A new reason to love OpenDNS: no more ads (2014)

https://www.opendns.com/no-more-ads/

by arunc • 10 years ago

64 34 10 years ago

na852• 10 years ago

And here I was thinking OpenDNS was taking a brave, pioneering step: I thought this was going to be an announcement that they'd be blocking all ad networks at their end.

A web without ads. Too good to be true.

janimo• 10 years ago

That would also be a web without net neutrality.

mholt• 10 years ago

Not really -- using OpenDNS is your choice, not an infrastructure/policy requirement as if they were your ISP.

textmode2• 10 years ago

If I'm not mistaken OpenDNS built their business on blocking websites at the DNS level for certain organizations. This is a "service" their customers paid for.

Redirecting "free" users to ads when they mistype domains was not a "neutral" move either.

na852• 10 years ago

Ah yes, here come the marketers to tell me how much I need them.

bobwaycott• 10 years ago

Thought the same thing. Realized I was wrong. Oh, well. I'll just keep my hosts file updated.

textmode2• 10 years ago

It could be done. I have thought about this many times. Do you want this as a service?

waldfee• 10 years ago

https://pi-hole.net/ does the job well and a is a pretty cheap way to block ads on the whole lan

justinlardinois3• 10 years ago

The OpenDNS Guide was, until recently, a helpful tool. If the website you wanted to visit wasn’t loading, we took you to search results instead of an error page.

Why would anyone ever want to use a service that did that? I guess it's good that they're not doing that anymore, but that's really awful.

amelius• 10 years ago

Well, nowadays in Chrome and probably some other browsers, Google is effectively doing that, i.e., showing suggestions when you make a typo in the address bar while typing.

justinlardinois3• 10 years ago

Doing it at the browser level is a lot more reasonable than at the DNS level.

corobo2• 10 years ago

Not everybody is technical.

justinlardinois3• 10 years ago

You don't have to be technical for that to be undesirable behavior.

chrismorgan• 10 years ago

Three years ago I was at a place in India for a couple of months where OpenDNS was forced: the ISP literally intercepted all DNS queries and fed them through OpenDNS. The absence of NXDOMAIN was really annoying. It easily convinced me that I wouldn’t use OpenDNS by choice while they did that.

To me, this is actually “we’ve fixed the main reason to hate OpenDNS” rather than a new reason to love OpenDNS. I know that others there, non-technical others, also hated the behaviour.

wccrawford• 10 years ago

Yes, it was absolutely horrible and to this day I don't consider using it because of how horrible it was back then.

From the other comments, I see that they actually stopped this horrible practice 2 years ago, and that this news is just out of date. But my thought is that I still wouldn't trust them with my DNS handling after making such a horrible move back then. It was such a major mistake that I have to worry they'll make other bone-headed decisions, too, and I just can't trust them with something that important.

corobo2• 10 years ago

So for you companies can never repent for their sins? I'd be interested in seeing the list of services you do use - I don't know many active companies that haven't had a bad idea somewhere down the line.

davidu• 10 years ago

Founder of OpenDNS here.

No idea how this is on the front page, this is literally years-old news.

We haven't shown ads or done nxdomain redirection for more than two years.

We are, however, probably one of the best and easiest things you can do to raise the bar for user security on the Internet. We're also part of Cisco now[1].

1: https://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?articleId=1...

technion• 10 years ago

I can suggest an answer here.

I just attended a distributor's webinar where this was introduced as a new "Cisco Innovation".

newscracker• 10 years ago

I had to look at the page source to find that there was a meta tag for description stating "As of June 6, 2014, OpenDNS no longer shows ads to users." Unfortunately, there is no indication anywhere on the visible page about the year.

Mods, please add 2014 to the title of this post.

warent• 10 years ago

Congrats!

oijawef• 10 years ago

this shows off really well one of my pet peeves: news/blog pages that don't include the date anywhere

this change is over two years old :|

philsnow• 10 years ago

Apparently bloggers consider this a feature, because they want the content that they are putting to be considered "evergreen", and seeing [2008] on a blog post makes a lot of people bounce right off and discount the whole thing. Well, that's the idea, anyway.

notfoss• 10 years ago

I am not sure why you were downvoted, but that is exactly the reason why many blog posts don't display the post date.

codezero• 10 years ago

This seems a reasonable thread to ask this: I found a weird dns server, conspiracy theory level. If you grok dns and would indulge me, send me an email :)

_jomo• 10 years ago

While this is old news and probably well-intenioned, I don't like anything being blocked out of my control. uBlock works great and shows me what's blocked.

nachtigall• 10 years ago

Using the free OpenDNS FamilyShield for years now: https://support.opendns.com/entries/46060260-FamilyShield-Ro.... Best solution I've found to get some parental blocking of p0rn or similar sites on Ubuntu/Linux.

A new reason to love OpenDNS: no more ads (2014)

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