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Open DNS

OmnutiaOmnutia
edited June 2007 in Technology
[Almost put Open NDS as the title, but hey.]
I watch DL.TV today (episode 176) and they had a bit on the end about Open DNS which is an alternate DNS server designed to be faster and filter out phishing sites and I just tried it out and pages are now loading significantly faster. My connection used to hang for a bit while connecting to a site then load it very quickly but now the whole process is noticeably faster.
haven't come up against the antiphishing yet but I've only been trying it for a few minutes.

What are peoples thoughts on using a somewhat different internet from everyone else and are there any downsides?

Comments

  • AprecheApreche
    No good. DNS is the way it is for a reason. Why screw around with a system that works? Lots of people come up with crazy ideas about how to change this or that technology in order to solve a problem. Usually all they end up doing is breaking things. The way to stop phishing is to have smarter users and things like Firefox's phishing detector. Why break DNS when it's not necessary?
  • CorbinCorbin
    edited June 2007
    How is Open DNS broken?  I don't see what you're trying to say here.  If it works bringing up webpage addresses and matching them to IPs isn't it... not broken?
    Post edited by Rym on
  • OmnutiaOmnutia
    edited June 2007
    Its working well a day later. Speed improvement is good enough to put up with not having the firefox auto find function when you type a word into the address bar. Working to fix this.
    Post edited by Omnutia on
  • RymRym
    Open DNS is pretty useless, and it is indeed broken.  There's no real speed improvement over DNS unless the few DNS servers you're using in the first place happen to be slow.  If you're having performance problems, you should use a different pool of DNS servers or run your own caching local server.
    The real problem with Open DNS is that it tries to solve a high level problem with a low level solution.  DNS is simple, and designed to work in a very specific way.  It's designed to solve one problem: name to ip address mapping.  These people are trying to use it to solve much higher-level problems, problems it was never intended to solve.
    DNS is supposed to be stupid.  It's supposed to just give you the answer to the exact question you ask.  The Internet as a whole is supposed to the stupid.  The intelligence is at the end points: the middle doesn't and shouldn't have the ability to make decisions.  This way software functioning at a higher level can make certain assumptions about the network.
    By using Open DNS, you're using a system that doesn't always do exactly what you ask it to do.  You let it do not what you actually asked, but what it thinks you intended to ask.  It makes assumptions about what you want.  Instead of trusting the bare, open standard, you're trusting these guys running Open DNS.  From the conversations I've had with them in the past, they are not people I terribly want to trust.  Even if they are, what if Open DNS changes hands in the future?
    Phishing is a high-level problem.  It needs a high-level solution.  The low level systems, such as DNS, are too far removed from the problem.  Trying to solve the problem all the way down there is like trying to solve the problem of world hunger by simply passing out food: it doesn't work in the long run.
    I could do an entire show just about specifically why Open DNS is a bad idea.
  • OmnutiaOmnutia
    Well while your at it could you explain how to set up one of these locally hosted DNSs (different to a custom hosts file?)
  • RymRym
    Install Bind
    Run Bind
    Point your PCs DNS resolvers at BIND
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