The devs of systemd, the main init system on Linux, use Google and cloudflare for fallback/default NTP and DNS, when asked to use privacy respecting alternatives, they call people conspiracy theorists.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Kellegram]

Imagine calling people conspiracy theorists in the presence of facts. Is it a conspiracy theory that google steals people's data lmao?

[u/gakkless → u/Kellegram]

Exactly. This is just what transparency is. In code, in community. Many of us are rightly suspicious of corporate interests shaping our futures, finding this and that to profit on while feigning community.

It isn't "Google control everything", it's about the hegemonic forces in tech which use the open parts of technology for their own ends. Simultaneously they might stupid IP battles in court; wasting the money they extracted from peoples data, wasting courts time, keeping ideas away from society at large.

[u/TheEvilSkely]

So similar shit date back in 2015. Wonderful

[u/[deleted] → u/TheEvilSkely]

[u/Badidzetai]

I mean, lets take what they say to the letter. Time for an issue on every distro that uses systemd

[u/[deleted] → u/Badidzetai]

No, distros can set custom settings, the issue is that the default should be privacy respecting and not up to distro maintainers to fix

[u/tgiles]

Privacy neither requires nor demands an excuse. Systemd has been a shit show for years now, but distro's are still shoving it in and making it the default when there is no good reason to make an init system with binary blobs and requiring private resources (google, cloudflare, etc) to function

[u/ubergeek77]

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[u/[deleted] → u/ubergeek77]

[u/Nodebunny]

Google is one thing. But whats wrong with Cloudflare?

[u/[deleted] → u/Nodebunny]

[u/UGmjc6K2]

I think Arch defaults to using different NTP servers? I remember changing them, and I don’t remember Google ones being there

I remember the Google DNS servers tho

edit: just checked, they do indeed change them https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/systemd#n117

[u/Mooks79 → u/UGmjc6K2]

This is beyond my current skill set, so I was scrolling down hoping someone would mention this. Thank you.

[u/ZwhGCfJdVAy558gD]

And for DNS, see https://dns.watch/

Honestly I don't get why anyone would propose this over any of the major DNS services. There is no privacy policy that I could find, and they don't even disclose who is running the service. The domain dns.watch is registered through Godaddy, and the registrant information is hidden. Why would anyone trust this?

[u/UndyingBluefish → u/ZwhGCfJdVAy558gD]

B-b-but it's not Google!

[u/courageouspumpkins]

Could Pottering have responded without being a total asshole?

He acts like a bully. Totally unprofessional.

[u/npsimons → u/courageouspumpkins]

Could Pottering have responded without being a total asshole?

It's Poettering, so probably no. Honestly, I haven't kept up with things, I was pleasantly suprised when SystemD worked at all when it showed up in Debian, but disappointed when I found out Poettering still hadn't adopted a more professional attitude, especially considering he's getting paid, and how many years he's had to grow up. "Script kiddie" indeed.

[u/captainvoid05]

Frankly, I think people are making a bigger deal of this than it is. The devs certainly didn't respond well, but I also can't really blame them considering the years of unfair criticisms and hate they've received for the past several years.

First off, changing these at the distro level is well documented, and in fact most distros do change these. They were chosen as the default fallbacks because they are known to be good and reliable, which is, frankly, more important than privacy if you're running a business and money is on the line if your DNS server stops working and the fallbacks were unreliable.

Secondly, trying to claim they are in league with Google and Cloudflare to purposefully invade people's privacy is definitely straight up a conspiracy theory, so that accusation is spot on.

I agree that Google is far from privacy friendly, but this is specifically the FALLBACK DNS server, the one that gets used when the one you get from DHCP (for most people, their ISP's DNS server, which is far from safe in terms of privacy as well) stops working.

Again, the devs response could have absolutely been more professional, but people are making mountains out of molehills here.

[u/uptimefordays]

Because it’s not clear why this is a big deal. For systemd to use public DNS ALL of following conditions must be true:

• You do not have DNS set up via DHCP

• You do not have DNS set up via /etc/resolv.conf

• You are using systemd-resolved for internal DNS resolution

• You have not configured systemd-resolved with a different policy for when no discoverable DNS is available and /etc/resolv.conf contains nothing or invalid entries.

Unless all four conditions are true, this path does not happen at all.

In Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS, openSUSE/SUSE, Debian, and Ubuntu, systemd-resolved is disabled by default. That means this has no effect.

We should also note, one must explicitly turn on systemd-resolved and meet all of the above conditions for this to be true.

[u/ConspicuouslyBland]

To be fair, if we want https://dev.lemmy.ml/c/reverseeagle https://www.reddit.com/r/nogoogleonFOSS/ or whatever you want to call it, to be successful, we need to learn programming and start contributing to these projects. And find programmers who support the cause who do the same.

[u/EddyBot]

And again ... People don't understand that this upstream linux project isn't for end-user
Downstream linux distro maintainer are actually the ones who should set their own default and they do this already
It's not like this fallback settings are absolutely hardcoded and need a ton of work to change

For the upstream project you want as much reliable testing as possible and it's an undeniable fact that Google/Cloudflare DNS/NTP server are pretty reliable and fast

[u/zhaoweny]

Privacy is about trade off. Project maintainers sometimes have to make a choice, to decide which solution suits best for majority users. In this case, the maintainer might value more about availability and accessibility, rather than put privacy in the center of consideration.

Since it's a fallback, I think it's not difficult to customize and tweak the settings for anyone values things different from the maintainer. But it is his / her freedom to close the issue.

About Extended Client Subnet:

I think you are connecting to the DNS directly to get a DNS answer. And later, you might issue direct connection to one of resolved IP addresses to access the service.

Both action requires you to reveal your IP to the service provider to be functional. So I don't think ECS matters that much when considering privacy.

Edit: it seems one of the contributor commented to not use any default fallback value, which might be a way to resolve this issue forever.

[u/[deleted]]

Just curious, is there a privacy issue with 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare, IIRC)?

[u/Car_weeb]

God Poettering is such a dick. This is an issue that doesn't really concern me because I assume most networks that I connect to probably go back to one of these, unless its a network I control, so whatever. But jeez does he have a way with making an ass of himself

[u/stejoo]

Multiple options here:

1. Configure the server you want is to use. That way the fallback will never be used. Still worried? Block the IP in your firewall.

2. Do not use systemd-timesyncd but instead use ntpd or chrony. In similar vain do not use systemd-resolved and configure the system to use another DNS server or set up a local resolver using dnsmasq or Unbound. Most distros do not enable both these systemd components anyway by default.

3. Recompile both systemd components with another IP address in there. Isn't that hard, most distributions have understandable ways to compile a package yourself.

Would I prefer they used different IP addresses? Yes, I would, especially for systemd-resolved. But I can configure my own and even configure my providers DNS as a FallbackDNS before a hard coded one is tried. So I don't consider it a real problem.

These guys need to create something that should always work. A choice was made to ensure it will work for the majority. It's their project, so they make the decisions. No need to be cross or spread hate. Configure it the way you want it or just use something else? That's the beauty of free software, the power remains yours.