Comment by myared | Hacker News Reader

Comment by myared | Hacker News Reader

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Not monetizing this? Where do you think their motivation is coming from (to make the world a better place?)

Google Analytics falls into the same category. You're not paying currency to use the service; you're paying with your metrics. When you think about it in terms of scale, this is way worse. Google is great at taking this data and using it to generate revenue in a number of other ways. Any smart advertiser who uses Google Adwords to buy traffic knows to stay away from Google Analytics. Why would you let the company you're buying traffic from know how that traffic behaves?

The DNS project takes this a step further by giving Google a world of new data. Now you don't have to use Google or be on a site with Google Analytics for Google to know where you're going.

Seems harmless, but I bet they can't wait for this to be adopted by the masses.

With all that being said, 8.8.8.8 is a damn cool IP address and I'm sure my Google-powered Droid already uses it. /rant

I love how everyone comes down on Google for collecting data about net traffic, as though no other company on the internet ever thought of collecting traffic metrics. What is your current DNS provider's policy on DNS data collection? In the case of OpenDNS, sure, they have a privacy policy, but they also proxy Google's results and serve up ads. How's that so much better?

I'm perfectly happy to have my DNS data be collected (which I assume my ISP is already collecting) in exchange for ad-free, fast name resolution. Plus, now I don't ever need to look up a DNS server again, Google's is 8.8.8.8. Sweet.

EDIT: looks like Google's not collecting so much information anyway. http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html

> Plus, now I don't ever need to look up a DNS server again, Google's is 8.8.8.8. Sweet.

My DNS servers have been 4.2.2.[1-4] for a long time. They aren't that hard to remember.

I tried using those servers, and they didn't work. If I do an nslookup or dig through them, it's fine, but when I use them as the default nameservers in my network configuration, they seem to reject my requests.

Anyone know why?

Don't know. I usually set them as the default DNS servers for my router to hand out through DHCP.

Try `nslookup -vc [hostname]` after setting your name servers to the Level3 IP.

Just a wild guess. I can't remember off the top of my head if nslookup or dig, when specifying an alternate server, use TCP or UDP. But, if it uses TCP for those, then it's possible that your ISP is blocking UDP DNS traffic that's not destined for their DNS servers. It wouldn't be the first time.

Weird. It works now, unlike the last time I checked. Something must have changed, but I don't know what.

Looking at that privacy policy, and it looks like exactly what they should be doing. There isn't much of a point in keeping personally identifiable information beyond a certain point, at least not something which directly leads back to you.

The only data analysis that would benefit from keeping identifying information would be to create a model for how users go about the internet, and google already has some very good models of that. This is just conjecture, but I would assume that being able to create geographic based models is far more useful than per-user models, which is something they keep.

> Not monetizing this? Where do you think their motivation is coming from (to make the world a better place?)

One thing I like about Google is that they research and share infrastructure technologies. Why is there any reason to think that they would not be interested in improving DNS if it makes the Internet a better place for applications?

They would likely benefit if more applications are moved to the Internet but that does not make this an "evil" or deceptive tactic. What other company today would improve an Internet protocol or create a new protocol (Wave) and release it openly in an effort to move the Internet forward?

Sure you need to be mindful of how data is used and the services you sign up for but that applies to any service, including OpenDNS.

I'm sure they will try to do something with the data, but Google's problem these days is that it's been so successful and gotten so big that it's incentivized to basically make the Internet bigger, better, faster in order to continue to grow. Chrome (and Firefox with the Chrome whip behind it) is another example of this.

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