It's interesting to learn more about the history here. When UO came out and used the shards concept I just assumed it was a callback to 1988's Ultima 5 and the shards of Mondain's gem. Linguistic history sure is blurry and organic!
Same here! I remember taking a saved game file, backing it up and then earning some gold. Comparing the two roughly told me where the saved game kept its gold. Then I made that number tremendous. I think I was in fifth or sixth grade at the time - it was a lesson that's served me well :)
You seem like you may know what you're doing. Would you mind sharing who your DNS provider is? Do you pay for recursive service?
I don't trust my ISP, so I'd prefer not to use their DNS or to pass requests up to root servers over cleartext. I also had some performance issues with root server requests since they have to chase the authoritive servers.
Right now I'm sending TLS requests to cloudflare, but obviously since I'm not paying for them, I'm the product.
OpenDNS offers paid dns service (if paying for dns give you peace of mind). Alternatively, you can rent a vps and run your own recursive dns server there, but make sure your vps provider allows running recursive dns to avoid account suspension.
I'm not sure where you call home, but at least in the US, that is impossible for many people. Or rather, impossible without physically moving your house.[0]
Especially if you do not count satellite, which I do not. My house has one crappy DSL 18Mbps provider and that's it. Their way or the highway.
You can just point to other DNS servers instead of your ISP's. Some providers might intercept and redirect those queries, but I haven't ever run across any.
You could, but DoH exists to provide a crypto-based guarantee that they can't even passively monitor the DNS requests you're sending to the alt. resolver.
DoH only hides the domain name lookup. You still connect to the other server by IP. Even $2.50/mo VPS plans offer a unique IP these days, and building a database of IP:hostname is extremely trivial, especially for ISPs that already run DNS resolvers.
But let's be real: the internet is quickly becoming a walled garden, so having access to DNS requests is mostly only going to give you a billion facebook.com + twitter.com + youtube.com + google.com + google-analytics.com lookups anyway.
I live in Norway, Europe and around here ISPs compete for my business.
Kinda like a “free market”, except it’s “regulated“ to not allow scamming end-customers. I find it quite enjoyable.
Maybe you in the US should fix the root cause of your problem (legislation) instead of deploying rogue technology making life complex for everyone else?
Here in the UK, I have a choice of many different ISPs, all of whom (in theory) compete for my business.
Guess what? The big ones are still awful: hijacking DNS, providing horribly congested service and laughable "support". All in the race to cut as much cost and increase profit in the name of being able to undercut the next guy by £1/pm. Competition isn't the pancea you seem to think it is.
> Maybe you in the US should fix the root cause of your problem (legislation) instead of deploying rogue technology making life complex for everyone else?
Maybe you should use a different browser. Or learn how the one you're using works at least.
That kind of feels like answer the question "why is there cellophane on the counter" with "Why don't you go to apple and get them to change their packaging to reduce plastic waste?" I mean, yeah, that's a solution, but you're requiring a massive effort, when really that doesn't address your problem at the moment.
