DNS matters: Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1
Cloudflare, one of the most interesting and relevant companies in the provision of DNS resolution services (the correspondence between the names of page domains, easy to remember, and the numerical addresses that really designate a network’s servers), has chosen April 1, April Fools’ Day, 4/1, to announce the launch of 1.1.1.1, a free DNS provision service that aims to solve important internet issues such as censorship and privacy. Launching the service on April Fools Day guaranteed a certain level of exposure, as in the past companies such as Google did with Gmail, although not everybody might get the joke, or have even heard about the launch, which is why I thought I would discuss it here.
Some of us may already be familiar with DNS resolution services through projects such as Google Public DNS, launched in December 2009 by Google, using 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as addresses for its DNS management, and that many of us adopted due to its good performance and independence from DNS servers offered by our connection providers. Google’s public DNS hit the headlines when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Prime Minister of Turkey, decided in May 2014 to block Twitter to prevent people sharing news of a corruption scandal in his government. In response, people shared addresses through all kinds of media, including graffiti. The service has been used on many other occasions to combat government censorship in other countries.
Changing DNS servers is something most people can manage, with the main problem usually being some WiFi networks that insist on using theirs. It requires editing the network preferences of the equipment and replacing the address that appears in the DNS servers. The tradeoff is that Google know which sites you have visited: that said, it has always made it clear that the information stored on its servers is the user’s IP address, which is eliminated after 24 hours, while your ISP and location information was kept permanently.
Cloudflare aims not just to offer a speedier service than Google, but also greater privacy, something more and more people are demanding: the company undertakes not to record the IP addresses of users and to eliminate all log files every twenty-four hours, and in addition, has tasked KPMG to attest to this by auditing its practices and its code and publishing an annual report confirming as such.
Using the 1.1.1.1 address as a DNS server is not a cure-all, but it does offer an interesting alternative and one that should be remembered in countries where censorship and privacy are issues. Cloudflare does not make its bread and butter from these kinds of services: the 1.1.1.1. DNS address is free, and the company has instead built its profitability and reputation on Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), as well as security services such as the response to denial of service attacks. With the launch of a free, end-user service, the company has certainly raised its profile while contributing to a faster, more secure, private and censorship-resistant network at a time when more and more people are finally waking up to the importance of such issues. An interesting initiative and one worth watching to see how many people take up.
(En español, aquí)
