The top comment on HN explains who Paul Vickie is. I believe people tend to read comments before reading the article or voting.

If you want a spot on my hill, I have room to rent.

It would respect all of my DHCP parameters, but silently ignore DNS settings.

It was clearly intentional to serve ads. I had to set up a firewall to force it to use my DNS server. And eventually even that stopped working with an update (which themselves are really hard to block).

I think the Chromecast is the ideal Google device, and a preview of what Google's model is: It slowly removes features through updates that you cannot turn off, and would rather fail completely than not be able to serve you ads.

Seriously, think about the venn diagram of Chromecast users and pi-hole users. It looks a lot like a tennis ball being dropped into the sun.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/195680/share-of-keywords...

Google is an ad company; if you don’t watch the ads, you’re not a useful product.

It doesn’t matter you “bought a product”, this behavior is their corporate DNA. It’s the Office to their Microsoft. Time and time again, we see a clear behavior from Google: that everything feeds the ad machine — or else!

Someone above says an update prevented this somehow, though.

I don't know much about DNS but based on what I do know I would think this to be trivial(?). All you'd need to do is make a request for a domain that doesn't exist. Something like "is-this-google-dns-im-connecting-with.google" or <salted hash of current timestamp>.com. Google DNS could be coded to respond accordingly.

So no DNS response, or not the response you were expecting = not Google DNS.

DNS over TLS and DNS over HTTPS will change that. Google has pushed encryption in all their other products, and is pushing these implementations so do not be surprised when their end user devices use it by default.

here i thought DoH was the panacea, solving all our DNS troubles. but this is one case where DoH doesn't help at all. on the contrary. with DoH we will have no control at all where our apps resolve their DNS requests.

No it didn't, it just queried 8.8.8.8 instead of whatever DNS server your DHCP configuration told it to use.

Putting "nameserver 8.8.8.8" in /etc/resolv.conf and marking it read-only would have the same effect. Doesn't look like much trouble does it?

You think you're guaranteed to be querying 8.8.8.8 with "nslookup hostname.tld 8.8.8.8"?

This is looking at things and totally backwards. You have a local problem, a broken router and you suggest we fix this by changing how all edge nodes on the internet works.

In the age of ever increasing, untrustworthy IOT-devices, you don’t solve this problem by taking control away from the network operator. You need to increase his control. Taking DNS out of his hands is literally madness.

Good luck trying to block their attempts to spy and report on you now!

DNS over HTTPS is going to cause a shitload more problems than it solves.

Oh, absolutely. What I wonder is if people don't notice this, or they do but believe Google is right in pushing fundamental internet design decisions that prioritize Google's incidental access to surveillance data over a high quality and resilient network for everyone.

By control, what I mean is that once DoH usage to G servers hits critical mass, they can decide who can visit what. Not that they would, but they can. People generally do what people can do.

The performance characteristics are also rather unfortunate. TCP handshake + TLS handshake with multiple public key operations + TCP protocol overhead adds quite a lot of both latency and computation vs. UDP DNS. DoH is even worse. There would have been ways (e.g. DNSCurve) to get equivalent or better security with less latency and computation if it weren't for horrible middleboxes breaking everything they don't understand.

And all that complexity is attack surface.

If we create internet infrastructure (like DNS over HTTPS) which prevents network operators from actually operating their networks, I’m 100% confident we will find it has bad, unintended and irreversible consequences.

Also: ISPs behave nice almost everywhere in the world where there is proper regulation.

What you have in the US is not a technical problem. It’s a regulatory one.

A good way of bypassing this would be to simply have Google run their DNS server in a port other than 53. But I don't believe you can set a different port in /etc/resolv.conf

And I don't have access to the /etc/resolv.conf on my Chromecast, that's the problem! Anyway, there's a new thread on this specific phenomenon. I'm glad I'm not the only one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19170671

this. I highly doubt Google is actually using DNS for tracking or connecting queries to someone's account, especially when they say they don't [1].

