You may recall that back in July I wrote about Google’s and Mozilla’s plans for DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and the furor it caused among the nannies in the UK who resented having their ability to spy on their users made more difficult. I was a little skeptical that Google and Mozilla would stick to their guns in the face of the opposition but Mozilla, at least, is moving forward with their plans.
In a post entitled What’s next in making Encrypted DNS-over-HTTPS the Default, Mozilla details the results of experiments with a beta version and their plans for rolling out the system to everyone. There are two problems to solve:
- What to do when DoH returns erroneous results
- How to interoperate with parental controls
Mozilla has solutions for both of these and plans to partially roll out the system starting in late September. DoH will be enabled by default but will be opt-in in the sense that users will be notified of the change and given a chance to disable it. If the test deployment goes well, Mozilla will enable the service for everyone in the U.S.
I applaud all this and welcome one more way of keeping the busybodies’ noses out of what I do on the Internet. The other advantage is that it also prevents DNS hijacking where users are surreptitiously directed to bogus and potentially harmful sites. It’s a win for everyone. Except the busybodies.