Another Tasty Bit from the Technology Front, for those of you who
miss them - from ex-silklister Keith Dawson. Apologies to the various
TBTF Irregulars here for the repetition.
Udhay
From: Keith Dawson
Subject: [IRR] OpenDNS
You may have caught the buzz in the blogosphere about OpenDNS [1] since
they launched on the 10th. The 7-person startup, led by EveryDNS founder
David Ulevitch, is aiming to make "DNS" the next acronym that crosses
over from the tech world to common parlance.
I've been a satisfied user of EveryDNS [2] for a few years now. Every-
dns.net is my first stop after godaddy.com for any domain I'm going to
host myself (the count is 16 at the moment). Ulevitch asked the EveryDNS
user base to try out OpenDNS.com a couple of weeks before launch. I set
up [3] my home AirPort router to use the OpenDNS addresses
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220
and -- beta product -- the confirmation page [4] gave me an "oops." I
contacted their support via AIM (they publish that contact information)
and spoke directly with David (whom I hadn't met before). He fixed the
problem in a few minutes and I then got a followup email from John
Roberts, the VP Prod Dev. Now *that's* support.
Besides resolving DNS queries fast, using 4 servers located at the
corners of the US (more to come), the service:
- intercepts attempts to go to known phishing pages
- corrects simple typos in URLs (mostly in the TLDs)
- sends you to a search page for unresolved URLs
OpenDNS will eventually make money by selling ads on the typo-intercep-
tion pages.
Some of the writeups linked below have raised questions about the new
service. OpenDNS has responded with alacrity on their blog [5], other
blogs, their FAQ [6], and in running code.
In my opinion these guys are about as trustworthy and clueful as they
come. The tone of every page on their site speaks of transparency. A
preferences page lets you opt out of the typo interception and/or the
phishing warnings -- again, more to come. (Personally I let OpenDNS
catch the phish but not the typos). And of course no lock-in is pos-
sible, as you can just change where you point for DNS resolution at
any time.
Ars Technica has a good writeup here [7]. Here are Wired [8] and CIO
Magazine [9]. For those wanting to dive into the blogoshpere's opinions
on the new service, try this ComputerWolrd blog [10] (it summarizes and
links a handful of bloggers' comments), and this del.icio.us tag
collection [11] numbers over 150 posts at present.
[1] http://opendns.com/
[2] http://everydns.net/
[3] http://opendns.com/start/
[4] http://welcome.opendns.com/
[5] http://blog.opendns.com/
[6] http://www.opendns.com/faq/
[7] http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060719-7303.html
[8] http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71345-0.html?tw=wn_technology_3
[9] http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=22909
[10] http://computerworld.com/blogs/node/3023
[11] http://del.icio.us/pencoyd/opendnsmention/
_______________________________________________
--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
