xiando wrote:
I read an article from LH this morning about the OpenDNS service.
http://tinyurl.com/24y2cn
http://www.opendns.com/
Can I use this with Tor? Will that void any anonymity provided by Tor?
Forgive me if this is a stupid question.
I call SCAM. Yes. SCAM, I tell you. This isn't really Tor related, so I'll
keep it short. In bullet summary, we know:
I think you misunderstand the meaning of the word scam.
Their nameservers are:
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220
At first blush their service may seem plausible. However, try them and visit
something like www.akljfdlkajdfasfd.com, which takes you to:
http://guide.opendns.com/?url=www.akljfdlkajdfasfd.com
I'm sorry, but if I try a non-existing domain then I prefer to be informed
that the domain can not be found. OpenDNS will tell you Sure, there's a
website called whateveryoutrytoresolve.com, here's the IP, and you should go
visit that site and view all these advertisements we've put up there.
If you'd spent two minutes reading their website you would have noticed
that by signing up for an account you can turn off the feature you
mentioned above. It's called typo correction and is described:
When OpenDNS receives a request to resolve a domain which does not
exist (known to techies as NXDOMAIN or RCODE 3), OpenDNS first attempts
to correct any known typos and resolve the domain again. If that fails,
OpenDNS uses the request as a search query to give you a page of search
results. If you turn this feature off, you will no longer have us
correct typos for you. Note: mail servers running DNSBLs and URIBLs work
fine with typo correction enabled.
You can hardly blame them for turning this on by default and using the
advertising. But you can certainly applaud them for making it optional.
It is a FREE service after all.
Further, their nameservers really aren't all that fast. I've got 50ms ping to
them and it takes them 345 ms to resolve a domain. They do cache, so if you
lookup the same name twice then you get a quicker response, but so does bind
and tinydns and those respond in 1msec if it's cached.
That could be them doing typo correction for you. As far as I can see
they're bloody fast. Your lack of knowledge about how their system
works, the fact that you never posted any benchmarks, and you're poor
usage of the word scam makes me disregard your speed comments.
As for Tor: I want to get a message saying the domain isn't found if it
doesn't exist - I don't want no mikey mouse bullshit advertisement landing
page. Thus; I'd really dislike it if you use OpenDNS with Tor and now you're
sending all these random Tor-users to view the stupid advertisement.
He never said he'd do that. But guess what, if he wanted to do it, he
could turn off the advertising.
Now that you know OpenDNS is bullshit scam, consider this:
I setup a fast Tor exit server, it uses my wildcard nameserver for it, I
redirect every resolve failure to a landing page, I'm fairly sure that would
upset quite a lot of people..
That's not what he said he'd do.
So don't use OpenDNS at all, specially not with Tor. I call it a SCAM. Perhaps
that's a little harsh word, but I do view their service as basically
nothing more than any other nameserver out there except that they wildcard
any non-existing domain to their advertisement page.
Read their documentation. Everyone else, ignore this guy and check out
the service yourselves.
Mike
P.S. I have no relationship to this site in any way other than having a
peak at it a year or two back, and just signing up for a new account.
