Most Internet users use their Internet Service Provider as the DNS provider, often without their knowledge. This may not always be the optimal solution depending on the provider’s infrastructure, network speed and handling of domain names that cannot be resolved as well as a country’s censorship implementations.

The last two aspects might need some clarification. Many IPSs display custom search pages if a domain name cannot be resolved. They do that to cash in on the user’s searches. This can be frustrating to the user who might want to prefer a different handling of those page requests.

Some countries use the domain name system to block access to web contents and other resources.

Using a different DNS provider can speed up domain lookup times, reduce web censorship and block custom error pages by the Internet providers.

Symantec is the latest company to enter the DNS provider market with Norton DNS which is currently offered as a public beta. The easiest way to use the settings is to change the DNS settings to: 198.153.192.1 and 198.153.194.1.

Symantec offers in depth instructions for Windows and Mac OS X on the official Norton DNS website.

Norton DNS promises the same advantages that Google offered when they introduced Google Public DNS back in December of 2009.

Norton DNS Public Beta offers you a faster, safer, and more reliable Internet experience.

The Norton DNS website and FAQ do not contain lots of information about how it is faster, safer and more reliable than the standard DNS provider. Norton seems to be using information from Norton Safeweb to block malicious site requests automatically. Similar services are offered by other DNS providers such as OPEN DNS as well.

Symantec seems to have plans to expand the product in the future naming parental controls in the FAQ as one of the planned features. It is likely that the service will get integrated into Symantec and Norton products once it comes out of beta.

The Internet Service Provider is usually the one that is providing the DNS servers to the customer. This happens more often than not automatically. There are however reasons to switch to other DNS servers with performance, privacy and censorship being three of the major reasons.

Censorship: Some countries use DNS to block access to websites. This is a weak block that can easily be bypassed by the user by entering the IP address of the website instead of its domain name.

Privacy: Many ISPs cash in on domain typing errors by displaying a custom error page to the user instead of the simple “page not found” error page.

Performance: Some ISPs offer DNS servers that are not optimized, slow and sometimes even unreachable.

Users who experience some of these difficulties can switch DNS servers. One of the most prominent free DNS providers was Open DNS which not only offers a fast independent DNS system but also additional optional values that include phishing and web content filters.

Google today announced that they have started offering public DNS servers as well. The system, called Google Public DNS, was designed to “make users’ web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable”.

Speed: Resolver-side cache misses are one of the primary contributors to sluggish DNS responses. Clever caching techniques can help increase the speed of these responses. Google Public DNS implements prefetching: before the TTL on a record expires, we refresh the record continuously, asychronously and independently of user requests for a large number of popular domains. 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.

Security: DNS is vulnerable to spoofing attacks that can poison the cache of a nameserver and can route all its users to a malicious website. Until new protocols like DNSSEC get widely adopted, resolvers need to take additional measures to keep their caches secure. Google Public DNS makes it more difficult for attackers to spoof valid responses by randomizing the case of query names and including additional data in its DNS messages.

Validity: Google Public DNS complies with the DNS standards and gives the user the exact response his or her computer expects without performing any blocking, filtering, or redirection that may hamper a user’s browsing experience.

A Google Code page details how to change the DNS servers to use Google Public DNS servers. Experienced users need to use the following two DNS servers.

8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4

Privacy Concerns

But what about Privacy? Users who use the Google Public DNS servers will automatically submit extensive data to Google that includes all the websites and other services on the Internet that they visit.

According to the privacy information posted on the project web page Google Public DNS records temporary and permanent data but does not “correlate or combine” these information “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”.

Temporary Logs: 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.

Permanent Logs: 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. After keeping this data for two weeks, we randomly sample a small subset for permanent storage.

Verdict:

Some users will say that providing public DNS servers is just another step in Google’s world domination plans. Others might find out that the benefits outweigh the doubts and concerns. It is definitely not bad to have another option in this field especially with the increasing censorship around the world.

They did provide a switch in the user control panel to disable that feature again but this is again a company that is forcing the user to take action for something that they changed.

Open DNS has been covered before on this website and I just want to remind everyone that Open DNS can be used to get rid of search boxes from your provider. Setup of Open DNS takes a few minutes at most and should be doable for everyone.

By using the service you start using the Open DNS servers instead of the ones from the Internet Provider. DNS meaning Domain Name System which is responsible for “translating” domain names into IP addresses.

Open DNS provides additional advantages such as phishing protection (that is not slowing down your computer), parental controls, typo corrections and shortcuts. Shortcuts work like Firefox keywords, you basically assign a phrase to an url and can use the phrase to open the website.