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OpenDNS

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OpenDNS
Company typeDNS Resolution Service
Founded2006
HeadquartersSan Francisco, California
Key people
David Ulevitch (Founder & CEO)
Number of employees
10
Websitewww.opendns.com

OpenDNS is a free DNS resolution service. It provides the following two recursive nameservers for public use:

  • 208.67.222.222 (Resolver1.OpenDNS.com)
  • 208.67.220.220 (Resolver2.OpenDNS.com)

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[1], Slashdot[2], and Wired News[3], which resulted in an increase of DNS requests from just over one million requests on July 9 to 30 million on July 11.[4].

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.[5]

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 11th, 2007, OpenDNS started advanced web filtering to block adult content for their free accounts.

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 processed much more quickly[citation needed], 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.

File:OpenDNS-Blocked-page.PNG
A screenshot of a 'phishing blocked' page

OpenDNS is not, as its name might seem to imply, open source software.

OpenDNS earns a portion of its revenue by displaying advertisements on a search page shown when their system cannot automatically correct a domain name typo. OpenDNS claims it is not the same as Site Finder as OpenDNS is purely an opt-in service and that the advertising revenue pays for the customized DNS service.[citation needed]

According to OpenDNS, additional services that run on top of its enhanced DNS service will be provided, and some of them may cost money[6].

One example of such an added service was their April 22, 2007 launch[7] 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[8], Wired[9], and PC World[10].

References

  1. ^ Digg Article
  2. ^ Slashdot Article
  3. ^ Wired Article
  4. ^ OpenDNS stats page
  5. ^ http://www.opendns.com/account/dynamic_dns.php
  6. ^ OpenDNS F.A.Q.
  7. ^ OpenDNS Blog, shortcut the web
  8. ^ NYT, A shortcut to your web destination
  9. ^ Wired, OpenDNS offers keyword browsing shortcuts
  10. ^ PCworld, OpenDNS adds browser shortcuts to free service
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