Wednesday, September 20, 2006

No phishing allowed

I ran across the OpenDNS.org service the other day from some technology video podcast where David Ulevitch (founder of OpenDNS) was being interviewed about it. You simply set the DNS in your router (or on your PC) to the following two addresses:

  • 208.67.222.222
  • 208.67.220.220
Then, whenever you attempt to access a phishing (scam) site, it will instead give you a message that the site you attempted to access was a phishing site.

This service will also correct obvious typos in your URL which can be handy too.

They also claim to be a faster DNS because the have "a really big, smart cache" and are "geographically distributed", however I don't see how accessing their regional server can be faster than the local DNS on your ISP network, but I'm currently using this service and it's plenty fast.

1 comment:

John Roberts said...

Steven, thanks for choosing OpenDNS.

You asked how OpenDNS http://www.opendns.com can be faster than your local ISP, and I want to explain.

There are two parts to DNS speed.

The first is network latency -- how close are you, network-wise, to the servers? Your ISP may have an edge here (they should, but don't always), but we've put our servers around the US (with London, England next) to make sure we get as close as possible to you (not sure where you are, geographically).

The second part of the mix is software speed & cache size. OpenDNS shines in this area, and that's why we're usually faster even if we're a few milliseconds further away on the network.

Cheers,

John Roberts
OpenDNS