The alternative to 8.8.8.8 is 9.9.9.9
For years Google DNS has been a goto DNS for personal and work needs. The advantage is that it is fast and reliable while DNS provided by your ISP may have magnitude slower response rate (sometimes hundreds of milliseconds versus 12–14 from Google). Given how many DNS requests a single page load may take, DNS can dramatically change your browsing experience.
However this “DNS to rule them all” used by the millions worldwide has been raising some concerns…
Now, of course OpenDNS has always been an alternative, but for my experience it has always been slower that Google’s and most importantly it did not have catchy, easy to remember IP address.
Now there is an alternative from another IT mogul — IBM. Here is a description from the company’s service release:
The Quad9 DNS service, at 9.9.9.9, not only turns URIs into IP addresses, but also checks them against IBM X-Force’s threat intelligence database. Those checks protect agains landing on any of the 40 billion evil sites and images X-Force has found to be dangerous. — theregister.co.uk
So with Quad9 you have all the same you had with Google DNS plus an additional security on the DNS level. It actually sounds exciting in the age of the global ransomware attacks becoming more and more frequent.
But to me the more important part is different. I and many others will now have similarly easy to use alternative. Next time I review my DNS settings I can actually choose whether to give myself in into the welcome hands of “Don’t be evil”* corp or into the hands of another seen as evil at its time corp, which nowadays actually controls much less of it’s users’ identity.
