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New(?) Anti-Fraud DNS service
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Jul 10, 2006 08:00 AM
from the does-it-actually-work dept.
from the does-it-actually-work dept.
knownsense writes "A new DNS system to foil spammers, abusers, and other ills of the Internet is around the corner, reports Wired. It claims to be more user-friendly than your ISP's DNS. Among its claimed advantages . . . Faster myspace(!?), coordination with spamhaus, and typo-squatter squashing. The actual service is called OpenDNS."
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Advantage? (Score:5, Funny)
Anti-fraud or not, someone's getting lied to there.
Adverts? (Score:5, Insightful)
No thanks.
Re:Adverts? (Score:5, Insightful)
Second that.
Plus trying to get the entire internet to change one of its key components is a rather ambitious attempt.
The guy even admits that the current phishing and scamming attempts are a social problem, not a technological one. Who's to say this new system won't be abused?
I'll save my enthusiasm for something else.
Parent
Re:Adverts? (Score:5, Insightful)
Suspecting abuse in a SiteFinder-like system? You must be joking...
Two words: censorship and advertising. Isn't this everything we want?
Parent
Re:Adverts? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Adverts? (Score:5, Informative)
This is not to replace the "entire internet" with a new DNS system. From my read of their website, it is a individual choice to set up your computer using their DNS servers. And they are being very clear about how their servers will behave and what they will do with incorrectly typed addresses. This is from the same guys who have been running one of the most reliable free DNS services, everydns [everydns.net].
Parent
Re:Adverts? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't care if he's the queen mother pope jesus vishnu all in one. What the guy is proposing is fucking stupid.
Stop fucking with DNS. Gimme a friggin IP when I query with a hostname. Gimmie a hostname when I query an IP. STOP THERE. THAT'S IT. NOTHING MORE TO SEE.
If something more "friendly" needs to happen, it needs to happen at the application layer instead.
Parent
Re:Adverts? (Score:3, Informative)
Today, our users cover our OPEX and almost all our CAPEX.
-david
Re:Adverts? (Score:5, Funny)
Agreed. I enjoy how users are 'protected' from phising/spam/advertising by this service by getting more ads! It's like pushing someone out of the way of a speeding car and then punching them in the face.
Parent
Re:Adverts? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Adverts? New? (Score:2)
The word is "monetization". (Score:5, Insightful)
But how to turn a profit from something that's being given away for free right now?
You'd have to offer some additional incentives. Like "phishing blocking" or claiming that a popular website would "load faster".
As far as I know, the DNS resolution has never been the problem for MySpace loading slowly. It's slow because so many other people are hitting their servers and bandwidth. And since Win2K, Microsoft has included a caching DNS app so once you do hit MySpace, you've cached the address on your workstation. You can't get much faster than that.
Parent
Re:Adverts? (Score:3, Insightful)
I *WANT* users to see a "oops, you fucked up" page when they mistype a URL. That is what tells them they screwed up. What I don't want to happen is for them to go to some domain-park search display with ads and crap that have nothing to do with my site,
Now, I am but a lowly programmer (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when were DNS lookup failures responded to with HTTP error codes?
Re:Now, I am but a lowly programmer (Score:5, Insightful)
He was probably referring to the fact that Internet Explorer, by default, shows "friendly" HTTP and DNS error messages, such as "This page cannot be displayed."
That part was definitely written incorrectly, but we all know what he meant (I hope).
Parent
Re:Now, I am but a lowly programmer (Score:3, Informative)
I was under the impression that Wired was relatively technical; perhaps I was wrong. (I've never actually read it, so I could well be)
Re:Now, I am but a lowly programmer (Score:3, Insightful)
In a nutshell: yes, you are wrong. And you haven't really missed much.
Wired occasionally has something worth reading, but most of it is just fluff and ads for expensive toys. I stopped taking it seriously years ago. Articles like this remind me why.
Re:Now, I am but a lowly programmer (Score:3, Insightful)
And what happens when someone registers wordpres.org? Then where are we? Well, I meant wordpres, not wordpress.. Thanks for sending me where I don't want to be.. A haven for phishers?
