23 January 2025
This week at the UK DNS Privacy Project
This has been an incredibly productive and exciting week for the UK DNS Privacy Project! Here’s a rundown of what we’ve achieved:
Governance and Transparency
We’ve taken a big step forward by officially registering as UK DNS Privacy Project Ltd, a company limited by guarantee. This structure reinforces our commitment to operating solely for the public benefit, ensuring that we remain accountable and transparent in all that we do. We’ve also outlined plans for future governance, including a member-based structure to involve the community in decision-making.
Initial Infrastructure Setup
This week, we laid the foundation for our DNS infrastructure by setting up our initial resolvers. Our servers, based in the UK, have been optimised for speed, reliability, and privacy. These resolvers ensure secure and encrypted DNS lookups and DNSSEC validation. We’ve also configured support for DNS-over-TLS (DoT) and DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH), providing users with advanced options for protecting their online activity. As we continue to expand, this infrastructure will form the backbone of our commitment to delivering a high-quality, privacy-focused DNS service.
GitHub Repositories
We’ve been building out our GitHub presence to foster collaboration and transparency:
- Steering Repository: A dedicated space for discussing ideas, tracking issues, and proposing solutions to improve our services.
- Status Repository: A repository to support our uptime and availability monitoring, ensuring users can always see the performance of our resolvers in real time.
Sponsorship Tiers and Goals
To support our mission, we’ve introduced a variety of GitHub Sponsors tiers. Since GitHub handles all transactions in USD, sponsorships are billed in USD only, but this simplifies management on our end. Sponsorship options range from $2/month for home users to $200/month for corporate partners. We’ve also set an initial sponsorship goal of $100/month to implement BGP, enhancing redundancy and improving the reliability of our resolvers. For a bit of fun, we’ve added a one-off "Buy Us a Coffee" tier, allowing supporters to contribute with a small but meaningful gesture to fuel our efforts.
Monitoring and Statistics Page
We’ve launched a new page featuring detailed DNS statistics against our resolvers. Users can now view charts showing resolver hits, performance metrics, and more. This transparency helps users understand how our service is performing while still being privacy focussed and demonstrates our commitment to reliability.
What’s Next?
Looking ahead, we’re focusing on:
- Adding more redundancy to our DNS infrastructure we have set a sponsorship goal of $100 per month to allow us to use BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) to add redundancy to our resolvers.
- Developing educational resources and how to documents to help users understand and configure DNS privacy solutions.
- Expanding our community involvement through open discussions and feedback opportunities.
We’re thrilled with the progress we’ve made and are excited for what lies ahead. Thank you for being part of this journey towards a safer, more private internet for everyone!
If you’d like to get involved, check out our Support Us page or consider becoming a GitHub Sponsor. Every contribution, no matter the size, helps us move closer to our vision.