12 ms·

The user can do whatever they want. It's their machine. But you know perfectly well that almost everybody is going to take the default because they don't even k

by zrm 6y ago

The user can do whatever they want. It's their machine. But you know perfectly well that almost everybody is going to take the default because they don't even know what the setting does, and end up disabling content blocking when they didn't intend to. And in many cases the user is the network operator. What the browser is doing is taking away the mechanism to set local policy. Ordinarily you hand out the DNS you want your devices to use via DHCP, and they use it. If you move that from the OS to the application and the application ignores the DHCP setting by default, now you've lost the ability to set a uniform policy for all your devices and applications. It becomes an arduous manual process to change the setting in every application on every device, and then you probably miss half of them.

shawnz 6y ago
Yes, and I am saying the default should be to use a guaranteed source of truth and not something set by the network operator's policy. Same as how your trusted root CA certificates don't come from a network policy for example. I don't think we should be making a convention of inspecting users' private traffic, regardless of whether it is by default or by opt-in, under the guise of protecting them from malware. DNS has historically been set by network policy so that it's easy for network operators to map hostnames to their local network resources. The point of the design wasn't to enable traffic monitoring or content blocking by altering the results for hosts that aren't under your control.
- zrm 6y ago
  The problem is "guaranteed source of truth" doesn't exist. When the network operator is you, or your family/company, you may trust the local DNS to respect your privacy more than you do Cloudflare. Not all names are intended to resolve the same everywhere -- sometimes the local DNS will give the RFC1918 address for a local server instead of the public one, or have a set of local names that are only accessible on the local network. How do you propose to globally resolve the reverse lookup zones for 10.0.0.0/8 et al?
  - shawnz 6y ago
    If the DNS set by DHCP were only used for local network resources and not internet resources, I wouldn't have a problem with that. That is what it is there for.
    - zrm 6y ago
      There isn't a bifurcation in the namespace for local resources. Any given name could resolve to a local address or a public one. There isn't even anything requiring a local-only server to have a private address -- it's common to have a public IPv6 address for something which is still only resolvable or accessible from the local network.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - josephcsible 6y ago
    > you may trust the local DNS to respect your privacy more than you do Cloudflare For most people, their local DNS is someone like Comcast or Verizon, way less trustworthy than CloudFlare. We shouldn't reduce the privacy of the majority of people just to increase it for a small minority of people by default.

by zrm 6y ago

shawnz 6y ago

Yes, and I am saying the default should be to use a guaranteed source of truth and not something set by the network operator's policy. Same as how your trusted root CA certificates don't come from a network policy for example. I don't think we should be making a convention of inspecting users' private traffic, regardless of whether it is by default or by opt-in, under the guise of protecting them from malware. DNS has historically been set by network policy so that it's easy for network operators to map hostnames to their local network resources. The point of the design wasn't to enable traffic monitoring or content blocking by altering the results for hosts that aren't under your control.

zrm 6y ago
The problem is "guaranteed source of truth" doesn't exist. When the network operator is you, or your family/company, you may trust the local DNS to respect your privacy more than you do Cloudflare. Not all names are intended to resolve the same everywhere -- sometimes the local DNS will give the RFC1918 address for a local server instead of the public one, or have a set of local names that are only accessible on the local network. How do you propose to globally resolve the reverse lookup zones for 10.0.0.0/8 et al?
- shawnz 6y ago
  If the DNS set by DHCP were only used for local network resources and not internet resources, I wouldn't have a problem with that. That is what it is there for.
  - zrm 6y ago
    There isn't a bifurcation in the namespace for local resources. Any given name could resolve to a local address or a public one. There isn't even anything requiring a local-only server to have a private address -- it's common to have a public IPv6 address for something which is still only resolvable or accessible from the local network.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- josephcsible 6y ago
  > you may trust the local DNS to respect your privacy more than you do Cloudflare For most people, their local DNS is someone like Comcast or Verizon, way less trustworthy than CloudFlare. We shouldn't reduce the privacy of the majority of people just to increase it for a small minority of people by default.