Re:Now, I am but a lowly programmer (Score:3, Informative)
Google does this with the "I'm feeling lucky" button. A lot of people use this or use google to type in addresses instead of the url bar, beacause it is far more user freindly. Errors are not always good user interface design.
And what happens when
This must be better (Score:5, Funny)
Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
The main advantage appears to be that they will prevent you from opening known phising sites. In terms of being faster, I'm not sure how they would be faster than my ISP since my ISP's DNS servers are presumably much closer to my machine than theirs. Any idea how they could make claims like that? Also, though the summary mentions foiling spammers, I saw nothing about that in the article. From the sound of the post, I thought this was something like SPF [openspf.org] even though that doesnt seem to be the case at all.
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
I presume what they do is have machines with loads of RAM (how many dns entries could you keep in say 4GB anyway?) and try to serve as many requests as possible from a RAM cache rather than disk cache. Thats my guess anyway.
Parent
It's just a cacheing DNS service... (Score:4, Insightful)
They also offer ads & search results for non-existent domains, and they claim they will filter out phishing sites.
Not really a big deal though even on a cache miss, a DNS query doesn't take that long.
Better how? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Better how? (Score:4, Interesting)
But in the end, no one is being forced to use it. This won't have any affect on the current system, so whomever they "cater to" won't matter to the overwhelming majority of people who stick with vanilla DNS.
Parent
Not going to work (Score:3, Informative)
These are such lofty claims that I doubt they will be able to live up to them. I like the idea that competitive services will appear, but if that happens I believe that OpenDNS will be a big loser.
Ahh, yes, YARDNS (Score:4, Insightful)
One that also does redirection in the case of an invalid domain name, thus breaking code (like mail servers) that rely upon being able to detect bogus domains.
One that requires users to change their DNS settings, with all the attendant breakage and difficulties for troubleshooting.
One that will ALSO load down the upstream DNS servers, since the users won't be using their ISP's name servers.
And I am sure their policy of blocking spammy sites' resolution will sit very well with the Slashdot Zeitgeist.
Yes, I am sure this will be a spectacular success, just like AlterNIC is.
Re:Ahh, yes, YARDNS (Score:3, Insightful)
From their FAQ: Is OpenDNS a root nameserver? [opendns.com]: "No. OpenDNS is a recursive nameserver. OpenDNS software talks to the root nameservers when necessary."
Only on slashdot could you be completely wrong and Insightful at the same time.
DNS needs to be dumb, not smart (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:DNS needs to be dumb, not smart (Score:5, Funny)
that sounds like a job for a client-side application
Yeah, my buddy turned me on to this great FREE program called Cool Web Search . . . it keeps track of all of my passwords too!
On another note -- does anyone know why my PC runs so slow now? I think there's something wrong with my Yahoo.
Parent
Its basically a DNS server with a big cache (Score:3, Informative)
I give it 2 weeks (Score:4, Interesting)
Its one thing to supply facts, but this service is editorializing DNS. I think they are leaving themselves open to attack based on their choices.
servers too far away! (Score:4, Insightful)
Neither new nor useful (Score:5, Insightful)
An alternative-root DNS system will never work (since Critical Mass is impossible to attain).
Myspace will not get faster. Whoever made you believe that is selling snake oil, too.
In fact, your DNS will actually slow down by a good bit; at least if you belong to the majority of the world (unlike root DNS servers, which actually deliver geographical and network dispersion). The big cache they are so proud of will create lots of problems if they actually do it differently from regular DNS resolver caches that you have at every major (and minor) ISP -- and those will be a lot closer to you than OpenDNS ever will.
Fixing typos is a double-edged blade. Sure it's nice if slashdo.torg works. How about whitehouse.gom, though ? And who decides that microsaft.com is really typo-squatter ? (They might just make nice juices !)
Their business model is funny, too. They sell advertisement for search pages in case they can't figure out where you want to go. This is hilarious, really. The selling point is that it can send you to the right page when you make a typo, but not figuring out what a typo was supposed to mean makes them more money. Hrrm. The better they become at their game, the less money they get ! Brilliant !
(Not to mention that this is precisely what got Verizon into hot water with their SiteFinder crap).
