Comment by olieidel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by olieidel | Hacker News Reader

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Sigh.

1. Looks like the cost of this project so far is already ~€1M. Does it really take you a million Euros to set up a DNS server?

(Just did a quick research in the EU's financial transparency system [1], I entered "dns4eu" in the subject field. €3m budgeted, €1M used already, most of it going to a company named "Whalebone sro" (?))

2. Why does every EU-funded software project have such a terrible website? As a visitor, you get the impression that the designers took great care to obfuscate the actual product as much as possible, while throwing in random text blurbs, useless buttons and boxes.

Stuff like:

> Looking for a fast, secure, and privacy-focused way to browse the internet? You're in the right place.

Yeah, sure.. just give me the product?

Reading on..

> Learn everything you need to know about DNS4EU Public Service – including where it's located, how to easily set it up on your device, and what configuration options are available to best suit your needs.

Yeah, sure.. just give me the product?

Compare this with the UI of Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 [2] which gives visitors exactly what they need. It's awesome.

---

It's hard not to be cynical about EU projects, this one included. I've had the questionable pleasure of diving deep into EU software projects and their funding when analyzing and rebuilding [3] the EU medical device database [4], a simple database with ~500k entries (~10GB on disk), which has burned €45M (!) so far and employs a team of ~50 people. Link to website with budget tracker [5].

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/budget/financial-transparency-system/an...

[2] https://one.one.one.one

[3] https://openregulatory.com/articles/beudamed-better-eudamed

[4] https://ec.europa.eu/tools/eudamed/#/screen/home

[5] https://eudamedburn.com

> 1. Does it really take you a million Euros to set up a DNS server?

Maybe ask Cloudflare how much 1.1.1.1 costs them?

> 2. you get the impression that the designers took great care to obfuscate the actual product as much as possible

I don't see that being limited to "EU-funded software project". It seems like nobody has a clue how to make landing pages anymore.

That said: https://www.joindns4.eu/about

first Q, first sentence of A:

> What is DNS4EU?

> DNS4EU is an initiative by the European Commission that aims to offer an alternative to the public DNS resolvers currently dominating the market.

Does this service has the same user count as 1.1.1.1? If not then why should this be relevant?

I don't know the finer details of this project that's being launched, but if I'm setting up a global DNS server, I want to make sure it stays up all the time, it's kind of the point.

It's not a project that "We will scale when we reach out limit". So I imagine there's a significant initial payment.

I never said that 1M EUR is too much. And yeh you are right, you want a global DNS server to be global.

Nonetheless Cloudflare has more POPs of their DNS server as this project and a lot lot more traffic as this project just starts.

So i think that the comparison is not useful at all.

An better question is why they did not take more money and build an alternative to the root servers on top of it, or a super low cost registrar (for self cost like CF).

I would absolutely love too see more from this project and less of bad comparisons that are knee jerk comparisons.

The comparison I made was in response to:

> Does it really take you a million Euros to set up a DNS server?

The subtext of the above being that it "obviously" shouldn't cost 1M to slap BIND on a spare beige box in a closet.

The subtext in mine was to put the scale context back in, not really comparing this project to Cloudflare who has more POP but also does a lot of other things (and so providing the DNS part for free is really a rounding error in their biz bottom line and they probably couldn't really tell how much it would actually cost).

But then again the QA invites the comparison, they clearly position as challengers to 1.1.1.1/8.8.8.8/9.9.9.9

I didn't mean it to be knee jerk at all, sorry of it came across so.

> Does this service has the same user count as (Google DNS)? If not then why should this be relevant?

Service offered by an American company: cool and important

Service offered by literally anyone else: "why is this relevant!?!?"

I did not write this? i think this project is cool.

My point is that the cost of a well established DNS server that has POPs everywhere and maybe billions of users, is not comparable to a new project.

Or in other words, i think the comparison is not useful.

Not yet obviously, they just started. 1.1.1.1 started with 0 users too.

Four devs and/or sysadmins: €400k

Add management and other overhead: €100k

Overhead from "international consortium of members from 10 EU countries": €500k

I'm just making up numbers here, but this is roughly how it usually works. A lot of these EU projects are huge "design by committee" efforts, with all the associated downsides.

It's not really a "EU thing though", but more of a "government thing". Or perhaps more accurately: "private companies doing work for government" thing. Defence contractors in the US are notorious for having their snout in the trough. How much was spent on that UK Post Office accounting system? A billion pounds IIRC? And that "contact tracing" COVID app that didn't even work was a few dozen million quid IIRC. There is an endless list of examples from many countries.

  > but more of a "government thing".

slight improvement: "more of a not government thing". Neo-liberal dogma tells us that `public services == bad`, government should hand out contracts to commercial sector, aka "small government".

Commercial sector gets dependent on government, and takes on politics as part of the business. You end up with State Capture. That means that the "real world" government is shifted outside public control.

  > Defence contractors in the US

are something else entirely. keyword: political economy

Yeah, 100% agreed!

I agree 100% with everything you've said, and I'm from the EU. EU companies are burning and pocketing as much money as they can for themselves while delivering sub-par software.

I found the flow quite intuitive.

1. Open website

2. Click "Explore Options".

3. I see five options depending on if I want filter/ad-blocking/child protection. Each with a plus-button.

4. Click a plus-button and it shows what to use for IPv4, IPv6, HTTPs, and TLS.

I don't think it is perfect (step 2 feels unnecessary) but it is one of the good websites in my opinion.

Compare this with Cloudflare:

1. Open website

2. See the IP 1.1.1.1. Copy.

Done.

I do get your point - and, sure, the EU website is not catastrophically terrible. But, damn, if I'm looking for a DNS, I just want the IP, I don't want five options and the mental overhead of having to determine why the hell I now am faced with five options for a DNS, which one I should choose, how they differ, etc., etc.. Add all of the IPv4/6 stuff on top of that, and.. oh man, I feel like you've lost 90%+ of interested people already.

I agree that the DNS4EU website is not designed very well, but CF's isn't any better - sure it shows the IP up front, but immediately below is the incredibly non-descriptive tagline of "The free app that makes your Internet safer." and download links for some kind of unrelated software (looks like a proxy? CF says it helps me "Connect to the Internet faster and in a more secure way.", and that "The Cloudflare WARP client blah blah faster, more secure, and more private experience online blah blah The WARP client sits between your device and the Internet, blah blah"). I'm just looking for DNS configuration instructions, why are they asking me to download software.

From the page:

> The DNS4EU Public Service is operated by the Czech cybersecurity company Whalebone.

Given the OP just complained about reading 3 lines it's safe to assume they didn't get that far.

I am in for better public documentation about the various software initiatives the EU supports in general. The reporting seems to follow the internal governments process and structure in form, rather than having some external user in mind.

The EU funds various highly useful, difficult projects across the globe. They make use of lean foundations who are highly knowledgeable in their area of expertise with a focus on delivering improvements for the public. The EU supports even non-EU citizens open source innovations, for example projects with a focus on novel p2p techniques, open hardware etc.

I have a problem with the general "omg public good, money waste" learned response from some other commenters. Neo liberal dogma's are just that, and they end up convincing the public to give consent to State capture. To me the more interesting critique would have been why DNS is not considered public infrastructure, instead of leaving that to commercial control only.

> Does it really take you a million Euros to set up a DNS server?

Why are you acting as if the scope of this project is dumping bind on a server somewhere? They are operating filters and threat detection. The scope is obviously wider than just “setting up a DNS server”.

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