Today Google unveiled their Public DNS service, a publicly available recursive DNS service much like OpenDNS. Google’s aim is to “provide end users with an alternative to their current DNS service.”
It’s a bit unclear what features one should expect, besides speed, that OpenDNS doesn’t already offer.
Quick comparison:
- Google DNS servers are a bit easier to remember: the nameservers are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. OpenDNS uses 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220
- uses the global load balanced infrastructure by Google, which usually works very well and fast (unless they accidentially blackhole a part of the net) – OpenDNS has a somewhat similar distributed, albeit a bit smaller infrastructure.
- Google explicitly does not provide wildcard results to redirect users in case of typo’s. RFC purists will agree with Google that “Sometimes, in the case of a query for a mistyped or non-existent domain name, the right answer means no answer”. OpenDNS takes the opposite approach by providing users with search results when a page is offline.
- Google doesn’t seem to offer a feature like SmartCache that can show you cached versions of a page after it gets knocked offline due to Slashdotting/Fireballing
I’m going to try out GPDNS on a few systems and check the performance, but I’m not sure if I will use it as my primary DNS service any time soon.
Google Public DNS is another step in the way of Google becoming synonymous with “the web” or even “the net”.
As Laurie put it:
“Dear Google: you are supposed to be a site on the Internet, not be the entire Internet all by yourselves. Public trust only goes so far.”
Others agree that this seems a bit creepy. (Of course, OpenDNS has got its criticisms as well. - Gruber likes Google better.)
One thing to remember – take out your tinfoil hat:
Whilst Google’s motto is “don’t be evil” and their mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, they’re primarily an ad company.
They make money selling ads. Any tool that better helps them detect user patterns helps them to deliver even more targeted advertising. When you’re using the Google DNS servers, it’s trivially easy for them to ‘watch’ you even when you’ve cleared all your cookies and aren’t surfing on one of the many top web properties where they’re present, be it through an acquisition (Youtube), an ad deal (Myspace), the advertising network used (Doubleclick / Adsense) or one of the many free tools theyprovide that provide useful information, but also feed directly into their giant database. (Google Analytics).
Jason Kottke and John Gruber believe Google’s motives are speed, speed, speed. Their privacy policy regarding Google Public DNS sounds OK, so this might be true. Their track record however is not completely flawless. I don’t want to sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist. I’m just imagining the possibilities… (Man, now I even sound more like Glenn Beck 
)
One step further to EPIC?
Today, October 23 at 9.00 CET the German domain registry DENIC eased some restrictions on domain registrations. The most notable change is that two letter domains have become available. These are usually quite popular, so a “land rush” was expected.
As my first name is Lode, I wanted to register the domain hack lo.de. I only read about this land rush at a couple of websites, so I anticipated some problems, namely domain registrars not knowing about the new rules. I contacted Namecheap support on thursday evening to check if they knew about this new restrictions starting today. The answer I got was quite clear, if not completely convincing: “Sure, we’ll be ready. You should be able to register directly through your account. Let me know if you’ve got any other questions.” The “should” part worried me a bit, so I prepared some backup plans.
At 9 AM I had different browser windows open, logged in to my different domain admin accounts and was ready to click “register”. I opened my accounts at OVH, Godaddy, Inforbusiness and Namecheap.
As I’m writing this, I am at 30.000 feet, somewhere between Chicago and San Francisco.
Up until recently, airplanes were one of the last places where you could spend some time being entirely disconnected from the outside world.
Sure, you could place satellite phone calls for $10 per minute, and for some time you could even surf the internet via satellite through Connexion by Boeing. Because of the $500.000 price tag to fit airplanes with the satellite service, the service was quite limited. “Gogo Inflight Internet” seems to have solved this issue. For domestic US flights this service uses cellular technology to equip planes with internet access. Cell towers from Aircell have been fitted with antennas that point upwards, and planes seamlessly hop from one tower to another as you’re in flight. The internet signal is distributed via standard Wi-Fi on the plane.
This is the first flight I’ve been on to offer this service, and I’m absolutely convinced of its value. The price for this 4 hour flight is $9.95. On top of a plane ticket of several hundred euros, this feels like a bargain. (Especially since I didn’t pay for the plane ticket )
The plane is equipped with 12V DC power ports. Luckily I’ve got a special cable to connect my laptop, so my battery won’t die before landing.
Being a techie, of course I had to try out the quality of the service. My friend Toon happily volunteered or a Skype video chat, him being in Belgium and me being somewhere over Iowa. The quality and latency were great. Sometimes there is some latency, probably during handovers to another tower, but all in all it’s pretty usable. (After testing Skype I noticed video chatting and other high-bandwidth services are apparently not allowed, though I don’t think I’m using other people’s bandwidth as I seem to be the only one using it on this flight. You are also asked to restrict yourself to “respectful internet browsing”. In other words: no porn on the plane, please.)
Remote desktop sessions over SSL-VPN work smoothly as well.
In-flight video chat
In-flight Wi-Fi speed test
After a transatlantic flight + layover of about 12 hours it’s nice to be able to check your e-mails and catch up on the news, but as John Troyer put it: “All you people streaming, skypeing, tweeting from your flights: you realize this means YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO STOP WORKING EVER AGAIN”
He’s right, of course. But for a geek like me this still pushes the right buttons. (And I didn’t check my work e-mail. Yet.)
By the way, without logging in you can’t do much, except DNS lookups. I’ll try to get OpenVPN over UDP 53 running before my next Wi-Fi equipped flight (Wednesday Sep 9th from SFO to SEA). I’ll keep you posted.
World Cup 2006 in streaming ASCII via telnet – Sheer brilliance. To quote The Inquirer: “Clearly this is what the internet was invented for!”
To start, open a telnet connection to ascii-wm.net, port 2006 (of course). (Like this)
Next match: GIYF
Here’s a small overview of the various news pages that will (probably) be providing coverage of Steve Jobs’ keynote of Mac World San Francisco 2006 later today.
- Macspecialist – AJAXy update feed
- Mac Daily news – AJAXy update feed
- Macrumors Live – AJAXy feed from Macrumors
- Apple Insider
- Think Secret
- Engadget
After the keynote, the video will probably be posted on the Quicktime guide and/or on the Apple Stream page.
Previous Stevenote streams:
- MWSF 2004
- MWSF 2005 – Announcing the Mac Mini, iPod Shuffle
- WWDC 2004 – Announcing Tiger
- WWDC 2005 – Announcing the switch from PowerPC to Intel
- Stanford Commencement Speech (