Jigsaw Operations LLC, the cybersecurity division of Google, has launched Intra, a new application for Android that “protects against DNS manipulation”. This is a censorship technique that allows a government, by monitoring traffic, to restrict access to certain websites by blocking the DNS.
In mundane terms, any web page has an IP address composed of numbers that are hard to remember. To facilitate access to users, a web address is written as xatakandroid.com. The DNS is in charge of translating xatakandroid.com into the IP of the server where the web is hosted to allow access to the content. Blocking the DNS prevents a user from accessing certain sites, which becomes a form of censorship.
Skip censorship using Google DNS
Intra, gross mode does not stop being a kind of VPN. In fact, when you install it, it asks you for permission to create one on your device. With this, what you are doing is that all your connection goes through the DNS of Google and not by your operator, which, in a country that advocates the manipulation and censorship of certain media and platforms, can help the user to certain websites and platforms. Also, it does not limit the speed or have a traffic limit.
The operation is really simple. Simply download the application, activate it, give it permission to create a VPN and go unprepared. As we have said, by default the Google DNS is configured, although they can be changed by another provider such as Cloudflare or a customized one. It also allows access to recent queries so you can see if there is any inappropriate application connecting in the background.
According to the guys from Jigsaw to TechCrunch , although the app is available in Google Play for any Android, the plan is to embed it in Android 9 Pie, which, incidentally, allows you to configure encrypted DNS from the settings.