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Big ISPs aren’t happy about Google’s plans for encrypted DNS

arstechnica.com

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Re: Big ISPs aren’t happy about Google’s plans for encrypted DNS

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To make money on analytics?

He is speaking of the developers and engineers who have the technical expertise and should know it's a bad idea but still agree to implement it regardless of their moral compass.

Google and FB are doing the same thing with their data (and worse) and the engineers they employ don’t seem to care that much, even though they are pretty smart.

Re: Big ISPs aren’t happy about Google’s plans for encrypted DNS

#232
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome doesn’t know that your local intranet is trusted or that the local resolver is trustworthy. You need to tell Chrome this by flipping a switch to either change your DoH provider or disable it all together. This change is explicitly protecting users from malicious network operators. Since you control the endpoints it should be no big deal, you apply GPO, run Puppet, whatever and everybody is talking to your loca…

In that context, I'd be perfectly happy if chrome had a "I'm on an untrusted network right now" switch, like incognito window. Not sure we should assume that the entire network between the browser and cloudflare is untrusted though. Aren't there some "hijacks" that are actually valuable to users? For example, if I run a network inside an extremely limited internet environment, I can hijack the user's DNS and redirect…

There's presumably no way to allow that without also thereby allowing you to change the apparent content of the Netflix service—or of other sites! (Suppose that you could hijack the user's DNS to redirect ubuntu.com to a page that said "Thanks for your interest in Ubuntu! To download the latest version, click here."" rel="nofollow">https://evil.com/ubuntu/ubuntu.iso'>here." How can you allow one kind of hijacking without also allowing the other?)

There has been work on allowing networks to communicate out-of-band to browsers for administrative purposes. Even this is risky in general because of the phishing possibilities, among other things. Showing users arbitrary messages from network operators in the middle of the users' other browsing activities is likely to make it even easier to confuse the users into taking actions that they really didn't intend to do.

Re: Big ISPs aren’t happy about Google’s plans for encrypted DNS

#233
post #15

While I don't particularly trust Google all that much anymore, the fact that ISPs even have an opinion on this is a smoking gun that they're doing sketchy things with DNS data. There is no actual technical reason why they should care if you use their DNS servers or something else, even a private, encrypted DNS service.

I worked at a couple of major telcos at my country, and at the last one - where we had literally millions of active ISP and mobile users - we were approached by a company willing to pay for DNS resolver data. It is definitely a thing (and possible income source) even if you don’t do that kind of analytics yourself.

But I’m fascinated by the legal implications. Right now in Portugal sites are DNS-blocked for copyright reasons (IIRC without the need for what you’d call full legal oversight, just a sort of loose arbitration with the local equivalent of the RIAA), and this is going to play merry havoc with that.

(Uber’s website was also DNS blocked for a while due to hassles with licensed cabs, which was interesting because the mobile app never stopped working — can’t remember if it was an actual court order, but this should give you an idea of how technically clueless some people are over here...)

Re: Big ISPs aren’t happy about Google’s plans for encrypted DNS

#234

I am a bit stuck here. I know it is a bit insane, but I run a simple system at home because I think, so if I drop dead tomorrow how is my wife going to sort this. If I am dead, internet still needs to work so my kid can do her home work. So despite my geek love, I do not run my own DNS, etc. the other part is I use unblock-us so iPlayer (BBC) works here in the US. I would love to set everything up so everything is en…

That sounds backwards. You sure that will be their biggest concern if you drop dead? They can always throw out your weird techy stuff and buy some cheap commodity solution and get them installed.

Your reasoning sounds like, I'm not going to do breakfast for my family, because, ya know, if I drop dead, they will miss the breakfasts.

Re: Big ISPs aren’t happy about Google’s plans for encrypted DNS

#235
post #15

While I don't particularly trust Google all that much anymore, the fact that ISPs even have an opinion on this is a smoking gun that they're doing sketchy things with DNS data. There is no actual technical reason why they should care if you use their DNS servers or something else, even a private, encrypted DNS service.

