Was 8.8.8.8 your default? well there's a new server in town and it's 1.1.1.1

The DNS wars are hotting up (well maybe if there was a DNS war in the first place), but there's a new player in town trying to topple Google's dominance in the domain name serving business.

Up until now, the generic default for putting in your resolv.conf (or equivalent) was Google's 8.8.8.8 public DNS IP service, well now Cloudflare have launched their own public DNS on 1.1.1.1 and it's fast.

The service was announced on April 1st, so many thought it was a spoof, a joke (it also happened to be Easter Sunday and Pesach) but it was real and it works. 1.1.1.1 is actually under the auspices of APNIC (the regional registry for the Asia Pacific region, more specifically their research group) and many a misconfigured service has a DNS entry of 1.1.1.1 - APNIC always wanted to research what traffic was bound there, but every time it was published, traffic overwhelmed whatever network it was pointed to.

Cloudflare offered to handle the traffic and analyse it, and then use it for DNS, which they have done and done it not for commercial gain (though presumably they get a lot of insight into DNS traffic and DNS use) but for the good of a healthy Internet.

As well as supporting standard DNS queries, 2 types of transport layer security are also supported, DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS which are both open standards.

More info can be found at 1.1.1.1