this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
2046 points (98.6% liked)

Technology

59455 readers
4086 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] KillSwitch10 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Search how not hard. DNS to pick a provider you trust.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Care to share where to read up on DNS and what it does, not that tech savy when it comes to networks.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Dns is what translates urls (google.com, lemmy.world, etc) into ip addresses (207.94.56.21) which your computer can actually understand. Dns can be used to track you but a good dns can also very slightly speed up your Internet because it gets you the address to websites a bit faster. I use adguard and have Cloudflare DNS upstream from that

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I'd like to elaborate a bit on why DNS can be used to track you.

Nearly all web traffic is encrypted (https), you can check by looking at the padlock next to the URL in your browser. But DNS requests aren't encrypted by default. This means anyone, most likely your ISP our the admin of your home network, can see what domains you're accessing. That means just google.com, lemmy.world, etc. and not lemmy.world/post/.... This isn't a huge amount of info, but it does tell anyone who's looking approximately what you're doing (googling something, looking at lemmy, etc.).

To fix that there are a few different ways to encrypt DNS requests, the most common of which (afaik) is DNS over HTTPS, which will encrypt DNS requests like any other web request your browser makes. I don't know why this hasn't been made the default yet. Firefox has a setting for DNS over HTTPS, it calls it secure DNS.

[–] KillSwitch10 2 points 1 year ago

This is a good explanation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Oh, cool thanks - did not know that, going to read up on it.