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The most important point to share from his message in my opinion: <<DNS and the Cloud Later, I saw that there was a push for “the cloud” to take over yet anot

The most important point to share from his message in my opinion: <<DNS and the Cloud Later, I saw that there was a push for “the cloud” to take over yet another part of our Internet. Encrypted DNS is great, we should all do far more of that. But I was (and am) tremendously unhappy that more and more of DNS is now set to move to (among others) Google and Cloudflare control – both of whom protest that they have nothing but the best intentions. But still I see yet more of the Internet getting centralised, and I worry where that will go. I also worry that people somehow are not worrying about this – somehow we’ve made peace with the fact that companies far away get very detailed records on everything we do online, and that we just have to live with that.>>

gitweb 6y ago
I don't think we have made peace. The issue is the market is being flooded with new recruits that don't care and grew up in the cloud, and these companies are actively involved in the education system to make it the new norm. We used to have actual computer science degrees and now we have IT training camps ran by the companies that have their own selfish interests.
- matthewmacleod 6y ago
  You know that we still have actual computer science degrees though, right? I don’t even know what point you are trying to make with this misinformation.
  - onei 6y ago
    I'm not convinced a CompSci degree actually teaches the history of the internet and why being decentralised might be something worth having. I didn't learn ideals from my university, or certainly not the ideals they want me to learn.
    - not_knuth 6y ago
      Well I guess it depends on where you study. My university was full of profs that never dared to even recommend proprietary software to us and always preached to us about the open web. Though, I should disclose, that this was in Germany, and for some reason I have found Germans to be particulary strong advocates of the decentralized web and general FOSS things.
      - hyperdimension 6y ago
        > I have found Germans to be particulary strong advocates of the decentralized web and general FOSS things. With apologies to Mr. Godwin, I think it's simply that Germans have (in general) learned what is possible when data is centralized and administered in one place, easily accessible. Additionally, I find an strange sense of pride (seeing as, again, I'm not German) that there are still some people who still live to fight all this data-collection and privacy invasion. I always look forward to, e.g. every year's C3 talks.
        mafuy 6y ago
        I'm German and would like to confirm this. How both fascism and communism (in East Germany) relate to (among others) data collection is in the mind of rather many people here, including young people. Sadly tho our leading politicians forgot history already.
        majewsky 6y ago
        [Disclosure: I'm president of a CCC local chapter and regularly advocate for the CCC's positions on privacy and IT security concerns in public and towards the press.] I frequently and publicly complain about crazy surveillance policy as much as the next guy. But I find it important to understand that the politicians in the interior and justice branches are not pushing mass surveillance because they're evil. It's because of perverse incentives: They know full well that, when the next terrorist attack happens, everyone who didn't push hard enough for law and order will be portrayed as an enabler. Or at least they think that this will happen. It can be argued if it really would, but them thinking that this is how the world is is my best explanation for their behavior. I don't think they want to build the next Stasi or Gestapo.
    - cmiles74 6y ago
      Isn't that more a history course and less a computer science course? I've always thought a little history makes the lecture more interesting. Yet dry and boring lectures seem to be the norm.
      - iso1210 6y ago
        Lectures should be recorded by the most charismatic person that is sufficiently knowledgable about the subject and available on demand, rather than the archaic bored professor talking to a hall of 150 students, 5 of which are massively engaged, the rest are either going too quickly, too slowly, hungover, or distracted by something else.
  - stjo 6y ago
    That CS degrees get rarer or at least lower percentage compared to people with incomplete education from big corps.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
frankietaylr 6y ago
This centralization is a scary thing especially when all large democracies are looking to make best use of this to monitor their citizens activities most of it to curtail free speech. It will be easy to force two or three multinational corporations to share data or create backdoors than forcing hundreds of smaller corporations which dont do explicit business in those countries.
- gabereiser 6y ago
  In addition, it creates chokeholds in our internet traffic patterns. Should Google or cloudflare decide a site isn’t worthy, they can just remove it from DNS. Google has already done this on numerous occasions.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    > Google has already done this on numerous occasions. Have you got specific examples? I can't recall this happening.
    - gabereiser 6y ago
      Are you serious? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google Some of it I agree with. Hate speech, disinformation, etc. but if google "owns" DNS than it's going to be the same story.
      - tialaramex 6y ago
        None of those has anything to do with DNS. The correct answer was "No", you don't have any examples of Google "doing this" but only you can link to some other things Google did that you didn't like that and you wouldn't like if it they did this too.
        gabereiser 6y ago
        They have everything to do with Google’s track record of bending to requests of governments and entities of interest. To think they wouldn’t do it if they centralized DNS under their umbrella is a farce. No, I don’t have direct evidence of them removing sites from their DNS servers, but there’s plenty of evidence of how they operate the rest of the company. To take a specific service and say they haven’t is just naive.
zdw 6y ago
As far as crypto goes, Bernstien's DNSCurve was a better and far more distributed privacy solution that DoH (anyone can add it to their nameservers, no centralization), but lacked supporters other than OpenDNS. http://dnscurve.org http://dnscurve.org
- rnhmjoj 6y ago
  DNSCurve still lives in DNSCrypt, which works very well. There are quite a few public resolvers listed here: https://dnscrypt.info/public-servers https://dnscrypt.info/public-servers.
manigandham 6y ago
Isn't all DNS centralized anyway? All the records are authoritative somewhere, answered by the owning nameservers. The only distribution is in the form of multiple levels of widespread caching. As long as that caching layer exists, is there really a difference between a large company hosting many names or multiple people hosting their own nameservers? Was the web really more resilient when everyone had their own servers?

