Re: Open DNS

[xiando <xiando@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> I read an article from LH this morning about the OpenDNS service.
>
> http://tinyurl.com/24y2cn
> http://www.opendns.com/
>
> Can I use this with Tor? Will that void any anonymity provided by Tor?
> Forgive me if this is a stupid question.

I call SCAM. Yes. SCAM, I tell you. This isn't really Tor related, so I'll 
keep it short. In bullet summary, we know:

Their nameservers are:

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

At first blush their service may seem plausible. However, try them and visit 
something like www.akljfdlkajdfasfd.com, which takes you to:
http://guide.opendns.com/?url=www.akljfdlkajdfasfd.com

I'm sorry, but if I try a non-existing domain then I prefer to be informed 
that the domain can not be found. OpenDNS will tell you "Sure, there's a 
website called whateveryoutrytoresolve.com, here's the IP, and you should go 
visit that site and view all these advertisements we've put up there".

Further, their nameservers really aren't all that fast. I've got 50ms ping to 
them and it takes them 345 ms to resolve a domain. They do cache, so if you 
lookup the same name twice then you get a quicker response, but so does bind 
and tinydns and those respond in 1msec if it's cached.

As for Tor: I want to get a message saying the domain isn't found if it 
doesn't exist - I don't want no mikey mouse bullshit advertisement landing 
page. Thus; I'd really dislike it if you use OpenDNS with Tor and now you're 
sending all these random Tor-users to view the stupid advertisement.

Now that you know OpenDNS is bullshit scam, consider this:
I setup a fast Tor exit server, it uses my wildcard nameserver for it, I 
redirect every resolve failure to a landing page, I'm fairly sure that would 
upset quite a lot of people.. 

So don't use OpenDNS at all, specially not with Tor. I call it a SCAM. Perhaps 
that's a little harsh word, but I do view their "service" as basically 
nothing more than any other nameserver out there except that they wildcard 
any non-existing domain to their advertisement page.