OpenDNS
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| OpenDNS | |
 |
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| Type | DNS Resolution Service |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2006 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California |
| Key people | David Ulevitch (Founder & CEO) |
| Employees | 10 |
| Website | www.opendns.com |
OpenDNS is a free DNS resolution service.
Contents |
[edit] History
OpenDNS was launched in July 2006 by hacker/entrepreneur David Ulevitch. It received venture capital funding from Minor Ventures, which is led by CNET founder Halsey Minor.
On July 10, 2006, the service was covered by digg[1], Slashdot[2], and Wired News[3], which resulted in an increase of DNS requests from just over one million requests on July 9 to 30 million on July 11.[4].
On October 2, 2006, OpenDNS launched Phishtank, an online collaborative anti-phishing database.
In 2006, OpenDNS began using the DNS Update API from DynDNS to handle updates from users with dynamic IPs -
[edit] Services
OpenDNS offers DNS resolution for consumers and businesses as an alternative to using their Internet service provider's DNS servers. By placing company servers in strategic locations and employing a large cache of the domain names, DNS queries are processed much more quickly, thereby increasing page retrieval speed. DNS query results are sometimes cached by the local operating system and/or applications, so this speed increase may not be noticeable with every request, but only with requests that are not stored in a local cache.
Other features include a phishing filter and typo correction (for example, typing wikipedia.og instead of wikipedia.org). By collecting a list of malicious sites, OpenDNS blocks access to these sites when a user tries to access them through their service. OpenDNS recently launched Phishtank, where users around the world can submit and review suspected phishing sites.
OpenDNS is not, as its name might seem to imply, open source software.
OpenDNS earns a portion of its revenue by displaying advertisements on a search page shown when their system cannot automatically correct a domain name typo. OpenDNS claims it is not the same as Site Finder as it is purely an opt in service and that the advertising revenue pays for the customized DNS service.
According to OpenDNS, additional services that run on top of its enhanced DNS service will be provided, and some of them may cost money[5].
[edit] Criticisms
One of the biggest criticisms is that OpenDNS removes the redundancy that traditional DNS offers. The traditional form of DNS relies on a decentralized collection of servers scattered throughout the world which offers a high level of redundancy. OpenDNS centralizes this system, making it more susceptible to failure.
