Bill, Isn't it funny though that OpenDNS is funded by the same group who funded Paxfire? www.minorventures.com OpenDNS can be an angel on one shoulder while Paxfire is on the other, right? Ray On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 9:09 PM, bill fumerola <billf@mu.org> wrote:
[ disclaimer: i work for opendns. ]
On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 05:53:15PM -0400, Martin Hannigan wrote:
I think it's best that we let David Ulevitch and the crew @ OpenDNS make the money that is to be made off this. He's doing good while doing well.
Why shouldn't anyone be able to "make the money"? The problem with that post wasn't that he was advocating law breaking, it was that it's a marketing missive and inconsistent with community norms, IMHO. That doesn't mean that it's illegal, and it certainly doesn't mean it's ok for one "good guy" to be allowed to profit and one unknown not to. Setting classes of who can profit from NXDOMAIN data creates unfairness in the system and it should be all or none.
now that our name has been brought into this, i think it's only fair to say: the NXDOMAIN data we know about is when a user's resolver asks our recursive servers for a record and NXDOMAIN is the end result of what our resolvers discover.
at that point, we optionally point you at a lander page w/ search results and ads and all that jazz based on the words in the record you [mis-]typed. note the optionally. if you want, we'll just return NXDOMAIN. you can configure this. you can configure it per-ip, per-prefix, etc.
now, on to what we do or could do with that data:
we do not sell and have never sold NXDOMAIN data. nor do we register domains based on NXDOMAIN information. the non-OpenDNS company who sees the original request that produced the NXDOMAIN that failed (which may or may not even be a valid hostname) is our advertising partner.
they get that data after we've transformed the original request into their API to send to them as keywords so they may return appropriate and relevant ads.
so, to recap: nope, we don't sell NXDOMAIN data. we don't sell any other data either. yes, some revenue comes from typos/mistakes. you knew that already. yes, you can even change that behavior and just get NXDOMAIN. that means your typos gain us nothing. you get our service for free. yes, you opt-in to our service in the first place. yes, we have a privacy policy that says this better than i can.
What you really want to look at is privacy policy. Not all of the good guys are actually good guys in that respect.
http://www.opendns.com/privacy/
it looks pretty good to me. i read it before i agreed to employment.
-- billf >at< opendns.com // opendns network engineering
p.s. since i rarely if ever post, i have to make the shameless, shameless plug: <peering@opendns.com>. we're in peeringdb too.