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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday November 21 2017, @12:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the promise-we-won't-peek dept.

The Global Cyber Alliance has given the world a new free Domain Name Service resolver, and advanced it as offering unusually strong security and privacy features.

The Quad9 DNS service, at 9.9.9.9, not only turns URIs into IP addresses, but also checks them against IBM X-Force's threat intelligence database. Those checks protect agains landing on any of the 40 billion evil sites and images X-Force has found to be dangerous.

The Alliance (GCA) was co-founded by the City of London Police, the District Attorney of New York County and the Center for Internet Security and styled itself "an international, cross-sector effort designed to confront, address, and prevent malicious cyber activity."

[...] The organisation promised that records of user lookups would not be put out to pasture in data farms: "Information about the websites consumers visit, where they live and what device they use are often captured by some DNS services and used for marketing or other purposes", it said. Quad9 won't "store, correlate, or otherwise leverage" personal information.

[...] If you're one of the lucky few whose ISP offers IPv6, there's a Quad9 resolver for you at 2620:fe::fe (the PCH public resolver).

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/20/quad9_secure_private_dns_resolver/

takyon: Do you want to give the City of London Police control of your DNS?


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  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday November 21 2017, @08:51PM (2 children)

    by edIII (791) on Tuesday November 21 2017, @08:51PM (#599873)

    To be completely fair, this might be on of those nitpicking [wikipedia.org] debates [danielmiessler.com].

    Technically, a hostname is a URN. From the perspective of the user, a URL is split apart into its URN, and then resolved. So it's not entirely incorrect for a journalist to say that DNS resolves URLs, or URIs, or URNs. Yes, it represents a lack of knowledge and sophistication, but it is not incorrect, but incomplete.

    A URI encompasses both URNs and URLs. This would be like saying you need a human to reproduce, when it's more correct to say you need a human female to reproduce. Although, for the audience here, maybe a car analogy would be more preferred ;)

    IMO, the most correct and clear statement is that DNS resolves URNs, but is not incorrect to say it resolves URIs either. The most widely accepted and understood statement would be that it resolves URLs, because URL is the most widely understood term. The other two are almost always exclusively used by technical people. I've read documentation from different companies, and some of them have used URIs everywhere, and the some use URLs. I've almost never seen URN in a technical document.

    Summary

    1. URIs are identifiers, and that can mean name, location, or both.
    2. All URNs and URLs are URIs, but the opposite is not true.
    3. The part that makes something a URL is the combination of the name and an access method, such as https://, [,] or mailto:. [mailto]
    4. All these bits are URIs, so saying that is always technically accurate, but if you are discussing something that’s both a full URL and a URI (which all URLs are), it’s best to call it a “URL” because it’s more specific.
    --
    Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday November 22 2017, @07:16AM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday November 22 2017, @07:16AM (#600079) Journal

    Technically, a hostname is a URN.

    No, it isn't. A hostname also is no URI, and no URL (although URLs tend to contain hostnames, but that is not required). Indeed, hostnames are much older than URLs/URIs/URNs.

    Also, a hostname doesn't identify a resource, but a host. There may or may not be a resource hosted on that host. Or there may be several resources hosted there. It doesn't matter.

    Here comes the nitpicking:
    Actually we are talking about FQDNs (Fully Qualified Domain Names). Strictly speaking, the hostname is only the first component of that, and while there can be arbitrary many hosts with the same hostname, the FQDN should be unique.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday November 22 2017, @07:26AM

      by edIII (791) on Wednesday November 22 2017, @07:26AM (#600084)

      FUCK!!! I hate it when I'm out-pedant'd :)

      Didn't notice that hostname part. I was *thinking* about FQDN too, but didn't use the term. The way I've been setting up servers lately is to use a FQDN for the hostname, so you caught me getting lazy...

      --
      Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.