opendns
Hey, LOSER! Why use that cruddy old DNS server your fuddy-duddy ISP makes you use? KICK IT TO THE CURB! Now there’s something, um, vaguely different: OpenDNS. (teen metal guitar solo)
Domain Name Servers (DNS) are computers that turn words (www.google.com) into numbers (72.14.207.104) that your computer and its internet applications can understand — and the faster your DNS can respond to requests, the faster your internet connectivity web browsing can seem. Sort of. Also, OpenDNS is blocking scurrilous websites that pretend to be other websites. So there’s that. In any case, I applaud the effort — anyone who wants to make the world’s web surfing faster and safer for free is ok in my book — and it will be interesting to see if using OpenDNS is in fact faster; I’m putting their DNS numbers in my router for a week to see if I can notice any difference.
~jeff
July 10th, 2006 at 7:47 pm
The error correction worries me a little. What if I really wanted to go to googol.com instead of google? It reminds me of that annoying feature in word that assumes it knows better than me what I intended to type.
July 10th, 2006 at 8:21 pm
Luke:
Testing reveals that Googol still goes to googol.com.
Google.cm, however, now goes to google.
So far, I like it. Not that I have especially strong preference in my DNS servers.
~jeff
July 11th, 2006 at 1:12 am
But it does open a small possibility of censorship. They may simply refuse to cache records from some sites, and if someone calls them on this they can claim this was a glitch in their typo-check algorithm, or a false positive in their anti-pishing index.
On the other hand, my ISP can filter DNS records and censor some domains just as easily. 8O
Crap… Where is my tinfoil hat?
July 11th, 2006 at 1:04 pm
Thanks for checking it out. Please let us know how it goes after your first week (or anytime).
OpenDNS is not going to refuse to cache sites.
We’ll keep providing more information, and more control to users. We have to show AND tell to earn your trust. We know that.
John Roberts
OpenDNS
July 11th, 2006 at 8:15 pm
Didn’t we decide this type of thing was a bad idea back in 2003 when Verisign switched on it’s SiteFinder service?
Doesn’t this break the idea of a authoritative nameserver being in control of it’s own TTL value? Folks who wish to propagate changes throughout the Internet will often times lower the TTL for their zone so that the changes will be accepted by “normal” caching servers quicker; while on the flip side, I’m assuming that the “lightning fast speed increases” felt by using OpenDNS is leveraged by caching things longer (i.e. using a forced TTL) to build up the Hugest Cache Ever(tm). But maybe OpenDNS doesn’t work that way?
Same problem would exist for other services, like DNS-based real-time black lists for which you really really don’t want old/cached information. The OpenDNS network may be super awesome, but maybe I kinda need crusty slow lookups from spamcop in order to keep things running properly.
Don’t get me wrong, I am intrigued by this idea, however, I’m just a touch skeptical.