What is OpenDNS and Why Should You Care?

OpenDNS opened it’s doors on Monday, which was a nice birthday present; thank you very much. Why should you care?

DNS, or domain name service, is one of the key underpinnings of the internet to which little attention is paid. It is the service which turns domain names like “cheerfulcurmudgeon.com” and “cnn.com” into addresses of computers.

In the good ol’ days, back when everybody played nice on the internet, DNS was pretty much a non-issue. Now, however, all kinds of miscreants hang out in cyberspace and use DNS to facilitate phishing exploits and typo-squatting. OpenDNS looks to be a powerful tool in combatting these problems.

I switched our home-office/home network to use OpenDNS this morning. I’ll report back in awhile to let you know how it goes. If you want to get started, visit the OpenDNS Get Started page.

If you are a tech weenie, just change your DNS servers to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.

Wired News’ Site-Lookup Service Foils Fraud article nicely explains OpenDNS in more detail.