Fine... but what have they actually done that's evil? Or better, what are you basing your comment on?
Generally speaking, having the potential for evil is not, in and of itself, sufficient basis for mistrust. Based on my knowledge of Google's history, I have absolutely no reason to mistrust their stated motives. Do you have information that would be relevant?
Furthermore, they've explicitly stated that they delete IP address information after 24 hours, they do not correlate DNS queries with any Google account, and they do not share their data with other Google divisions (like the advertising division). Given those restrictions, I can't think of anything "evil" they could do with that data.
Or do you have reason to believe they won't stick to their own privacy policy? (I don't mean a reason based on paranoia, I mean an actual concrete reason.) If you do, please share.
Google's privacy policy explicitly states that they don't preserve IP address information beyond 24 hours, nor do they associate your DNS queries with any Google account information.
In other words, they would be completely unable to comply with such a request, because they won't have that data.
No, but Google has given me no reason to mistrust them, whereas my ISP has given me every reason for mistrust.
So, you tell me - given the choice, would you rather choose Google or Comcast for DNS queries?
That post reads like FUD:
He implies that Google will sell your DNS data (by not mentioning Google's privacy policy and then mentioning their own). Google's privacy policy explicitly states that a) they purge all IP information after 24 hours, b) they don't sell your data to other companies, and c) they don't even share data with other Google divisions. If the response is "well Google could change their privacy policy", I'll respond with "so could OpenDNS", so that's not a reason to trust OpenDNS over Google.
He says that Google is doing this to "control your internet experience". If they're giving you valid DNS responses, then they're not controlling anything - especially given that by their own privacy policy they can't share this data with e.g. Google's advertising division. OpenDNS is in just as good a position to "control" the internet experience of its users as Google is, and OpenDNS gives me no reason I should trust them over Google.
He says... well, I'll quote him:
it’s not clear that Internet users really want Google to keep control over so much more of their Internet experience than they do already — from Chrome OS at the bottom of the stack to Google Search at the top, it is becoming an end-to-end infrastructure all run by Google, the largest advertising company in the world. I prefer a heterogeneous Internet with lots of parties collaborating to make this thing work as opposed to an Internet run by one big company.
Even if I'm running Chrome OS querying Google Public DNS to connect to Google Docs, it's still not "an Internet run by one big company". It's "a couple of services run by one company that I happen to be using". Google wouldn't be running all the other hundred servers I connect to regularly. In other words, it's just fearmongering.
Frankly, I'm more inclined to trust my DNS queries to Google than to OpenDNS - especially since Google's servers are going to be closer to me and more reliable. Google can afford better service.
$ host aoeusnth.com
You must use Dvorak ^_^
Sorry but because of this, I am having a hard time reconciling that with your statement about this being "an enormous amount of extra work." I may be missing something, or you may have genuinely encountered difficulties that did not happen in my case. Can you explain this discrepancy please?
You apparently don't dual-boot with Windows (e.g. for gaming), or if you do you don't care that Windows doesn't use your own personal DNS server. You also apparently don't have any other machines on your network.
Running your own DNS server on a non-trivial network is a relatively significant investment in time, equipment, or both. Why should my wife's laptop be unable to resolve sites while I'm rebooting or shut down for the night? Why should I have to maintain *two* DNS servers (one in Windows and one in Linux) if I want to dual-boot? Why should I have to set up a separate physical machine to run DNS (to avoid the multi-machine problem), which adds energy and maintenance costs?
The potential costs of your proposition are far greater than the benefits, especially when someone else (Google) is doing it all for free. And yet you think it's trivial.
Can you explain that discrepancy, please?
On second thought, don't bother - you obviously think "it's easy for me in my situation" is equivalent to "it's easy for everyone in every situation".
Why would I invest two hours and a spare machine into setting up my own DNS server when I can spend thirty seconds changing a setting on my router?
As for maintenance... Why should I invest time updating the software that runs these servers every time a new security vulnerability is discovered? Why should I even have to check for updates, when someone else is doing it all for free? Why should I pay for the electricity to run the additional machine? (You're going to say "run it on your desktop", but what if I dual-boot? Why should my wife's laptop be unable to resolve sites while I'm rebooting or shut down for the night?) And so on and so forth.
Maybe you like spending your free time dealing with all of that crap. Most of us don't.
As for "most consumer-grade routers have a DNS server built-in", I'm not sure you know what you mean. Sure, most have a caching DNS server built-in, but they merely defer to your ISP's DNS server when they don't have the address cached, which means you're going to be querying your ISP's DNS servers every $TTL anyway - so if your ISP is redirecting NXDOMAIN queries to ad pages, you're still going to get them.
If you're technical enough and care about such, you're way better off setting up your own recursive DNS server.
Being technical enough to do it doesn't mean you're willing to invest the time, effort, and equipment into setting up your own server.
Other companies, perhaps. But when has Google ever made their ToS more evil?
As far as I'm concerned, Google has done nothing to undermine our trust in their sincerity. If you have examples, though, I'm more than willing to dig in to it.
One could argue that this Taiwanese man is now "famous". Whether it's the good kind of fame, or the bad, is debatable... ;)