Fedora and fallback DNS servers [LWN.net]

Fedora and fallback DNS servers

Posted Feb 25, 2021 17:23 UTC (Thu) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418)
Parent article: Fedora and fallback DNS servers

If there is a fallback added, it should be DNS over tor, see https://blog.cloudflare.com/welcome-hidden-resolver/ , which is effectively private.

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Fedora and fallback DNS servers

Posted Feb 26, 2021 4:22 UTC (Fri) by helmholtz_coil (guest, #123692) [Link]

You should realize that using Tor has ramifications that may be even worse than the privacy concerns regarding Google or Cloudflare. There are places in the world where using Tor may draw suspicion towards an otherwise ordinary user, resulting in consequences far worse (such as an arrest) than a few logs in a megacorp's database. And I'm not talking about people who are at odds with the powers that be; this is about the Plain Joes (like, say your parents): they lead an ordinary life, and you set up a Linux system for them because they just want to browse the internet, and Fedora works pretty well for them, while not making proprietary OS makers even richer. You live far away, so if their ISP-supplied DNS fails for a day, there's still a fair chance that the fallback DNS works and they won't notice anything. When the ISP fixes the problem, you'll be back to using their DNS instead of Google or Cloudflare.

Fedora and fallback DNS servers

Posted Feb 26, 2021 21:43 UTC (Fri) by thoughtpolice (subscriber, #87455) [Link]

Absolutely not. Tor is nothing but a huge liability for the very vast majority of users when they aren't aware of it (it's another huge failure point in the software stack, and one that some government agencies will respond to with outright hostility), and if the user isn't aware of it, the protections it offers tend to be severely neutered.

Tor can only anonymize and keep you private when you're actively working with it under specific assumptions. Throwing users into the network and making some trivial claim to privacy isn't just a low-effort nerd cop out red herring BS (yes, that's exactly what it is), it's actively misleading to the user about what they can expect.