Google announced today the launch of Google Public DNS and it’s a boon to everyone under the tyranny of the brutal practice of your ISP hijacking DNS requests and spamming you with search+ads pages when a domain name really doesn’t exist.
For those who don’t know what this is about: Domain names, like google.com, are based on dotted-numeric addresses like 123.222.178.48. Domain names help out since those numbers are hard to remember. So when you type in a domain your computer actually looks up the long number and knows how to get the website by that.
The easiest way to enable this is, if you’re comfortable setting up your router, is to enter the following IPs for your DNS entries:
- 8.8.8.8
- 8.8.4.4
Restart your networking or restart your computer and voila!
So far I’ve found google’s dns to be superior, obviously, to my isp dns as well as opendns’s servers.
This has been a long time coming and I’m thankful a solution on this scale has arrived.
My only fear now is that when the major ISPs hear of this they’ll start silently redirecting dns requests back to their own servers.
Evil companies.