[p2p-research] Google gets into the DNS business

[M. Fioretti]

On Fri, Dec 04, 2009 08:41:00 AM +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote:

> It is ridiculous that people would willingly give over more and more
> of their services to a single commercial entity...

agreed. One of the things I hope to cover in a "digital awareness"
course I'll start next week is just the fact that people need to stop
delegating this and the services below to others.

> Running your own caching DNS resolver is a) trivial

And the same applies to email, calendaring, etc

This said, it's not free, because to do things well you need to rent a
Virtual Private Server in some professional data center, which means
several Euro (>= 10/15) each month, so it's simply out of reach for
many people, especially because this is something every individual
should do by him/herself.

And it's not trivial at all. More exactly, it is trivial for somebody
who already has the right basic skills, knowledge and attitude for
messing with command line installation and configuration of server
software. But that is just what, 3/4% of people?

For all the others (*), software is still equivalent to terribly
complicated black magic: if you can't avoid it you use it, but don't
even try to understand it, you don't dare alter the spells others told
you to repeat and you couldn't imagine anything less productive, or
more boring/dangerous, than reading the instruction manual for those
spells.

This does not mean that that 3/4% of people are better or superior to
all the others in any way, of course. I run my own mail server but am
completely helpless in other areas. It only means that we're all
different, and it would be counterproductive to forget it.

I plan to write a piece on some of the social impacts of this by the
end of the month, will post here the link when done.

    Marco


(*) and this includes most people who are advanced MS Office or
OpenOffice users, run a blog at blogspot.com, wordpress.com and
similar, or spend their day in Facebook, Twitter and other social
networks.