DNS stands for Domain Name System. This is the system of matching human, memorable web domain names, like openrightsgroup.org to an IP Address, which is a number, used on the net to locate actual machines. This is a called a "DNS Look-up".

DNS Servers are used by your computer or Internet device to match these names to IP Addresses.

You can quickly see how DNS works by trying an online "look up" service.

Rights and censorship implications

DNS servers and the domain system are potential targets for law enforcement, and attacks to prevent access to content, as it is much harder to reach sites or services if the domain name cannot be resolved to an IP Address.

Thus during the attacks in 2010 on WikiLeaks, DDoS attacks were concentrated on their DNS server, to prevent people finding the IP Address of WikiLeaks. Systems like Cleanfeed for web content blocking rely on pre-filtering DNS look-ups to make checks for unwanted content.

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