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Comment by m-p-3 | Hacker News Reader

privacy-wise, plaintext is the worst option possible.

I disagree, at least in my situation.

My DNS requests traverse my ISP's network to my ISP's DNS server (or my employer's ISP's DNS server if I'm at work).

I live in a country where I have very strong privacy protections and what my ISP can and can't do with my DNS requests is extremely limited.

If my DNS requests are sent to CloudFlare or Google instead, my DNS requests are under American jurisdiction, where I have no rights and both American businesses and the American government can do whatever they please with no real recourse.

Couldn’t your isp watch traffic to pull out SNI information?

the next step is eSNI and judging by the DoH rollout that will also be a new level of controversy advocating against it

What are the arguments against eSNI?

> What are the arguments against eSNI?

Institutions providing internet access, but with an obligation or operational requirement to block certain kinds of content (e.g. insufficient network capacity on the free WiFi at a hospital to allow streaming video for all visitors) would not be able to do it at all.

Privacy proponents seem to forget that there are sometimes reasonable reasons to allow traffic to be blocked, and instead of looking for a real solution, are imposing ridiculous "solutions" on all Firefox users.

So it depends on the country. In my country (Russia) all Internet traffic is being recorded by the ISP for the last month and sites are blocked on political reasons. For me having DoH with Cloudflare is better.

Ditto in Australia

The reason why browsers are moving to features like DoH and eSNI as defaults is because it's every type of nation that is now instituting pervasive surveillance against its citizens

You also can't trust laws since ISPs can be hacked or infiltrated from the inside

In terms of personal protection encryption trumps law

> You also can't trust laws since ISPs can be hacked or infiltrated from the inside

Cloudflare isn't magically free from the same threats.

> I live in a country where I have very strong privacy protections and what my ISP can and can't do with my DNS requests is extremely limited.

There's very few countries with such strong privacy protections, even in the Western world.

From what I can tell, all countries covered by the GDPR heavily limit what an ISP can do with DNS queries. That covers 515M people, which is more than the populations of three mentioned countries (US, Russia and Australia) put together.

> which is more than the populations of three mentioned countries (US, Russia and Australia) put together.

Not sure it matters, but only by a small margin is that true. 500M vs 515M.

A lot of these countries currently have laws to record years of DNS logs for future analysis by the police. Due to the abuse these countries have done in the past about it, I do not want any record personally.

That’s a very good point. In fact all of them do, because the same EU that mandates GDPR also mandates data retention, which only differs in details in member states.

That's a very good point.

I'm not familiar with DoH. Would it allow CloudFlare to match domain names to IP addresses still? If so, then I don't see how it adds any value to the current solution. If anything, it creates a false sense of security which is worse than no security at all.

What's the point of encrypting the DNS lookup step if a middleman can still potentially see everything in plaintext?

Your request will hit CloudFlare edge node in your country and be served from there. Under your jurisdiction.

I can think of something worse: sending all your DNS queries to an unregulated third party.

aren't you still sending your data to unregulated third party with any ISP? (i dont live in the US so i am not aware if they're regulated in this regard)

This is already what happens. Your DNS queries have to go somewhere, and unless you control the DNS servers, there's a third party in the loop somewhere.

Not really, my DNS requests go to my ISP's DNS server. And the ISP sees the requests anyway since they are the one forwarding all the packets.

Now, Cloudfare will see them too. (if this would come to my country).

But your ISP won't see them. They'll see that some requests are being made to Cloudflare, but not anything about the content.

No I mean in my current situation if my ISP is also my DNS provider they will get the requests.

But they can already see what sites I visit because they are my ISP and carry my packets.

In Mozilla's new default implementation Cloudflare will also see them, without me ever knowing (as an average user).

With TLS1.3, encrypted SNI, encrypted DNS the ISP can only see the IP address you are connecting to, not a domain name. For Google's resources it only sees that you are connecting to Google's network, but is it Youtube or Gmail or Maps, they cannot tell (which is awesome by the way).

With Tor ISP can't even see the final address, but maybe Tor has its own solutions for DNS?

Onion sites use a keypair as their "name"

And down the toilet goes the (distributing and caching) Inter-Net. Long live to the new Cloud-Net. Cloudfare and Google are achieving what Compuserve and AOL could not.

Exaggerating slightly ... but not that much really. And all in the good name of privacy and security.

It is also amazing how people (Americans ?) are not willing to admit I want MY jurisdiction to apply. Not an American one. I want the choice.

Caching died with insecure HTTP, and that's okay.

> I want the choice.

Then turn it off. But the default protects more people than it harms.

Well, it's not really a choice if for security I must give up on jurisdiction ?

I don't doubt the intentions of Mozilla. But, I expect Mozilla to set the bar much higher.

> But the default protects more people than it harms. Sorry, not good enough for me. They should not be promoting a private company centralized solution. They really should be pushing for a decentralized and distributed solution that is yet secure for everyone involve and promote that.

Hence your request goes to yet another party: your ISP (by necessity via IP destination in your IP headers), the site you want to go to, and to Cloudflare/Google as DNS provider and as fourth party. Whereas with regular DNS, your ISP's nameserver gets DNS queries, hence only three parties are involved. Eg what ndidi, apexalpha said.

SNI isn't super useful to profile customers by itself. Now of course encrypted SNI will be a welcome addition to the protocol, but it won't get rid of traffic profiling.

The destination IP is more than enough to build a customer profile. It's not terribly relevant if you visited Youtube or Maps. Just analyzing netflow logs will give much more information than what services you use, such as for how long you use them and if you stream any media during that time.

Should you wish to have more information than that on your customers you'd have to buy it from someone who runs code in most web pages you visit. There are plenty of those, too.

ISP and government are that "unregulated third party".

ISPs are highly regulated, as opposed to Cloudflare and Google. The only effect here is that Google closes another "loophole" in their view where web visit signals are send to another party (other than Google), and Cloudflare wanting their share of the cake as well. Has Mozilla disclosed what Cloudflare is paying them for being listed as default DoH provider?

ISP's are highly regulated when it comes to DNS? Not here in the US they are not.

Well to buy a domain you need to go to an accredited registrar for the respective TLD. And DNS registrations, renewals, etc. are standardized (and have TLD-specific policies). Also, you're entitled to transfer your domain name to another registratr, etc., also with a public and transparent protocol. The registrar will then arrange for their nameserver being registered as authoritative for your domain on the TLD's root domain server, etc. What's the problem with US ISPs here? That they're selling DNS query records (with your IP) against their nameservers? That's in the same territory as Cloudflare and Google, and will only stop with proper privacy laws; certainly not by giving up on the decentralized nature of DNS and giving all traffic/signals to Cloudflare/Google.

Plaintext doesn't route every god damn request through Google or Cloudfare.

If you have a Chromecast, it's already sending the DNS requests to 8.8.8.8 unless you specifically block the IP.

> If you have a Chromecast

Why the hell would anyone buy hardware from an evil spyware company such as Google?

Of course you can never trust a private corporation to do stuff in the public interest.

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