How on earth will OpenDNS stem the tides of spam ? Even IF it had a chance doing that purely with DNS, if it was relevant at all Spammers would find a way to make it inconsequential.
Last, but not least, their company is small. There is no oversight. I don't know whether I want to trust a group of 20 people to decide who is an abuser and who is not. I'd rather have hundreds of parties involved in the process, providing a stable balance to one another. (Fun scenario : OpenDNS gets bought out by DirectRevenue.com, starts redirecting EVERY DNS request to their own servers, encasing every website with a nice adbar. Oops. (points for doing it after attaining critical mass).
Re:Neither new nor useful (Score:5, Interesting)
This POS is neither new nor newsworthy nor useful, at least not for the reasons they try to sell it to you for.
Well, to be fair, you're responding to the article and not the service. But I'm going to go through and answer each of your points because this post seems to cover a lot of the really important topics.
An alternative-root DNS system will never work (since Critical Mass is impossible to attain).
I couldn't agree with you more and we are *NOT* an alternate root. If you are using our service, you are using the real ICANN assigned roots. Period. Full Stop.
OpenDNS is new particularly because of how we do what we do. We have built a recursive nameservice. That means that we are making the changes only for a client and not for the entire Internet. The article, while good at trying to cover a hard topic, fails to mention that not only are we opt-in but we can set preferences for different users.
So if you don't want us catching typos, we won't. If you just want straight, normal DNS that's just using a bigger and faster cache, that's just fine by us. We aren't going to mess with you later for deciding that you just want a more reliable DNS. But when you setup your neighbor or mom or brother or friend you might decide they are better off with an added layer of security. The choice is, of course, yours and always will be.
Myspace will not get faster. Whoever made you believe that is selling snake oil, too.
First, MySpace is just an example, of course. It does like 10 DNS requests on the homepage loading web,ad,image server FQDNs. But to respond, empirical evidence thus far (from really smart people) would disagree with that statement. Hopefully we'll have some good and more scientifically grounded data soon. If you want to help out with that, let me know.
In fact, your DNS will actually slow down by a good bit; at least if you belong to the majority of the world (unlike root DNS servers, which actually deliver geographical and network dispersion). The big cache they are so proud of will create lots of problems if they actually do it differently from regular DNS resolver caches that you have at every major (and minor) ISP -- and those will be a lot closer to you than OpenDNS ever will.
Most resolvers tend to churn through their cache long before TTLs expire so what you're saying isn't exactly true. In many instances most recursive DNS servers toss out a bunch of glue that is consistently being re-fetched. While it's important to respect TTLs (and we absolutely do), it's also important to keep stuff in your cache to get the benefit of the TTL that was set by the zone owner. That's not happening and that's making your DNS not perform well. And it's more than just adding more ram to the system. DNS is 20 years old and it's now a quite critical piece of infrastructure. It's beautiful in many ways, but one way in which it isn't is with how resolvers work. Really, nobody has ever spent much time working on making a killer resolver until recently.
Fixing typos is a double-edged blade. Sure it's nice if slashdo.torg works. How about whitehouse.gom, though ? And who decides that microsaft.com is really typo-squatter ? (They might just make nice juices !)
We don't redirect typos like that. We have a ton of requests to do that, but we don't yet for exactly the reason you point out. It's a tough road to go down, and if we do it, it'll be a preference you set with a little checkbox or something. Not a choice I should be making for you. Our goal is to empower you to control what used to be this black box of a memory structure in a DNS server and add some transparency to it for you. That was lost a bit in the article as it focused mostly on the security aspects of our service but there's more; much more.
Their business model is funny, too.
Parent
Re:Neither new nor useful (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Neither new nor useful (Score:4, Informative)
What happens is nobody has tried the service that's posting this stuff. There's so much misinformation it's hard to know where to start. But I think the best thing I can say is this:
People at EveryDNS have been using my services for years. We're one of the largest and most free services on the Internet. We've stood up to lawsuits from assholes like Diebold and others in the past in the name of our users. I wouldn't ever scam or do that nasty stuff this thread is saying I would. I have an open email, open door, and open phone policy. I am me, and there's a good amount of clue behind me, and even smarter people around me.
So when I say this service is not going to spy on you or tell your parent that you look at porn, I'm serious. Read our privacy policy and know that we use the service too.
