You can also setup a custom DoH provider (that can also be configured on the system level, not just the browser) so neither Cloudflare or your ISP gets your DNS queries.

You know you are quite fortunate to be able to say so.

Firefox is a project with global impact. A lot of people around the world can benefit from DoH.

The German Grundgesetz (constitution) says "eine Zensur findet nicht statt" (censorship does not occur/there will be no censorship) yet, there is censorship.

I was sceptical about DOH in general (why do we need this?) but now I see why this can be a good thing and great as well that Firefox supports it so easily.

I'm not going to search for every single article. Or are you seriously suggesting that Reuters is 100% free of propaganda, especially in war times?

The answer your question: "common sense".

I don't care about either side of this argument, but you can't logically turn the question around. The burden of proof is on you, who made the claim.

Like "don't get caught by your own gov accessing restricted material get caught by USA gov-related organisations so they can sell you out to your own gov & benefit USA".

If you're bothered about who's watching your web traffic then it seems highly unlikely you want to add USA to the list of who is watching you??

And the States are watching you anyway: most of the Internet resides there. Even the websites that don't are likely using Cloudflare or etc to save on traffic.

I'm in Canada and the default provider is CIRA. I can also choose to switch to Cloudflare, NextDNS, or add my own.

You can check out the Network Settings at the bottom of the General tab to see what your default is.

And I simply don't trust Cloudflare.

The threat vector is understandable. Not making the choice to mitigate it is what does not make sense to me. Cloudflare is not an unknown operator. You can study their past behavior, their beliefs, and how their services work, and make that choice.

Saying 99% of people accept the defaults and claiming this is bad without learning about what the defaults are or how to change them when it takes a few straightforward steps to do so is what does not make sense to me.

Even installing Firefox in the first place is to make a conscious choice to change the defaults of nearly all operating systems that the vast majority of people on Earth use. It’s defaults will also now have a feature to encrypt your DNS queries to a third party vetted by Firefox. If you cannot trust them then why use their browser?

“Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s chief executive. “It’s dangerous for infrastructure companies to be making what are editorial decisions,” he said.”

Not dangerous enough apparently.

It's just an option. In this case, both selected options are excellent providers that I'm happy to see.

apt install dnsmasq

is my preference.

Even a ten dollar router will let you pick who you trust for DNS.

A while back, Sky Broadband was even intercepting all customer traffic to UDP or TCP port 53, and forcing it to go to their shitty DNS servers, which panic and drop the connection when they see something 'unusual'.

This is exactly why DNS over HTTPS is a thing. Unencrypted services are regularly abused by ISPs and DNS is no exception.

And if I was an intelligence agency trying place spies, Cloudflare would be among the first tech companies I'd target.

This feature seems almost exclusively a feature for people in the ISP-monopoly-friendly United States.

This seems like a threat model swap in the conversation. The subject threat model here is (1) defending against companies stealing and selling my data. You swapped in the threat of (2) state level agencies spying on you through these companies.

The problem is that #2 seems to be an intractable problem. (but not so much because of an infiltrated DNS provider, more like cable taps and infiltrated hardware manufacturers)

#1 seems to be a more solvable problem (albeit at increasing levels of complexity). When you bring #2 into the conversation, it defocuses on the solution to #1 and gets to a point where we all throw up our hands and admit helplessness and defeat.

I see this happen often and I think every conversation should be clearly grounded in the threat model that is being addressed.

Everyday people who are worried about state-actor threats - an incredibly targeted and unlikely scenario for the average person - but are less concerned about their personal information being harvested for marketing purposes - something that happens all the time to everyone.

I agree with you that people should be more worried about companies collecting their personal info, but we know now that the state collecting your data isn't incredibly targeted or at all unlikely. They just take everything. It's happening to every last one of us every single day. It's been going on for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice

Even if the foreign government spies more nether jurisdiction is likely to care enough about you specifically to make an international case of it.

In other words I'd think most Americans would be better off proxying through Europe, and most Europeans would be better off proxying through the US.

Even better would be to proxy through a third country that your own country is unlikely to cooperate with, and which won't care about you personally.

E.g. I wouldn't want to live in Iran or North Korea, but I'd think proxying DNS through them would in some way maximize my privacy if I was living in Europe or the US.

