Cloudflare is launching its own “privacy-focused” DNS service today, and they’re saying it will give you faster internet. Before you read “faster internet” and remember that they launched the service on April Fools’ Day, we’re telling you that this is no joke — https://1.1.1.1 is an actual DNS resolver that consumers can now start using. There are other DNS services out there, like OpenDNS and Google DNS, but Cloudflare is betting on the privacy aspect of its own DNS service, promising to wipe all logs of DNS queries within 24 hours. Wow.
DNS (domain name server) services are usually attached and given by your internet service provider (ISP) to resolve a friendly website name like Facebook.com into a real IP address – the ones with numbers – that allow routers and switches to find the website you’re querying on the internet. There are two problems with ISP-provided DNS servers – first is that they’re slow, and second is that ISPs usually keep a log of all sites that are visited, giving you privacy issues.
Cloudflare’s DNS service aims to solve these problems by making a service that will first make their customer’s websites faster. After all, Cloudflare is still a business, so there is that. “We came to the conclusion that the only way is if we ran not just the authoritative DNS service, which is the part that serves the content producers, but if we ran a consumer DNS service,” said Cloudflare cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince. “And while [that consumer service is] fast if you’re going to someone who is not a Cloudflare customer — it’s the fastest in the world — if you’re going to a Cloudflare customer, it is blindingly fast.”
Secondly, Cloudflare says that this new service will help keep some of the query data out of ISPs’ hands, and that even they won’t be keeping data in their hands for that long either. The commitment is to both never write users’ IP addresses to disk and that Cloudflare will delete all logs from their systems after 24 hours. The company is also paying an independent audit firm to make sure that their code does what the company says it does.
If you want to use Cloudflare’s new service, check out this tutorial.
SOURCE: Cloudflare
