Cloudflare launches high-speed, privacy-focused DNS service

Cloudflare, a US internet services company, has launched its own consumer DNS (domain name system) resolver, which promises to speed up your internet connection and protect privacy. The service, which was unveiled on April fool's day, coincidentally is using the address, https://1.1.1.1, and it is open to the public.

The service is free and can be used by changing the settings in your web browsers or operating systems. You can use it on computers, routers and phones. If you type 1.1.1.1 into your web browser, you'll find a website that gives you instructions.

DNS is the crucial process of matching up a URL - like facebook.com - with a website's true location on the internet, called an IP address (for Facebook, that's 157.240.18.35). Despite being an important part of the internet, DNS services provided by ISPs are often slow and unreliable. Additionally, there is the question of privacy as the DNS servers can be used by ISPs to identify all the traffic from a particular IP address.

Cloudfare boasts it will be "the Internet's fastest, privacy-first consumer DNS service." The company's tool will allow users to shorten load times of web pages and keep some data away from network providers.

Cloudflare has promised to avoid writing any querying addresses to disk and wipe logs within 24 hours. It even went so far as to have KPMG audit its code and practices on a yearly basis to publicly confirm that it's doing what it promised.

"If you switch to 1.1.1.1, then that ledger of where you're going online is not being kept by your ISP," said company CEO Matthew Prince. "[I]t's been depressing to us to watch all too frequently how DNS can be used as a tool of censorship against many of the groups we protect. While we're good at stopping cyber attacks, if a consumer's DNS gets blocked there's been nothing we could do to help."

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