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We just talked about Personal Info being Private Unless the holder Decides to Sell It on SoylentNews. Today we were treated to yet another such a situation, and this time it hit close to home.
El Reg Reports that OpenDNS is in the process of being acquired by Cisco. And the OpenDNS founder's Blog confirms it.
Cisco will essentially take over total ownership, and the vague promises of continuance of OpenDNS. The blog to the contrary, no promises of terms of service after the acquisition can be believable.
OpenDNS managed to sneak in a Sales clause into their Privacy Policy somewhere along the way:
OpenDNS does not share, rent, trade or sell your Personal Information with third parties, except...
(4) it is necessary in connection with a sale of all or substantially all of the assets of OpenDNS or the merger of OpenDNS into another entity or any consolidation, share exchange, combination, reorganization, or like transaction in which OpenDNS is not the survivor; you will be notified via email and/or a prominent notice on our Web site of any change in ownership or uses of your Personal Information, as well as any choices you may have regarding your Personal Information.
That privacy policy has grown more permissive over the years, allowing OpenDNS to sell filter lists used by their customers, or just about anything else they might want to do.
Full Disclosure: In my day job we were a paying customer of OpenDNS. We had an ISP that ran unreliable DNS servers, injected ads in 404 pages, and generally was slow. We tried Google's DNS free service, and found it quite fast, but full of re-directs and other objectionable features. We switched to OpenDNS mostly for ad, and website filtering, phishing site blocking, and Speed. We were very happy with the fast service over the years. So reliable we never had to look at the web site.
But we were shocked at the extent of permissions creep in their Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. We thought we were avoiding Google's DNS mining service. Little did we know...
Original Submission
(Score: 1) by gtomorrow on Wednesday July 01 2015, @03:30PM
For me, OpenDNS was a no-brainer but now i'm having my doubts. So what alternatives are there besides Google's DNS service (might as well stay with OpenDNS) or running my own DNS (me to stoopid)? Yes, i could "just google it" but i thought i'd throw it out to all here for an informed opinion, all in the name of repartee and contribution to discussion.
Be nice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2015, @04:12PM
I use 4.2.2.2 (and neighbors). [tummy.com]
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday July 01 2015, @05:27PM
4.2.2.2 = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_3_Communications [wikipedia.org]
If they don't boot you off, why not?
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Wednesday July 01 2015, @04:52PM
My questions is what is the alternative that has the filtering (at least by category) like OpenDNS. That was the real hook that got me to start using it for work.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 3, Funny) by captain normal on Wednesday July 01 2015, @05:14PM
How about just take a wait-and-see attitude on this. If there is a scale of corporate evilness then Cisco is way down on the list from the likes of Oracle, Apple, MS, ATT etc. I think Cisco is serious about an open and secure internet.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2015, @07:45PM
you can run "T0R" [client -or- relay mode] on a computer and activate the tor-resolver functionality.
now just point your 1an clients that need to resolve a ip for a domain name to the ip of the tor running computer.
you don't even need to know a single working ip address of a dns server for this to work.
maybe you want to add a caching server before the tor-resolver ...
-
in short: aliens from outerspace (duh) can land, connect the laptop to some solarpanel, connect to some wifi (easy), run tor and then resolve any domain name without having to "google search" (which won't work because they cannot resolve "www.google.com") a working ip number of a dns server : ]