New FREE Service to speed web pages, block ads & phishing

[Rover]

This is way cool.  A nice idea and it works pretty well.

http://news.com.com/DNS+service+promises+safer%2C+faster+browsing/2100-7355_3-6092980.html?tag=nefd.top

OpenDNS says its free address-lookup service makes Web sites load faster, and that it blocks malicious, data-thieving phishing schemes and other threats. Furthermore, the service corrects obvious typos in URLs, sending people to the site they intended to visit, it says.

To pay for it, though, the company serves up ads and a search page, instead of an error page, if the user enters a Web address that doesn't exist or can't be corrected. The approach is similar one used in an unpopular VeriSign service called Site Finder, which was pulled soon after its launch in 2003.

-CNet News

http://www.opendns.com

[mouser]

interesting idea..

[kimmchii]

thank you, i will give it a try.

[app103]

That search page, when a page won't load or can't be found, is the most annoying feature (and probably the only annoying feature I have found so far) in the AOL Explorer browser.

[jgpaiva]

I guess this service could be almost perfect. Using opera, one could blobk the address of the page and wouldn't get it again!
(or would it be that that address page is not product of a redirection but has the address one typed?)

[housetier]

I am using OpenDNS for two days as of this writing. I haven't experienced anything surprising. There were not glitches, all sites that I want to reach I can reach.

As for the promised speed up: I am not so sure about that, but I also have not really paid attention nor have I run timing tests.

What can I say: It works, it works well!

[mouser]

can i just say that i got a helpfull phone call and email and follow up advice from opendns to help us improve our nameservers.. i guess you can count me an opendns.com fan now too 

[housetier]

Regarding this:

can i just say that i got a helpfull phone call and email and follow up advice from opendns to help us improve our nameservers..

-mouser (July 18, 2006, 03:27 AM)

I meant to post this yesterday, but I forgot. I contacted them via their contact form and informed them about the issues rover and I had with opendns.com not correctly resolving donationcoder.com. A few days (1? 2?) later they replied. It was a short reply, but it was not automated.

We have someone looking at this site's DNS and how it's set... they do some strange things, and we're looking at our code to see if we need some better error handling.

John Roberts
VP of Product
OpenDNS  http://www.opendns.com/

> It seems that the IP for donationcoder.com is not correct. 72.36.247.86 is the right one, while the resolved IP 208.67.219.40 leads \"nowhere\", well at least not to dc.com
>
> This discrepancy has been confirmed by other users of both donationcoder and opendns.

-opendns.com product service

They took this complaint seriously and responded. I like that!

[f0dder]

opendns... yay. As in, NO FRIGGING WAY!

Ping time to opendns.com - ~200ms
Ping to my ISP DNS server - ~30ms.

I bet my ISP has at least as big a cache as OpenDNS has, so no gains there, only slower response time. If OpenDNS does more agressive caching than the RFCs allow, they'll break stuff (at best just make DNS propagation slower than it already is).

And what's with the whole "fix typos" thing? Who decides whether a domain name is a typo or not? (hmm, they're ad financed... I wonder who decides...)

Also, some software depends on getting a "domain not found" instead of a bloody search page. And I'd be really unhappy about a search page myself, smells too much of adware.

 

[mouser]

balanced interesting take from crunchnotes:
http://www.crunchnotes.com/?p=238