Announcing it as part of their ongoing efforts to make the Web faster, Google opened the doors to a new Public DNS service, which promises both speed and security.
Google launches public DNS drops on the masses.(IMG:J.Anderson)
Most users never notice DNS. However, it is because of DNS that this server’s IP address properly translated to www.thetechherald.com. Each day, a typical Internet user will perform hundreds, if not more, DNS lookups. At the same time, some sites require several DNS lookups, which will cause browsing to slow down. According to Google, there is an easy fix for this, and they have worked to implement it.
Google Public DNS uses Prefetching before the TTL on a record expires, Google explained. They refresh the DNS record continuously, asynchronously and independently of user requests for a large number of popular domains. This allows Google to serve many DNS requests in the round trip time it takes a packet to travel to our servers and back
“Our research has shown that speed matters to Internet users, so over the past several months our engineers have been working to make improvements to our public DNS resolver to make users' web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable,” wrote Prem Ramaswami on the Google blog.
When it comes to security, Google says they have that covered too.
“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,” explained Ramaswami.
When it comes to privacy, Google said that temporary logs are deleted after 24-48 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,” notes the privacy information.
We’re not sure how this will compete, if at all, with OpenDNS, but it’s a neat offering just the same.
If you want to test Google’s Public DNS resolver, simply use 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as your DNS servers. For those of you familiar with OpenDNS you’ll know how to change your DNS settings already. If you are new to this, Google has documentation online here, as well as customer support at 877-590-4367 in the U.S. and 770-200-1201 outside the U.S.
The full documentation is here.
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