New(?) Anti-Fraud DNS service

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."

Advantage?

Among its claimed advantages . . . Faster myspace

Anti-fraud or not, someone's getting lied to there.

Adverts?

"Currently, web surfers simple(sic) get an error message when they attempt to navigate to an unused domain. OpenDNS users will instead be routed to a company server that will present a list of search engine results and paid advertisements."

No thanks.

Re:Adverts?

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.

Re:Adverts?

Who's to say this new system won't be abused?

Suspecting abuse in a SiteFinder-like system? You must be joking...

Two words: censorship and advertising. Isn't this everything we want?

Re:Adverts?

Oh, wait. I would forget: add gathering marketing data. They'll learn what are the most commonly mistyped domain names, so they can typosquat them for some extra dough.

Re:Adverts?

Plus trying to get the entire internet to change one of its key components is a rather ambitious attempt.

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].

Re:Adverts?

It doesn't matter. NXDOMAIN response needs to exist for a lot of other reasons that makes the 14 year old myspace user getting an ugly error message over a spammer's search page irrelevant.

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.

Re:Adverts?

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.

The word is "monetization".

This is nothing more than another attempt to make some money off of the basic infrastructure of the Internet. DNS is free right now. And to some people, that means that there is a chance to "monetize" that service.

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.

Now, I am but a lowly programmer

And know little of networking and other sysadmin type subjects, but:

Users who type "wordpres.sorg" or "craigslist.or" into their browser's address field are automatically routed to the correct address, instead of getting a 404 error page.

Since when were DNS lookup failures responded to with HTTP error codes?

Re:Now, I am but a lowly programmer

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).

This must be better

But it has to be better, it has "Open" in its name.

ISP's will start port blocking 53

much in the same way that many now block 25. This will be in reaction to bots that start using a shadow/private DNS built into the bot. I don't see how OpenDNS survives this emerging trend.

Interesting

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

Here is how the faster claim works. Say there is a 150ms round trip between you and your ISP's name server. You computer requests the IP for www.slashdot.org. If you are lucky then www.slashdot.org is in the name server's RAM cache, and you get a fast response in just a little over 150ms. If not (and for the majority of websites, its not) then the name server has to search its disk cache (this is where it is most likely to be. If its still not found, then your ISP's server has to look up slashdot.org with the root servers, and get the name server for that domain, and next it has query the dns server for slashdot.org to find the machine named www. each of these taking more time.

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.

It's just a cacheing DNS service...

Your ISP probably does the same thing already. These guys claim to have a much bigger cache, so they're more likely to have cache hits than misses.

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?

A broken, non standards compliant DNS isnt a better DNS, it's a crippled DNS. The phishing and scamming is more of a social problem than a technical problem. The last thing i want is for some DNS host to filter my queries. The open part of open_dns is a farce. This is a commercial venture trying to make a profit by skirting around well defined standards. OpenDNS will be plagued with problems like people who run the dns getting nice kick backs from scammers to keep domains from being filtered, etc. There will be false blocks by accident etc. OpenDNS would have the ability to push companies and personal sites around. Who knows what the OpenDNS people are catering to. What if they catered to the Christian right, and started blocking non wholesome content, etc. This is a bad idea people. -koft

Re:Better how?

I believe this would qualify as a hack. [catb.org]

Hack
1. n. Originally, a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well.
...

In this case, the real problem is the people behind the scams, but to fix it they're mucking a system that already works beautifully now.

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.

Not going to work

From TFA: "The OpenDNS system, which will open its servers to the public Monday, wants to be a more user-friendly name resolution service than those provided by ISPs, with technology to keep fraudulent sites out of its listings, correct some typos and help browsers look up web pages faster.

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

Ahh, yes - Yet Another Root Domain Name System, like AlterNic.

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.

