Villainary
While we’re bigging up Mozilla, now’s a good time to mention that an utterly toothless organisation – the UK ISP Association – nominated Mozilla for its Internet Villain award, placing it alongside such gems as President Trump and the EU’S Article 13 Copyright Directive. Why? Because Mozilla plans on enabling DNS-OVER-HTTPS (DOH!) by default in Firefox, which would make it hard (boo hoo!–ed) for ISPS to snoop on DNS queries.
Setting this up at the OS level is probably beyond your average user (but we’ll show you how to do it later), so the villainary appears to lie in helping average users boost their privacy. DOH is no silver bullet, and there are legitimate concerns around any kind of centralised DNS, but this all seems pretty nonsensical to us. Oh, and Google also plans on enabling DOH in Chrome soon, but we don’t see them getting nominated for any Internet Skullduggery award.
In the interests of fair and balanced reporting, it’s nice to see the UK ISP Ass. nominating Sir Tim Berners-lee for an Internet Hero award, for his work protecting the free and open nature of the Internet. We should also note that the UK is not alone in pushing a surveillance state agenda: we’re still behind China’s facial recognition-powered social credit system, and Australia’s “Access And Assistance” Bill passed in December 2018 asks communication providers to either do the impossible or break end-to-end encryption.