Many people say "use Cloudflare DNS if you're worried about privacy", but Google effectively makes the same claim as Cloudflare that they don't use DNS to track you. The only plus you get from Cloudflare is how they get KPMG to audit and ensure they're not logging IPs forever.

1: https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy

CloudFlare doesn’t make their money off of brokering my attention, they have a decent track record of doing the ‘right’ things (or at least not the ‘wrong’ things), and they’ve made some decently pro-privacy statements in the past.

It seems that everyone wants to collect data on everything and figure out how to sell it off, so I’m not putting it out of the realm of possibility that CloudFlare could do shady stuff and abuse my privacy as well- but their general line of business doesn’t require it the way Google’s does.

All things otherwise equal, I’m gonna trust the company who’s business isn’t selling my profile a bit more for most things. I used to use Google DNS a lot, now I use CloudFlare’s. I trust them both more than Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon with respect to technical competency and security at the very least.

Both CloudFlare and Google are for-profit corporations which want to take actions to maximize their profits. Insomuch as they are profit maximizing, we should expect them to take actions where the expected gain is greater than the expected cost, and to prioritize actions which have the maximum gain over actions which are only barely profitable.

If the cost -- in terms of extra labor and reputation if the data-selling becomes public -- is estimated to be less than people are willing to pay for the data, why would any profit-seeking corporation choose not to sell your data?

We can't trust companies not to sell poisoned food, even though that's a huge reputational hit. We can't trust companies manufacturing herbal, vitamin or nutritional supplements to actually put the herb, vitamin or nutritional factor they claim they are in the bottles they sell. We can't trust the makers of USB cables to produce cables that actually meet the USB specifications. Why should we believe that any corporation, regardless of whether or not you pay them for their goods and services, would leave the money to be made selling your data on the table, even if there's a potential reputational hit if the practice becomes public?

But Cloudflare's business model is different: they get rich by making the internet faster. Plus, it's great publicity for them. Their customer acquisition focuses largely on winning developers (by letting them use a great, barely cut-down-at-all service for free) so they use it in companies later. This helps with that a lot.

Cloudflare doesn't need to analyze my data to make money -- they offer a great service that people will throw money at them to use.

But pi-hole (or other privacy dns appliances/services) also block tracking targets. By enabling/enforcing the "free and unaltered internet experience" Google also ensures access to tracking.

Why do you doubt it? This behavior would be consistent with Google's behavior generally.

> You know what would be an actual story though? If Google used Google DNS to spy on people. If anyone has concrete evidence that they're doing that, that is a big fucking deal.

I'm an optimist, but I'm also cynical enough to foresee the same complaints — it's not a story! everyone does it — if that came to pass.

Prevention is important because in real life you can almost never recoup the losses as easily. You can take it to the courts etc. but if your data leaks, it's out there, you can't undo it.

You're right, I'm sorry. I edited my post a bit to soften it.

> I'm an optimist, but I'm also cynical enough to foresee the same complaints

Well, maybe. I would hope not, specifically because Google has made previous guarantees that they do not use that data for spying.

It's different when it's your ISP, which already does tons of shady shit and buried somewhere in your TOS that they do this stuff.

I don't find it any more acceptable, but it would or at least should be a bigger story if Google was doing it with Google DNS.

Google's smart though. They know that rolling out unsavory ideas in small pieces keeps it under the radar.

They didn't, for example, push the organic search results under the fold all at once.

This could be innocuous, or part of some larger agenda.

(Maybe not this, just an example to note that motivation can be hard to discern)

Are you seriously thinking they don't store/analyse/use that kind of information??? (That's every site you visit, at minimum.)

They don't. They guarantee they don't.

The spooky answer is they don't need it.

https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy

So, while it can't be traced back to you, it is absolutely useful information for their business. Why do you think they offer the service? To be nice?

You tell me how to do that.

"By using service X you are agreeing to be bound by the terms located at .... "

That's why whenever companies change their ToS you get email/notifications/actual mail informing you of the changes.

You can't do that for DNS.

Legally speaking, yes it does. It's a free service. The only obligation they have is to make their terms freely accessible, and to publicize any major changes.

