Oblivious DNS standard promises improved privacy
Oblivious DNS is a new proposed DNS standard that has been co-authored by engineers from Apple, Fastly and Cloudflare to improve privacy during DNS operations.
DNS is a fundamental cornerstone of the Internet as it translates domain names, e.g. ghacks.net, into IP addresses that computers use. Whenever you connect to a site on the Internet, DNS is needed.
DNS involves a client device, e.g. a user PC, and a DNS server. The server may be operated by the user's Internet Service Provider, but it is also possible to change it to another provider as it may result in better performance and privacy.
The introduction of encrypted DNS standards, DNS over HTTPS and DNS over TLS, protect DNS traffic against third-parties listening in. DNS traffic alone is valuable as it includes all destinations a user visits when using the Internet.
While DNS traffic is encrypted if one of the encryption standards is used, it is still the case that the DNS provider has access to the IP address of the device the user uses and all the destinations. The proposed standard ODoH (Oblivious DNS over HTTPS) promises to change that.
Basically, what ODoH does is add a proxy to the requests that sits between the client device and the DNS provider.
Traffic flows through the proxy and that results in improved privacy.
- The DNS provider communicates only with the Proxy and not the client. In other words, the DNS provider sees the proxy IP but not the IP of the user device.
- The Proxy sees the user IP as it communicates directly with it, but it has no information on the DNS request as it is encrypted.
ODoH adds another level of encryption to the DNS message itself to ensure that the proxy cannot read it. Cloudflare has published a detailed overview of Oblivious DNS that provides additional technical details. The research paper Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (ODoH): A Practical Privacy Enhancement to DNS provides additional details.
Cloudflare ran benchmarks to determine the performance cost of ODoH. It compared the performance to DoH and concluded that there is a cost, but that it is marginal.
Cloudflare's DNS Resolver 1.1.1.1 supports ODoH already; the company has open sourced implementations, Support may come to Firefox in the future, as confirmed by Eric Rescorla, CTO of Firefox.
Closing Words
Oblivious DNS separates a device's IP address from its DNS queries. That is a good thing as it prevents that DNS providers link IP addresses to DNS queries.
Now You: what is your take on Oblivious DNS?
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.