Image via Wikipedia"Don your tin foil hats, ladies and gentlemen. Take the following news with a pinch of salt and admire their noble privacy policy. Now brace yourself: Google, with the benevolent and seemingly-altruistic intent of speeding up the Internet, have just launched a public DNS service.
What is DNS? Computers on the Internet don't actually have names -- they have numerical IP addresses. DNS maps names to numbers. When you type in 'DownloadSquad.com', DNS runs off and resolves that to an IP address. DNS is almost completely visible to you, the end user. Except for one thing: it's slow. Most Internet users will use their ISP's DNS servers which can be slow or buggy or even return the wrong results. With Google's new public DNS servers, they are guaranteeing faster speeds and more accurate results. Apparently DNS servers can also be compromised and fake details inserted -- with Google's service you should be more secure.
But there are implications. Good implications, but still, you wouldn't seriously expect Google to launch something as huge as this with purely innocent intentions... would you? Google wants to speed up your access to their services. Their Voice, YouTube and Docs services -- all of these could gain substantially from faster DNS resolution speeds. Then there's their free Wi-Fi they've been offering -- of course they want to guarantee a high-quality experience for their users, so they need to provide a fast end-to-end pipe for their web apps and searches. DNS is a big stepping-stone in that direction. Next up is actually rolling out their own Internet backbone... (one day soon, I assure you).
I'm just amazed that they're promising to keep the wealth of data they will accrue purely within the Google Public DNS project. Imagine if we all used their DNS service -- they'd know, without cookies, without Analytics, exactly what you're doing at any given moment. Food for thought...
Incidentally, if you want to use the new service, simply change your network settings to use 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as your DNS servers. For more details, check out the Google Code page for their Public DNS project.
[via Official Google Blog]
Speed-up your surfing with Google's Public DNS originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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