It isn't even all that sketchy, its just providing broad snapshots of what sites are getting traffic and which ones aren't, which is used by advertisers when they bid on their ad placements. So yeah, its going to chop off some of their revenue and they don't like it.

Yeah, they are going to tell an advertiser that Sally Doe at IP x.y.z.a is going to the planned parenthood website. Not sketchy at all.

Re: Big ISPs aren’t happy about Google’s plans for encrypted DNS

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good question, they said it would happen annually so they should have had one by April 1st 2019. I put a question into support, we'll see if it goes anywhere.

Have you checked April 2 for any posts revealing the joke? :)

From the launch page: https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/

“Seriously, April 1?

The only question that remained was when to launch the new service? This is the first consumer product Cloudflare has ever launched, so we wanted to reach a wider audience. At the same time, we're geeks at heart. 1.1.1.1 has 4 1s. So it seemed clear that 4/1 (April 1st) was the date we needed to launch it.”

Seems like they were pretty serious with it. :)

Same post mentions KPMG.

Re: Big ISPs aren’t happy about Google’s plans for encrypted DNS

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I question the amount that such ethics courses actually help. Business majors have had ethics courses for as long as I can imagine, and yet you don't have to go far on HN (even in this very thread) before you see people saying business majors are unethical. The bigger problem, IMO, is that many tech companies have started handing out kool-aid that data collection and analytics is ethical. They justify it by saying th…

> Business majors have had ethics courses for as long as I can imagine I took a business ethics course in undergrad, and it was surprising how many students advocated all sorts of (to me) aberrant ethical views. (Note I’m pretty traditional, morally speaking. The environment was strongly postmodern, and this was before all the modern insanity about “free speech is bad because some people say bad/offensive things”.) N…

> this was before all the modern insanity about “free speech is bad because some people say bad/offensive things”.)

To be totally fair, the idea "free speech is bad because some people say bad things" is older than the mind of man can remember.

Re: Big ISPs aren’t happy about Google’s plans for encrypted DNS

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything warrants skepticism until proven otherwise. Especially things that are being given out for free. Google might be operating on the up and up, but Google is just a large collection of people and some of them will be ethically lacking. And Google's employees have a large incentive to not see any issues with collecting all the personal information that exists.

Internally, Google employees have quite a large incentive to NOT collect unnecessary data. It's a fundamental tenant. Don't collect any data unless it's for a specific tangible feature that benefits the user.

The way you phrased that makes it sound like Google the company treats our data in the same way individual employee does.

I think we have to be be pretty naive to believe this is event remotely true.

Re: Big ISPs aren’t happy about Google’s plans for encrypted DNS

#240
post #122
post #15

While I don't particularly trust Google all that much anymore, the fact that ISPs even have an opinion on this is a smoking gun that they're doing sketchy things with DNS data. There is no actual technical reason why they should care if you use their DNS servers or something else, even a private, encrypted DNS service.

They do use that information, it's not necessarilly sketchy. They run analytics just like everyone else. In fact, one could argue Google's huge push for https was primarily motivated to deprive service providers of valuable data that Google has anyway.

Exactly; it's just the same old story with Google. We all know ISPs and Telcos are greedy af, but when Google is getting into providing DNS, they do it to close a loophole (from their point of view) where web visit sensor data is going to someone else; they really think they own the Internet. In this particular case, even if Google succeeds in establishing DoH via Chrome (and, sadly, also Firefox), ISPs will still get to see your IP data; they could try reverse-DNS lookup to get back domains, but this is much less targetted ever since HTTP/1.1 shared hosting. At the same time, Google is also engaged in AMP such that requests for many sites go to a single IP, with the actual requested site SSL-encrypted. What will happen next is that Google will, via piecemeal extension of HTTP/3, fuckup TCP/IP even more.

I hope somebody in regulation will finally stop Google and others to monopolize the web.

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