DNS needs to be dumb, not smart

If people want to filter out bad sites and auto-correct bad URL's then that sounds like a job for a client-side application, not for DNS servers. DNS does one thing and it does it well: it acts like a phonebook for IP addresses. There is no bias in its resolutions. Keep it simple and let it do its job without red tape.

Re:DNS needs to be dumb, not smart

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.

Its basically a DNS server with a big cache

Service is pretty cool for people who can't run Bind (or something similiar). However for those that can, I am guessing its probably just as effective as running a caching only DNS server and maybe Squid to emulate their phishing blocking (assuming you have access to known phishing sites). As a matter of fact, the local version should be even faster (although the cache will obviously be smaller so there is a tradeoff). Off the top of my head, I am not sure how you could do the spell checking. Does Bind have a similiar option?

Until it's available...

Until it's available, I'm going to have an "I'll believe it when I see it" attitude, which, surprisingly, is normally the right thing to do with news like this.

I give it 2 weeks

How long until the service is sued by either

• A user who it fails to block from a phish site, or
• A "legitimate" business that gets blocked?

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!

So using DNS servers that are 23 hops and 170ms away from me is meant to be faster than using ones 4 hops and 5ms away? Think they need some sort of distributed system with servers in every country, and some good peering.

Neither new nor useful

This POS is neither new nor newsworthy nor useful, at least not for the reasons they try to sell it to you for.

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

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.

Re:Neither new nor useful

So true.

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

faster?

I did a quick test:

- DNS query -

- dutch hosted .org -

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 .net -

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.

Early Bird

The OpenDNS system, which will open its servers to the public Monday

I get the feeling Monday will be a good day to go to the beach.

So much negativity!

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. Netcraft has been trying to fight the good fight against phishing and scamming sites for a long time, and here's a group of guys who are really blocking them at the source.

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!

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).

DNS currently sucks...

But this is not the solution. The anti-phishing stuff will be good. The typo stuff seems interesting, but their business model seems to benefit more by not finding the typo. But no different from IE redirecting people to MSN, I guess.

But the extra large cache is going to be a problem. If I'm using DNS to distrbute load its going to screw things up. What if I simply want to change a website to a different server? What if my primary connection goes down so I have point the DNS to a differnt IP?

If you cache stuff too long it makes problems. Anyway, I don't think it takes that long to do a dns lookup anyway, does it?

What we really need is a DNS system that can return multiple IP addresses and a code to indicate how to use them (ie, randomly select one or use the first unless it fails then fallback to the next one). And maybe have some "root" servers which contain only changes, so that servers could check them periodically and know what needs to be updated, and use the cache for everything else. Then we can have load balancing, and DNS servers could safely keep stuff cached for longer periods of time.

Of course, this would require everyone to change their DNS servers and their browsers, so it isn't likely we'll see DNS imrpoved anytime soon.

Re:DNS currently sucks...

If I'm using DNS to distrbute load its going to screw things up. What if I simply want to change a website to a different server? What if my primary connection goes down so I have point the DNS to a differnt IP?

The zone serial number takes care of that. I tested if they mess with the round-robin nature of looking up A records, but that still seems to work just dandy.

The really cool part is ...

they are located next to where the NSA operates its spyware on top of ATT. Hmmmmm, I wonder ...... With a centralized DNS, this will make for a nice way to control the internet.

Personally, I have one word: Next.

Is caching a good thing?

Sites can periodically change their IPs. Is some kind of testing included in the caching app that makes sure that the cached IP numbers still work? And, even if the testing is periodic, will sites that change their IP numbers be broken longer than the usual propagation time of changes?

And they'dk *better* not cache *.homeip.net and *.dyndns.com.....

-b.

More user-friendly?

to be more user-friendly than your ISP's DNS.

How can that be. With my provider I connecet with DHCP and I am done. All I need is my login and my password and ut works. I would love to see how they make it more user-friendly.

And the Weiner is...

...the people who buy this service.

