Hacker News Reader

How is it a disaster? From what I've seen, a number of gripes are due to people not actually understanding how DoH works or expecting it to do something it isn't designed to do.

View on HN

Disaster was maybe too strong a word there. I personally don't like some aspects to put it more mildly. To me, the Firefox move centralises critical infrastructure behind players like cloudflare, including their non-contractual(?, at least not with me as the end user) promises and potential US influence. Guess we'll have to hope for upcoming transparency reports there and hope we don't find this part of the infrastructure as a sidenode in some NSA leak a decade down the road. In my view, once the stack is widely adopted, users will by default either use whatever firefox gives them, or talk to a DoH instance their ISP pushes (I assume there's still a mechanism for that?), not really achieving that much in terms of potential privacy breaches if somebody on the other side decides to act maliciously.

Please correct me if I'm wrong here, it looks like a weird approach to fix a protocol on a lower OSI level. Instead of fixing DNS&DNSSEC privacy a few key players bypass and replace it with their own solution, with Firefox pushing it onto users. My major gripes there are the added complexity and an aversion to wrap our whole networking stack into HTTPS instead of addressing the underlying problems. I realize that's more philosophical than technical grievances though, sorry for the wording.

DNSSEC explicitly doesn't provide privacy --- in fact, it does the opposite --- so if you were waiting for DNSSEC to hide your queries from your ISP's adtech analytics, you'd have been waiting a very long time indeed. Firefox made the right call. DoH, by the way, is also an open standard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com