Does anyone know what hardware Google is using to complete these requests? I hoping the article would go into that detail and I found it sadly lacking.

The classic one.

> If it’s free online, you are the product

which won't be surprising if you think about a little bit - 8.8.0/24 is anycasted, which just means that multiple independent locations around the world announce the IP range, so that your requests broadly go to a nearby instance of it. that's great for your inbound requests, but if it originated it's own DNS queries from that IP, then the replies would also get attracted to whatever instance of 8.8.8.0/24 is near the authoritative DNS server it just queried, not the instance of 8.8.8.0/24 that sent them.

also, even aside from that, having some large fraction of the entire world's DNS requests coming from one IP address would trigger everyone's anti-DOS filters and probably lead to some extremely funny router catastrophes as all traffic hashes to one bucket or whatever.

> What's at the Other End of 8.8.8.8?

The CIA.

DNS subnet mask, which systemd, as service crafts as tmp/sslip.io.in the log prior to grep test.