OpenDNS
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| OpenDNS | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Type | DNS Resolution Service |
| Founded | 2006 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California |
| Key people | David Ulevitch (Founder & CEO) |
| Employees | 12 |
| Website | www.opendns.com |
OpenDNS is a free DNS resolution service. It provides the following two recursive nameserver addresses for public use, mapped to the nearest operational server location by Anycast routing:
- 208.67.222.222 (resolver1.opendns.com)
- 208.67.220.220 (resolver2.opendns.com)
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, Slashdot, and Wired News, which resulted in an increase of DNS requests from just over one million requests on July 9 to 30 million on July 11.[citation needed]
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.[1]
Since January 2007, OpenDNS provides geographically distributed servers in Seattle, Palo Alto, New York, Washington, D.C., London, with planned expansions to Chicago and Hong Kong.
On June 11, 2007, OpenDNS started advanced web filtering to optionally block adult content for their free accounts.
[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 usually processed much more quickly[2], 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 sending the user to an OpenDNS search page when a domain name that the user has entered is not valid. Advertisements are displayed on this search page to help fund the operations of OpenDNS. While this behavior is similar to VeriSign's previous Site Finder, OpenDNS states that it is not the same, as OpenDNS is purely an opt-in service (compared to Site Finder's effect on the entire Internet, as VeriSign is an authoritative registry operator)[3] and that the advertising revenue pays for the customized DNS service[4].
According to OpenDNS, additional services that run on top of its enhanced DNS service will be provided, and some of them may cost money[4].
One example of such an added service was the company's April 22, 2007 launch[5] of "shortcuts", letting users make custom DNS mappings, such as mapping "mail" to "mail.yahoo.com". This feature launch was covered by a large number of publications, including the New York Times[6], Wired[7], and PC World[8].
On December 3, 2007, OpenDNS began offering DNS-O-Matic, a free service, to provide a method of sending dynamic DNS updates to several Dynamic DNS providers utilizing DynDNS's update API.[9]
[edit] Privacy issues and covert redirection
While OpenDNS is currently a free service, people have complained about how the service handles failed requests. If a domain cannot be found, the service redirects you to a search page with search results and advertising provided by Yahoo. This can be switched off via the OpenDNS Control Panel [10].
There is also a large privacy concern about sharing your DNS requests with any third-party. Normally DNS requests are handled by the ISP, which already has access to all of your data going upstream through your connection. When using OpenDNS, the DNS requests go through this new third-party company, which exposes you to potential tracking of your web activity by the OpenDNS company.[1]
Covert redirection of search engine requests; A user's search requests sent to Google may be covertly redirected to a web server owned by OpenDNS without the user's consent.[11][12]This is done by returning false results to DNS lookups, so that, for example, a lookup of www.google.co.uk actually returns the address of a server google.navigation.opendns.com. This means that users' searches are potentially monitored by OpenDNS infrastructure.
[edit] Conflicts
Various people received a Spyware warning when trying to visit Google or perform Google search.[2] This issue is being addressed in the official forums. [3]
Also, the service resolves certain requests to google.com, to reverse what it considers interference by what it claims is Spyware installed on to certain Dell computers (an Internet Explorer toolbar that redirects mistyped domain names to Google searches). Some of the traffic is handled by OpenDNS themselves, and the rest is transparently passed through to the intended recipient[13].
Other users have found themselves unable to access secure and appropriate websites such as alternative media[citation needed].
[edit] Server locations
[edit] Current
[edit] Planned
According to their Network map, September, 2007:
[edit] See also
- ORSN – Open Root Server Network (with DNS resolution service, too)
- OpenNIC – OpenNIC (http://www.opennicproject.org)
[edit] References
- ^ OpenDNS > Support > Knowledge Base > Dynamic IP: General Info
- ^ Neowin.net - OpenDNS: What's Your Take?
- ^ OpenDNS knowledge base: OpenDNS is not like Site Finder
- ^ a b OpenDNS knowledge base: How does OpenDNS make money?
- ^ OpenDNS Blog, shortcut the web
- ^ NYT, A shortcut to your web destination
- ^ Wired, OpenDNS offers keyword browsing shortcuts
- ^ PCworld, OpenDNS adds browser shortcuts to free service
- ^ OpenDNS Announces DNS-O-Matic: Free Service to Simplify Residential ISP and Small Businesses' Dynamic DNS Service
- ^ OpenDNS Control Panel
- ^ Prevent OpenDNS from Redirecting Google Search Queries
- ^ OpenDNS Blog » Google turns the page… in a bad way
- ^ OpenDNS Blog » Google turns the page… in a bad way.
[edit] External links
- Official website
- ComputerWorld article, ''Hack DNS for lightning-fast Web browsing''
