Gadgetory

thanks for watching tech quickie click the subscribe button and enable notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos so I would argue that it's healthy to be a little concerned about the people who follow you around online be it the government unscrupulous advertisers or maybe your crazy ex who swear she'll never love another man hmm but even if you've taken all of the obvious precautions including hiding behind seven proxies browsing only in the incognito mode hole drive encryption and stationing an attack dog outside of your computer room unfortunately there might still be in the Sidious hole in your defenses that could expose a fair amount about you I'm talking about DNS leaks and if you don't know what the DNS is you can check out our other video right up here on how it works but simply put is the system that matches web addresses you enter like youtube.com to numerical IP addresses so that your web browser will know which site to bring up now typically whenever you try to visit a new website your computer will ask a DNS server maintained by your ISP for its IP address now this means that your ISP knows which size you're visiting which normally wouldn't be an issue but if you're doing something sensitive you may not want your ISP to have this information especially if they're logging it indefinitely or much worse selling it to third parties oh but come on John that's amateur hour stuff I use a VPN that I pay actual money for so I'm totally safe right well maybe not depending on how your VPN is configured it might be using a secure encrypted toll to connect you with the websites themselves but the DNS requests to help you navigate to those sites might still be going to your ISPs DNS server now this is because some operating systems and windows is notorious for this will rely on whatever DNS server it is saves as the default so if this is your ISPs it might completely ignore the fact you have a VPN running and send all of your browsing requests to your ISP anyway now they won't see exactly what pages are visiting or the contents of a message you type but they can build a shockingly robust profile of your online life based on just this information alone so how can you plug these pesky leaks well if you are using a VPN you trust the most straightforward way is to enable its anti DNS leak which will encrypt and route all DNS requests to their servers instead of your ISPs after turning this setting on you can test it at a site that checks for any remaining leaks to see if it's functioning properly and won't put a link to one of those sites down in the video description and even if you're not using a VPN you can still route DNS requests through different servers if you don't trust your ISP there are a number of public DNS servers out there that you can find with little research two of the more notable ones are run by Google and CloudFlare to set this up just bring up your ipv4 settings under Ethernet properties and windows and enter the IP addresses of the DNS servers you'd like to use though Windows 8 and 10 users should note that a new feature called SMH and are that's a mouthful anyway well it could still route your request through your ISP so we've linked a plug-in that can disable it in the video description if you're using a VPN and well-regarded public DNS servers can have other benefits for example google claims that their service only keeps logs of user's IP addresses for 48 hours before deleting them provide speed improvements in many cases and encrypts your DNS requests as well of course no matter who you use you're still trusting essentially some Rando just not your ISP to be respectful with your privacy so read their privacy policies thoroughly you don't want to spring a leak somewhere else or else your requests for privacy will end up feeling kind of like a boat ride and a pasta strainer and speaking of racing across the lake and a pasta strainer are you racing against the clock as a freelancer it's challenging but with the growth of the Internet there has never been more opportunities for the self-employed to meet this need check out fresh books cloud accounting software designed for the way that you work it's the simplest and easiest way to be more productive more organized and more importantly get paid quickly create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds setup online payments with just a couple of clicks and get paid up to four days faster see when your client has seen your invoice and put an end to the guessing games FreshBooks is offering a 30-day unrestricted free trial to our viewers to claim it just go to FreshBooks comm slash tech wiki and Intertek wiki envy how did you hear about this section okay guys thanks for watching like dislike check out our other channels leave a comment down below with your ideas for future videos and don't forget to subscribe