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Comment by greatgib | Hacker News Reader

The most important point to share from his message in my opinion:

<<DNS and the Cloud

Later, I saw that there was a push for “the cloud” to take over yet another part of our Internet. Encrypted DNS is great, we should all do far more of that. But I was (and am) tremendously unhappy that more and more of DNS is now set to move to (among others) Google and Cloudflare control – both of whom protest that they have nothing but the best intentions. But still I see yet more of the Internet getting centralised, and I worry where that will go.

I also worry that people somehow are not worrying about this – somehow we’ve made peace with the fact that companies far away get very detailed records on everything we do online, and that we just have to live with that.>>

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This centralization is a scary thing especially when all large democracies are looking to make best use of this to monitor their citizens activities most of it to curtail free speech. It will be easy to force two or three multinational corporations to share data or create backdoors than forcing hundreds of smaller corporations which dont do explicit business in those countries.

In addition, it creates chokeholds in our internet traffic patterns. Should Google or cloudflare decide a site isn’t worthy, they can just remove it from DNS. Google has already done this on numerous occasions.

> Google has already done this on numerous occasions.

Have you got specific examples? I can't recall this happening.

Are you serious? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google

Some of it I agree with. Hate speech, disinformation, etc. but if google "owns" DNS than it's going to be the same story.

None of those has anything to do with DNS. The correct answer was "No", you don't have any examples of Google "doing this" but only you can link to some other things Google did that you didn't like that and you wouldn't like if it they did this too.

They have everything to do with Google’s track record of bending to requests of governments and entities of interest. To think they wouldn’t do it if they centralized DNS under their umbrella is a farce. No, I don’t have direct evidence of them removing sites from their DNS servers, but there’s plenty of evidence of how they operate the rest of the company.

To take a specific service and say they haven’t is just naive.

If they did do it, why would there not be at least one blog somewhere, of someone noticing that some domain doesn't resolve against 8.8.8.8, but does resolve against some other DNS provider?

Of course, this question would be silly under a dictatorship; the answer would just be "records have been suppressed." But we don't live in a dictatorship. Anyone in the US can use any DNS provider they like, even ones from outside the US. And anyone outside the US can use our DNS providers. So why would there be no evidence?

Mind you, I'm not necessarily arguing that Google wouldn't do this, if they were demanded to do so via a National Security Letter. I'm just arguing that you shouldn't conflate "no evidence that they're not willing to" with "already have in the past."

Google censoring stuff is obviously a big deal and if they'll do it in other avenues they will certainly do it with DNS. Corporations have at least 90% of their goal to maximize profit, and that is made much easier when you centralize everything to your servers, your control, and your specifications.

A bigger issue is IANA. The way that IP addresses are managed and controlled is really disadvantageous for smaller entities. The organisation itself should be moved to Switzerland as a start.

If you're thinking about IPv4 then I'm afraid that ship has long sailed. IANA exhaustion occurred in 2011, there aren't any IPv4 addresses left to be assigned by IANA. If your region did a poor job of allocating its blocks, take that up with them, it's not IANA's fault.

For IPv6 there is plenty of space and if you have a real use for more than a /48 then you can write up the paperwork for why you need so much space and get it approved, you don't need IANA, whether in Switzerland or anywhere else.

As far as crypto goes, Bernstien's DNSCurve was a better and far more distributed privacy solution that DoH (anyone can add it to their nameservers, no centralization), but lacked supporters other than OpenDNS.

http://dnscurve.org

DNSCurve still lives in DNSCrypt, which works very well. There are quite a few public resolvers listed here: https://dnscrypt.info/public-servers.

Isn't all DNS centralized anyway? All the records are authoritative somewhere, answered by the owning nameservers.

The only distribution is in the form of multiple levels of widespread caching. As long as that caching layer exists, is there really a difference between a large company hosting many names or multiple people hosting their own nameservers? Was the web really more resilient when everyone had their own servers?

I don't think we have made peace. The issue is the market is being flooded with new recruits that don't care and grew up in the cloud, and these companies are actively involved in the education system to make it the new norm. We used to have actual computer science degrees and now we have IT training camps ran by the companies that have their own selfish interests.