Honestly, I always tell users that DNS is like 411 for computers. Just like people, they don't know someone they've never met before so they need a directory. Hence the raison d'etre for DNS. So if someone handed you the name of a person or business you don't know and says, "call them" but doesn't give you their phone number, what do you do? You either look in your phone book (Caching DNS which COULD be out of date) or... you call 411. Now, how would you like it if some third parties who weren't telcos started selling you "premium 411" service? I didn't think so. That's all this amounts to. You know that when third-parties jump in providing services they have no business providing, both you (the customer) and you (the legitimate DNS provider) are in for trouble. The customers are going to wind up being held hostage by this new premium service should it become lucrative. If the premium DNS service provider decides that it doesn't like the Democratic presidential candidate, they could set up a longer update cycle on those records just in case any last minute DNS changes happen... And the customer, not understanding that their ISP isn't to blame will call the ISP or the IT dept at work and start bitching to them about how "the internet is broken again". I can't really see this taking off anyway. And the concept that this is the way to stop phishers is laughable. I think this story should have been filed under humor. Maybe I'm just getting old at 36...

False sense of security

FTFA: "Those who click on a link in a phishing e-mail that attempts to take them to a fake site and con them into entering their credit card number won't even make it to the website, if OpenDNS knows about it."

A false sense of security is worse than no security at all. "if OpenDNS knows about it" indeed ... so when can the user trust that OpenDNS has successfully caught the phishing attempt, and when should they check that it has failed? The answer is simple; they should perform the same checks WITH OpenDNS as without, except now there will be a whole raft of users who don't know that and the phishing will get worse.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions ...

New way to teach spelling..

Typos are punished with ads :)

Improved system?

I'm sorry. When I think of system I think of daemons. Improvements to the DNS system would be appreciated. Someone to provide me with commercialized redirections and pay per use DNS service doesn't equate to improvement.

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

Your company advocates a

(*) 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!

The *only* relevant question

What would DJB [cr.yp.to] do?

--
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Their "massive" network....

A traceroute from Amsterdam:

raceroute to 208.67.222.222 (208.67.222.222), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
  1 router.openswan.xtdnet.nl (193.110.157.158) 256.697 ms 0.638 ms 0.318 ms
  2 384.ae0.cr1.3d12.xs4all.net (82.94.242.233) 58.937 ms 22.735 ms 41.513 ms
  3 0.so-1-2-0.xr1.3d12.xs4all.net (194.109.5.57) 0.856 ms 0.917 ms 75.493 ms
  4 194.151.244.74 (194.151.244.74) 1.123 ms 2.135 ms 0.767 ms
  5 195.190.233.248 (195.190.233.248) 1.572 ms 1.916 ms 1.542 ms
  6 195.190.233.249 (195.190.233.249) 1.654 ms 2.047 ms 1.504 ms
  7 asd2-rou-1021.NL.eurorings.net (134.222.228.14) 1.318 ms 1.820 ms 1.359 ms
  8 nyk-s1-rou-1001.US.eurorings.net (134.222.231.230) 86.985 ms 87.364 ms 87.055 ms
  9 nyk-s1-rou-1003.US.eurorings.net (134.222.230.98) 87.026 ms 87.584 ms 87.066 ms
10 sl-gw40-nyc-0-0.sprintlink.net (160.81.182.129) 82.005 ms 82.046 ms 81.675 ms
11 sl-bb20-nyc-3-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.13.51) 82.030 ms 82.309 ms 81.963 ms
12 204.255.174.225 (204.255.174.225) 83.129 ms 83.374 ms 82.873 ms
13 0.ge-5-0-0.XL4.NYC4.ALTER.NET (152.63.3.117) 83.387 ms 83.487 ms 83.134 ms
14 0.so-6-0-0.XL2.NYC4.ALTER.NET (152.63.20.214) 83.444 ms 83.459 ms 83.202 ms
15 POS7-0.GW2.NYC4.ALTER.NET (152.63.19.225) 83.602 ms 83.376 ms 83.120 ms
16 splicetelecom-NewYork-gw.customer.alter.net (157.130.14.214) 83.863 ms 83.907 ms 83.902 ms
17 resolver1.opendns.com (208.67.222.222) 86.260 ms 86.110 ms 88.797 ms

It doesnt seem to actually terminate somewhere in Europe at all.