gitweb 6y ago

I don't think we have made peace. The issue is the market is being flooded with new recruits that don't care and grew up in the cloud, and these companies are actively involved in the education system to make it the new norm. We used to have actual computer science degrees and now we have IT training camps ran by the companies that have their own selfish interests.

matthewmacleod 6y ago
You know that we still have actual computer science degrees though, right? I don’t even know what point you are trying to make with this misinformation.
- onei 6y ago
  I'm not convinced a CompSci degree actually teaches the history of the internet and why being decentralised might be something worth having. I didn't learn ideals from my university, or certainly not the ideals they want me to learn.
  - not_knuth 6y ago
    Well I guess it depends on where you study. My university was full of profs that never dared to even recommend proprietary software to us and always preached to us about the open web. Though, I should disclose, that this was in Germany, and for some reason I have found Germans to be particulary strong advocates of the decentralized web and general FOSS things.
    - hyperdimension 6y ago
      > I have found Germans to be particulary strong advocates of the decentralized web and general FOSS things. With apologies to Mr. Godwin, I think it's simply that Germans have (in general) learned what is possible when data is centralized and administered in one place, easily accessible. Additionally, I find an strange sense of pride (seeing as, again, I'm not German) that there are still some people who still live to fight all this data-collection and privacy invasion. I always look forward to, e.g. every year's C3 talks.
      - mafuy 6y ago
        I'm German and would like to confirm this. How both fascism and communism (in East Germany) relate to (among others) data collection is in the mind of rather many people here, including young people. Sadly tho our leading politicians forgot history already.
        majewsky 6y ago
        [Disclosure: I'm president of a CCC local chapter and regularly advocate for the CCC's positions on privacy and IT security concerns in public and towards the press.] I frequently and publicly complain about crazy surveillance policy as much as the next guy. But I find it important to understand that the politicians in the interior and justice branches are not pushing mass surveillance because they're evil. It's because of perverse incentives: They know full well that, when the next terrorist attack happens, everyone who didn't push hard enough for law and order will be portrayed as an enabler. Or at least they think that this will happen. It can be argued if it really would, but them thinking that this is how the world is is my best explanation for their behavior. I don't think they want to build the next Stasi or Gestapo.
  - cmiles74 6y ago
    Isn't that more a history course and less a computer science course? I've always thought a little history makes the lecture more interesting. Yet dry and boring lectures seem to be the norm.
    - iso1210 6y ago
      Lectures should be recorded by the most charismatic person that is sufficiently knowledgable about the subject and available on demand, rather than the archaic bored professor talking to a hall of 150 students, 5 of which are massively engaged, the rest are either going too quickly, too slowly, hungover, or distracted by something else.
- stjo 6y ago
  That CS degrees get rarer or at least lower percentage compared to people with incomplete education from big corps.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

frankietaylr 6y ago

This centralization is a scary thing especially when all large democracies are looking to make best use of this to monitor their citizens activities most of it to curtail free speech. It will be easy to force two or three multinational corporations to share data or create backdoors than forcing hundreds of smaller corporations which dont do explicit business in those countries.

gabereiser 6y ago
In addition, it creates chokeholds in our internet traffic patterns. Should Google or cloudflare decide a site isn’t worthy, they can just remove it from DNS. Google has already done this on numerous occasions.
- viraptor 6y ago
  > Google has already done this on numerous occasions. Have you got specific examples? I can't recall this happening.
  - gabereiser 6y ago
    Are you serious? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google Some of it I agree with. Hate speech, disinformation, etc. but if google "owns" DNS than it's going to be the same story.
    - tialaramex 6y ago
      None of those has anything to do with DNS. The correct answer was "No", you don't have any examples of Google "doing this" but only you can link to some other things Google did that you didn't like that and you wouldn't like if it they did this too.
      - gabereiser 6y ago
        They have everything to do with Google’s track record of bending to requests of governments and entities of interest. To think they wouldn’t do it if they centralized DNS under their umbrella is a farce. No, I don’t have direct evidence of them removing sites from their DNS servers, but there’s plenty of evidence of how they operate the rest of the company. To take a specific service and say they haven’t is just naive.

zdw 6y ago

As far as crypto goes, Bernstien's DNSCurve was a better and far more distributed privacy solution that DoH (anyone can add it to their nameservers, no centralization), but lacked supporters other than OpenDNS. http://dnscurve.org http://dnscurve.org

rnhmjoj 6y ago
DNSCurve still lives in DNSCrypt, which works very well. There are quite a few public resolvers listed here: https://dnscrypt.info/public-servers https://dnscrypt.info/public-servers.

manigandham 6y ago

Isn't all DNS centralized anyway? All the records are authoritative somewhere, answered by the owning nameservers. The only distribution is in the form of multiple levels of widespread caching. As long as that caching layer exists, is there really a difference between a large company hosting many names or multiple people hosting their own nameservers? Was the web really more resilient when everyone had their own servers?