You know that we still have actual computer science degrees though, right? I don’t even know what point you are trying to make with this misinformation.

I'm not convinced a CompSci degree actually teaches the history of the internet and why being decentralised might be something worth having. I didn't learn ideals from my university, or certainly not the ideals they want me to learn.

Well I guess it depends on where you study. My university was full of profs that never dared to even recommend proprietary software to us and always preached to us about the open web.

Though, I should disclose, that this was in Germany, and for some reason I have found Germans to be particulary strong advocates of the decentralized web and general FOSS things.

> I have found Germans to be particulary strong advocates of the decentralized web and general FOSS things.

With apologies to Mr. Godwin, I think it's simply that Germans have (in general) learned what is possible when data is centralized and administered in one place, easily accessible.

Additionally, I find an strange sense of pride (seeing as, again, I'm not German) that there are still some people who still live to fight all this data-collection and privacy invasion. I always look forward to, e.g. every year's C3 talks.

I'm German and would like to confirm this. How both fascism and communism (in East Germany) relate to (among others) data collection is in the mind of rather many people here, including young people. Sadly tho our leading politicians forgot history already.

[Disclosure: I'm president of a CCC local chapter and regularly advocate for the CCC's positions on privacy and IT security concerns in public and towards the press.]

I frequently and publicly complain about crazy surveillance policy as much as the next guy. But I find it important to understand that the politicians in the interior and justice branches are not pushing mass surveillance because they're evil. It's because of perverse incentives: They know full well that, when the next terrorist attack happens, everyone who didn't push hard enough for law and order will be portrayed as an enabler. Or at least they think that this will happen. It can be argued if it really would, but them thinking that this is how the world is is my best explanation for their behavior. I don't think they want to build the next Stasi or Gestapo.

To your last point: no, surely not. I think it's a failing of our current public view (daily news cycle perhaps?) of politics where politicians always have to be seen 'doing things' about all this evil lurking about, and if they aren't, then should anything happen, the blame lies squarely in their lap.

This, I'd argue, leads to it always being essentially career-wise risk-free to be more tough/stringent/et c. on <evil thing du jour>. And why not? There's hardly any downside. It's all unfortunately about optics.

EDIT: re-reading your comment, I realize I'm just stating in more words your salient point. It is, however, a particularly difficult hole to dig ourselves up from though.

Godwin recently suspended Godwin’s law, so no need to apologize to him:

https://www.theregister.com/2017/08/14/godwins_law_creator_r...

Unscientific gut-feeling as an American who has visited Germany for ~1 year in total: Germany remembers fascism. Not necessarily in the direct sense of people who lived through it, although there is that too, but.. It is hard for me to describe.. I get this feeling that much of their government and society is structured along a guiding principle of "This must never happen again."

I'm currently studying CS in Germany at a big university. Yes, the profs seem to all run Linux and they usually recommend free software. But then COVID-19 happened and they all caved in to using Zoom/Teams. Those are now heavily recommended, even for use in smaller groups. When promted about it a few of them might say that they care about privacy, too, but that's then not reflected in their actions. Even those doing research on privacy or security related topics heavily embrace Zoom/Teams. And as if that's not enough, the administration seems to view things like the GDPR as a nuisance, especially since the privacy shield has been invalidated.

You might argue that the professors have no choice. But then there actually are non-CS professors from other universities that won't even put recorded videos of themselves online. They teach by uploading a few documents. Some stopped teaching altogether. None of that is particularly great. But it shows that professors have some power and would have even more of it as a collective. That in turn means that all those CS professors chose not to exercise it. From what I know it's the same at many other universities.

I seriously doubt anyone is taught any of the values you're talking about any more. The opposite is the case - if you held any of them before you'll have to be practical and let them go.

Isn't that more a history course and less a computer science course?

I've always thought a little history makes the lecture more interesting. Yet dry and boring lectures seem to be the norm.

Lectures should be recorded by the most charismatic person that is sufficiently knowledgable about the subject and available on demand, rather than the archaic bored professor talking to a hall of 150 students, 5 of which are massively engaged, the rest are either going too quickly, too slowly, hungover, or distracted by something else.

That CS degrees get rarer or at least lower percentage compared to people with incomplete education from big corps.

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