Google Public DNS ROCKS (speed up your browsing)

[kfmfe04]

my browser was acting weird today - a bit slow, a bit eratic

I suspected a stale DNS cache so I googled around and found this:

http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/

after pointing my DNS to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, my browser is now blazingly fast

I highly recommend trying these out if your connections seem slow or erratic

(note - I'm not affiliated with google in any way - just love free stuff that works well!)

[ashish verma]

cool dude... this working...

can you please help me solving my problem

http://cplusplus.com/forum/lounge/44717/

[matsom]

I've actually been using Google DNS for quite sometime now, IMO it's adequate i.e not "blazingly fast" compared to my ISP's own DNS, but kept using it because I'm too lazy to change it back to the old DNS.
Another option you can look at is Open DNS (208.67.222.222/208.67.220.220)

my browser was acting weird today - a bit slow, a bit eratic

I found that updating the Adobe flash player also solved a similar problem with my browser (FF4) :\

[kfmfe04]

apparently, the better DNS could depend on where you are, which makes perfect sense

for me, Google DNS appears to be quicker than Open DNS

[kbw]

Do you really want Google to track every site you visit?

[Cheraphy]

If you're not visiting sites with illegal content you've got nothing to fear!

[kbw]

It's not a matter of fear.

[kfmfe04]

true - I'd prefer not be tracked by anyone, but it's not worth the effort to hide my DNS queries

what could be scarier in the future is when cash goes away one day and every single monetary transaction is recorded by the government

despite not doing anything illegal, I find that loss of anonymity to be potentially much more frightening than any DNS query tracking by Google

[kbw]

what could be scarier in the future is when cash goes away one day and every single monetary transaction is recorded by the government

There have been various attempts at providing electronic money that doesn't have a central clearing system (Mondex for example), but in the end, no one trusts electronic money without a paper trail; would you? It's not primarily a matter of some state trying to track you.

I'd prefer not be tracked by anyone, but it's not worth the effort to hide my DNS queries

Tracking's almost everywhere. For example, everytime you connect to this site, the browser contacts pagead2.googlesyndication.com. If you have a google account and remain logged in, you're sharing your browsing habits. I agree, it's probably not worth the effort.

[z05DSL3A]

I have a lot of privacy stuff set up, I don't give out info to just anyone that asks. All ad banners requests are dumped, cookies are restricted etc. If a site "needs' more than I am willing to give,I don't use the site.

[ascii]

Woah, there's definitely a noticeable difference. Thanks!

[Cheraphy]

I never understood the need for anonymity. In this day and age it's impossible to do damn near anything without some sort of tracking. It doesn't matter if it's governmental or just some company. You can't do much in the modern world without having it being recorded somewhere.

[khamara]

if you are running Linux why not put your favourite sites into your /etc/hosts. Nothing faster than direct lookup. But be careful of load sharing sites (if that matters, doesn't to me).

Alternatively you can run your own caching DNS. For example I run Posadis on Windows (but don't know if it's caching though). It's much much faster. It should only access an external DNS for the initial IP (but it does do updates though - wonder if you could disable this). Maybe I should write my own :) This should avoid tracking via DNS but not via IP address.