Traceroute from Canada:

  1 brick (209.112.44.1) 0.195 ms 0.108 ms 0.107 ms
  2 216.191.140.37 (216.191.140.37) 1.169 ms 1.047 ms 0.986 ms
  3 syn (216.13.88.149) 667.916 ms 630.618 ms 602.319 ms
  4 fe11-0-0.hcap2-tor.bb.allstream.net (216.191.48.1) 648.830 ms 621.588 ms 659.484 ms
  5 srp2-0.gwy1-chi.bb.allstream.net (199.212.160.243) 726.753 ms 654.081 ms 599.996 ms
  6 POS5-0.GW5.CHI1.ALTER.NET (157.130.115.117) 656.960 ms 769.177 ms 793.922 ms
  7 0.so-1-0-0.XL1.CHI1.ALTER.NET (152.63.70.78) 854.671 ms 26.646 ms 121.226 ms
  8 0.so-3-1-0.XL1.NYC4.ALTER.NET (152.63.1.50) 35.634 ms 53.774 ms 48.509 ms
  9 POS6-0.GW2.NYC4.ALTER.NET (152.63.19.221) 36.545 ms 175.197 ms 141.500 ms
10 splicetelecom-NewYork-gw.customer.alter.net (157.130.14.214) 224.545 ms 651.278 ms 553.703 ms
11 resolver1.opendns.com (208.67.222.222) 613.281 ms 645.959 ms 678.715 ms

Not too good either. And they both end at the same server, wit hthe same ip and similar hops, so it doesn't look like it is anycast at all.

And no mentioning whatsoever on how they blacklist typo/squat/phishing DNS.

I'll put my trust in my ISP now, and in DNSSEC in the near future.

A problem in search of a vector

It's a good thing this is dead in the water. Too few people care or are aware of the problem for a commercial product to provide any kind of solution. Plus, if the marketing material is accurate, it's already flawed.

• Safer - helps prevent identity theft and warns against phishing attempts
• Faster - speeds up your existing internet connection
• Smarter - corrects spelling mistakes on the fly

The first bullet is a dubious claim, the second one is clearly bullshit, and the third one makes a mess of bullet one by making it certain people will end up at a site they didn't intend to go to. I hope someone loses a lot of money on this, because they deserve to.

Nipples!

This thing reminds me of a problem I had recently with my sailboat and certain vendors of boat gear. My fresh water pump was running continuously instead of on-demand when a faucet was opened, and after checking all the plumbing I determined there were no leaks or air in the system which would cause the pressure to drop and the sensor on the pump to turn it on. With all other causes but the pump eliminated, I decided to replace the pump. Pull out the old SHURflo pump and went to West Marine. The only SHURflo models they had were washdown pumps or bait pumps (no pressure switch, no on-demand). So I bought a Jabsco variable speed fresh water pump and took it back to the boat. This is where I got really mad.

The Jabsco pump did not have threaded sockets for nipples on the inlet and outlet ports. Instead, machined into the fucking pump body were receptacles for Jabsco's own design for a snap-in o-ring fitting (and a traditional nipple or barb on the other end to attach to your plumbing). I'm thinking WTF! How many times to they expect me to connect and disconnect this fitting! Is the pump that bad, that they expect I'll have to replace it often enough to warrant a quick-connect fitting? WTF is wrong with a nipple and teflon tape, you know, the kind that's been in use almost since the invention of plumbing for pity's sake! The fiting is locked in place by sliding plastic collars that engage a groove round the body. On the pump the collars or tabs are captive. But on the accumulator tank that I also bought they are loose. Keep in mind this stuff is installed under the galley sink on a boat where one usually has to go through some mild contortions in order to dangle oneself upside down in the space. Nice job, dickwads, I hope I don't drop one into the fucking bilge, you idiots!