I'll never travel to either of them, and my authorities are vanishingly unlikely to cooperate with either of them for anything short of murder.

A way to 'opt out' of response customization based on my location would be nice while troubleshooting. But then which zone is that going to give me? Probably the US one. :P

DNS was originally intended to be a domain name resolution service with fixed records. Yet, IIRC even in the very early days (1983) it allowed multiple records. So providing a list of potential endpoints to the client to empower them was fully supported since approximately day 1.

Apparently, instead of developing smart clients that use this (very efficiently provided) information to make reasonable actor-centric decisions, we have developed dumb clients and instead of selecting the best possible endpoint from a set it will just select either a random response or the first response most of the time. GeoDNS further degrades this already bad situation to purposefully provide limited, expiring and non-cacheable responses to individual clients thus locking in the failure.

There are application-level peer selection implementations for various protocols, for example gentoo had a mirrorselect tool which is awesome and torrents will generally prefer fast peers. It would not be that hard to make a smart resolver that did AS-level resolution and cached previously observed bandwidth to make intelligent prioritization decisions without the need to actually actively probe the network. This could even be done at the OS level, transparent to applications.

[RFC882] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc882.txt [RFC883] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc883.txt

Better yet, give the browsers a way to detect this (e.g. generate a random domain known not to exist and make sure it gives NXDOMAIN) and switch to the other DNS only if the normal one is broken.

I don't know if US ISPs do that, but it can be done.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/t-mobile-sprint-...

If the big players are selling DNS data, I guarantee you there are companies out there approaching every other smaller ISP with a turnkey solution that makes it as easy as possible to do the same thing with some kind of revenue share model.

Not a lot of businesses would turn down extra money like that, when they know their big competitors are doing the same thing.

Unlike most ISPs, privacy and security are a core part of Cloudflare's brand and business model - at least at the moment - so it's in their own interest to actually not do this stuff.

Only time will tell whether or not they pull a "don't don't be evil" on us, but that's a different conversation. :-)

And yes, I know a cheap router can easily fix this problem. I just haven't had the time..

I have it installed a few different places on a few networks (Ubiquity, DDWRT, OPNSense, DNSMasq), and it works as expected.

2) I thought we were just talking about defaults? Firefox DoH lets you choose any server too

Has this ever happened?

What is that?

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/353...

The appeal itself appears to be reasonable, but Thailand is notorious about the enforcement of lèse-majesté law [1], and anything that could be interpreted, even slightly, to fall under this law often saw a summary judgment, less burden of proof, and harsh punishment. This is the reason the authority cited as a basis to block it. AFAIK, the website fought back; the block lasts only 6 months.

[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lèse-majesté_in_Thailand for more information.

Do they actually use their massive unchecked power to target child porn? We don't know because it's unchecked the government doesn't report on how the law is used it just uses it.

If the government actually used it to lock up a thousand pedos that would be pretty great it would get me voting for that government so why haven't they reported how success-full this law has been in the 4 years its been in affect? we haven't heard a peep, probably because there hasn't been any success for them to boast about.

This is currently the case, no? DNS is already, as far as the user concerned, a centralised service where any slippery-slope censoring can (and im sure does) already happen.

And that's ignoring the obnoxious government interference ISPs tend to implement through DNS. From piratebay to youtube blocks.

You have to trust someone with DNS. And Firefox's trusted partner is better than the current status quo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_over_HTTPS

This is actually considered "a disadvantage" by wikipedia, because of course it means captive portals don't work.

Mozilla decided to turn on DoH by default, without asking, without prompting, without any indication whatsoever. Even if you configure a canary domain, that doesn't disable the DoH preference - it just temporarily turns it off.

Organizations making unilateral decisions about sharing my private information with an untrusted, for-profit company that has a history of abuse and social irresponsibility is a very bad thing, not a good one.

That's what I actually want from Mozilla — offering (but not forcing) privacy-enhancing services, preferably for free.

DNS is not centralized. You can enter whatever DNS server you want. The problem with plain text DNS is that in countries like Turkey over half million domains are blocked in DNS level. Even if you enter your custom DNS, Turkish ISPs MITM the queries and respond with are IP adrress that says that the domain is blocked. DoH prevents such attacks. For this reason once again huge thanks to Mozilla who fights against opressing regimes.