You seem to be implying that Google and other free DNS providers have never changed their privacy policies since there's no good way to notify the users. Google's own website (and the Internet Archive) totally contradict this.

https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy

"Last updated October 29, 2018."

They claim that they don't. You have no way of knowing if they're lying or not, though, so it boils down to "do you trust Google?"

You do, and that's fair. I don't, and that's also fair.

RE: configurability ... I thought one of the main reasons people went with Google over Apple, specifically with Android, was precisely because of their configurability. Every person I talk to that left iOS tells me this.

Android also seems to be going the way of iOS on many fronts, because as it turns out, this philosophy makes things hard to maintain.

In general data that exists can be supoenaed, and if the logs don't exist a court order can make them begin to exist.

Common != Right.

I can totally see how they and other IoT vendors would want to do that. What boggles my mind is that so many people believe the feature implemented was "Use 8.8.8.8 and break otherwise so we can trojan our DNS into places" instead of "Hardcode 8.8.8.8 so it works in most cases".

What is paranoid IMO is some commenters' (as well as seemingly Paul Vixie's) implication that Google does this trick with the Chromecast to better spy on people, which completely goes against Occam's Razor.

It's not "spying". Google DNS just "monetizes data sent through Google servers". Like they do with Chrome Data Saver, or Amp, or Calendar, or Contacts, or Voice, or GKeyboard, or Photos, or Maps, or Gmail, or Search, or...

What constitutes "spying" to you? Do you honestly believe Google isn't mapping your IP address to your account and monitoring your DNS requests to influence the ads they serve to you?

> We don't correlate or combine information from our temporary or permanent logs with any personal information that you have provided Google for other services.

* Client's AS (autonomous system or ISP), e.g. AS15169

* User's geolocation information: i.e. geocode, region ID, city ID, and metro code

* Absolute arrival time in seconds

While Google's AS that the use as an example is huge[1], sometimes the AS is very revealing[2] and only map to a few addresses[3]. Combined with the geo-data, if you're on a smaller AS, Google has better tracking data than the IP address that is easy to correlate back to unique users[4].

As for their claim that "We don't correlate or combine information from our temporary or permanent logs with any personal information that you have provided Google for other services."

There is a lot of carefully chosen language in that claim. You didn't "provide" them with the AS number or geo-data; they looked that stuff up based on your IP address. How are they defining "personal information", and exactly what counts as "provided Google for other services."? These are totally undefined terms and companies have a tendency to evolve their definitions of important-but-not-strictly-defined terminology as the Overton window shifts and bad behavior becomes sufficiently normalized that they can use the "everybody is doing it" excuse.

But looking at it in terms of what they currently say misses the larger problem: unless they have shown that their ability to amend this policy is restrict by a Ulysses Contract[5][6], they can change their policy at any time. They can also have the policy changed by an external power, against their will (e.g. a court could order them to start logging (w/ a timestamp) who communicated with them[7], even if they didn't want to.

[1] "IPs Originated (v4): 8,717,056" https://bgp.he.net/AS15169

[2] Google is admitting to logging which entry on this list each DNS requests originated from (warning, big page, only has US data): https://www.whatismyip.com/asn/US/

[3] "IPs Originated (v4): 256" https://bgp.he.net/AS54007

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17170468

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_pact

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlN6wjeCJYk

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register (or a NSL, etc)

Indeed. And they're terrible. Maybe making a stink about a big player like Google doing this might encourage others to rethink the practice.

Probably not, of course, but the alternative of just shutting up and taking it isn't any better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTP_server_misuse_and_abuse#No...

Seen far, far more instances of:

- ISPs shipping shitty network devices / awful factory settings

- ISP's own DNS servers being terrible in various ways

- Uncle Steve "the IT guy of the family" having messed with the network settings and nobody knows why 1 youtube video in 20 doesn't load but we just ignore it.

Nitpick, but more like $70; you may be confusing Chromecast Ultra with the base Chromecast.

> The Chromecast Ultra isn't sold here