And if I am cruising in Mexico, I bet I can't find any of these proprietary fittings anywhere, should I need to replace one. I have no idea how sound the connection is, and whether it will hold together in rough seas. Furthermore, they only gave me elbows, no straights, and my existing plumping (inflexible QEFT tubing) was run through to attach to a straight fitting. So to install this pump as provided would have required some replumbing of my galley, which was out of the question foir such a simple job as replacing a pump. If I didn't like how the galley was plumbed I'd have no problem tearing it out and redoing it, but there's nothing wrong. Thoroughly disgusted, I put it back in the box and went to another West Marine store to exchange it for a SHURflo model. I bet you can see the end of this story coming. The new SHURflo models also had quick disconnect fittings on the pump ports - and they were different from and not compatible with the Jabsco fittings. I'm pretty much out of marine pump vendors now - those two are it. I kept the Jabsco after all and installed it. Went back to West Marine to buy some spare fittings. Guess what? They don't stock them. So now I get to figure out who has them. Jabsco doesn't sell direct.

I hope one of Jabsco's product designers (I can't call them engineers now) Googles this post some day while taking a break from dreaming up the next marine plumbing disaster. I mean really - WTF was wrong with nipples? Nothing! They were simple, reliable and easy to get and easy to install. And nothing is wrong with DNS, unless you install this JabscoDNS thing we're talking about.

*sucks not resolving anymore?

If OpenDNS can refuse to resolve typosquatters, would it also refuse to resolve other names, like *sucks upon request?

On another note, ICMP replies don't carry advertisement either. Someone taking care of that finally? :)

breaking DNS

Current beta testers, pulled from the EveryDNS.net, are also begging OpenDNS to redirect clear typos, such as "wikepedia.org" (instead of "wikipedia.org"), away from typo-squatters who set up pages with advertising to cash-in on errant keystrokes, something Ulevitch seems game to implement.

So if I want to visit a domain that is close to a big domain, I'm likely to get redirected?

It sounds more like he is breaking DNS, in ways that may make it more helpful for some people.

Re:oingo.com is the source of much typo squatting

That's not uncommon when doing a search for an actual domain name on google. Try searching on just "oingo".

Re:oingo.com is the source of much typo squatting

Try the Google search with "oingo.com" surrounded by doublequotes. You'll see plenty of results.

Re:oingo.com is the source of much typo squatting

I did a search for oingo on google and yahoo and got a pretty much identical list.

The home page redirects to "applied semmantics" which prodly boasts of being bought by google.

Whats your beef?

 

Re:Didn't RTFA...

OpenDNS has been around for YEARS. The original reason it was made had nothing to do with any of this, it was so that members could vote to add new root domains that would have never been added to the "official" DNS servers. It was an end run around ICANN, basically. There are very few restrictions on OpenDNS on what can be added, and it's all voted on by the members. I actually tried using OpenDNS for awhile, but I had problems with it. There just weren't enough servers, and those that were there went down frequently. They acted as a relay to the "real" DNS as well, so you could resolve .com, .net, .org, etc. But after the 5th DNS outage in a month, I finally set BIND on my server to hit the root servers again instead of OpenDNS. The service just wasn't reliable enough. These goals that are being mentioned in this article have absolutely nothing to do with what OpenDNS was supposed to be about. Either TFA is BS written by a media drone who has no clue what's going on, or OpenDNS has radically changed its goals since I last used it a year ago. I hope for their sake that it's the former.

Re:Didn't RTFA...

OpenNIC is a totally different organization. They are an alternate root. We're (OpenDNS.com) not anything close.

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