Cloudflare Announces Privacy-First DNS Service

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Cloudflare:

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. We’re excited today to take another step toward that mission with the launch of 1.1.1.1 — the Internet’s fastest, privacy-first consumer DNS service. This post will talk a little about what that is and a lot about why we decided to do it.
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Lucas Matney, writing at TechCrunch:

The company says that the new service will help keep some data out of ISPs’ hands and that they won’t keep data in their hands for long either. Cloudflare has pledged to both never write users’ IP addresses to disk and that they’ll purge all logs from their system after 24 hours.
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You can find out how to use this service on different devices here.

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Neat, I wouldn't mind saving 50ms on my DNS query.

 

pretty cool - and easy to do.

 

How are your DNS queries possibly that slow?

 

Thanks for sharing this! Super useful and easy to do.

 

So you have to do this with each wireless network you connect to? What about when your using 4G?

 

p p p cool

 

Most people I've seen use this say its slower??

 

DNS Performance

It's not.

 

You can change it just on your phone to use the DNS. Or at home change your router.

 

So is this a good thing to do on my router? Any downsides?

 

In my opinion, yes. It's faster (I've been using it all day and have seen great results so far) and more privacy focused (another win).

 

Thanks for the graph. I'm a bit skeptical of the numbers, but it's nice to at least see where someone might come to this conclusion.

This service seems to be having some problems. I tried it on my personal computer at home (U-Verse) and on multiple servers at work (Level3 circuit) and DNS queries can't resolve. Using Google, Quad9, etc. all work fine. Pinging 1.1.1.1 works fine in all tests.

We have a secondary circuit at work that's an XO circuit, and that's the only one where I'm seeing DNS queries resolve. So either there's an issue with multiple disparate providers reaching 1.1.1.1 or this service isn't quite fully-baked yet.

Further, in my testing using the one circuit I can actually use, DNS queries resolve slower than Google and Quad9. So I'll definitely be waiting before I recommend this to people.

Have you run any performance tests between different DNS providers? Just curious what you're seeing.

 

Yes. It’s much faster.

Here’s a third party audit: DNS Performance

1.1.1.1 DNS Performance

 

Interesting. On the announcement page, there's a response to a comment about not working that states:

So perhaps that's what I'm encountering. 1.0.0.1 is working fine for me on the circuits I had previously mentioned. That being said, it's still not faster than 8.8.8.8 in my tests.

Though I did realize through this effort that my U-Verse-provided router is dogshit slow at DNS queries. I probably should haven known that already, but as nerdy as I am, even I don't regularly benchmark my DNS providers.

 

I'm wondering if this is free, or if you have to pay for it?

Their website isn't telling me much in that regard.

 

It's completely free. Cloudflare sells other DNS services, so this is one they offer for free to get their name out there.