Here's the last thing, These can all be preferences. People that don't want typo's caught or other things can have a preference set that gives them just a better and more optimized DNS. When people ask us about our privacy policies I ask you, what does your ISP do? I mean, ATT just said they own all your data and they're being accused of working with the government to spy on you. We don't do that.
Check it out,
David Ulevitch
Parent
Re:Neither new nor useful (Score:3, Insightful)
faster? (Score:5, Informative)
- DNS query -
- dutch hosted
opendns
Query time: 1228 msec - they have to query upstream
Query time: 261 msec
Query time: 192 msec
Query time: 192 msec
Query time: 193 msec
my isp
Query time: 74 msec - they have to query upstream
Query time: 29 msec
Query time: 30 msec
Query time: 29 msec
Query time: 29 msec
- us hosted
opendns
Query time: 380 msec - they have to query upstream
Query time: 192 msec
Query time: 193 msec
Query time: 193 msec
Query time: 193 msec
my isp
Query time: 184 msec - they have to query upstream
Query time: 29 msec
Query time: 30 msec
Query time: 29 msec
Query time: 29 msec
- Ping test -
Ping to open dns: 192ms
Ping to my isp: 29ms
- Conclusion -
The dns repsonse is the same as the ping so they will never get faster then my isp.
So much negativity! (Score:3, Insightful)
I applaud their efforts, while it may not be for me, I think a lot of people are going to find it very useful.
Re:So much negativity! (Score:5, Informative)
I can understand why slashdot geeks wouldn't want their DNS servers messed with, I'm among you, however most of the internet users out there aren't nearly as computer literate as we are, and this service I believe would be really good for them.
Most internet users don't know or care what a DNS server is. For this to succeed you need to capture the hearts and minds of the ISPs. Luckily for them, ISPs are very concerned about DNS right now as it is critical, somewhat vulnerable, and they are lacking visibility into it. Unluckily for them, the entrenched players have all started jumping on this and providing real solutions. Why block all requests to a DNS name when legitimate researchers and security people might need to get there? What about when a cracked server that still hosts legitimate content as well? what about when the FQD is a forum with 99% legitimate traffic and 1% worms and phishing?
This solution is a shotgun where a scalpel is needed. Block worm traffic as detected by the DNS request, not all traffic to that domain. Also, contrary to what people seem to be thinking here, the main DNS issue is not worms or phishing (ISPs don't care that much) but they do care about large chunks of their traffic to the DNS servers coming from misconfigured servers repeatedly querying them. Since, in many cases, these servers are their own, blocking them with a fancy, broken DNS server is not the best plan. Redirecting other ISPs' server to an ad a million times a day will not yield any long-term profit (since no person sees them) Rather, fixing their own servers and notifying others/filtering at the peering edge is the way to go. Since ISPs are now able to do that, I foresee a large yawn when operators see OpenDNS (what a misleading name, kind of like OpenXML).
Parent
False sense of security (Score:3, Insightful)
A false sense of security is worse than no security at all. "if OpenDNS knows about it" indeed
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions
Improved system? (Score:3, Informative)
Sites providing free email without protecting their URIz with spf protection is what needs to be fixed. This would help to kill spammers pretending to be google, yahoo, aol, et al.
For a real improvement in DNS use spf http://www.openspf.org/ [openspf.org] and urge others to use it too.
Checklist (Score:3, Funny)
(*) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Re:Didn't RTFA... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Didn't RTFA... (Score:4, Informative)
We're about giving you control over your recursive DNS, something you should want. If you don't want us catching typos for you, that's fine. Just check out our FAQ [opendns.com] and learn a bit more.
-david
Parent
Re:DNS currently sucks... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:DNS currently sucks... (Score:3, Informative)
RFC 2782 [ietf.org]. I quote:
It doesn't require any DNS infrastructure changes, but clients nee
Re:ISP's will start port blocking 53 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is caching a good thing? (Score:3, Informative)
That they cache data isn't really that noteworthy, its more them calling attention to it in their marketing more than anything else. Perhaps they have configured their servers to support a very large cache, so that it doesnt have to delete anything until the TTL does call f