Mozilla quietly announced a major change to its Firefox web browser explaining that “after many experiments—we feel confident that enabling DoH [DNS over HTTPS] by default is the right next step.”
The company assured in its blog post that “most of our users will benefit from the greater protections of encrypted DNS traffic,” but there was also recognition at some of the backlash against the new technology. “When DoH is enabled,” it added, “users will be notified and given the opportunity to opt out.”
So what’s going on, why the controversy, and why might users opt out?
The Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) is one of its greatest strengths and also one of its greatest weaknesses. As open traffic, IP addresses and browsing activities can be profiled and your requests intercepted and manipulated. But with more and more of what is done online being encrypted, the very act of accessing specific websites can be encrypted as well. This is what DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is all about, bypassing locally held DNS nameservers, sending encrypted traffic to a central server instead.
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