Technology user groups are awesome. That’s why OpenDNS is announcing a new program dedicated to celebrating the innovation and education taking place at user groups everywhere, and making life a little more delicious for their members. Even though programmers, engineers, IT professionals and SysAdmins are notoriously over worked and under appreciated, many still somehow find time to gather together, share insight and explore new tech tips on a regular basis. There are thousands of user groups around the world that are independently organized and run where people join to share hard-won knowledge and experiences and have a blast doing it.

Each month, OpenDNS wants to buy dinner for a different user group that’s focused on technology. It makes no difference to us whether your group discusses hardware or hacking, speaks JAVA, PHP or Ruby, prefers servers or the cloud, or is a Mac or a PC (or Linux/Unix/Other for that matter). All we care about is that you’re well-fed while you’re talking tech and that you’ve got plenty of caffeine to keep the discussions lively. And, we’ll provide plenty of sought-after OpenDNS stickers to pass around and a few t-shirts to give away!

If you’d like OpenDNS to help feed the hungry crew at your next meeting, just give us the basic details - how often you meet, how many members, focus for the group, helpful links, etc. – and we’ll take care of the rest. In addition to providing some hearty chow, we also want to feature your user group in an upcoming issue of the OpenDNS newsletter, so we can highlight your awesomeness for the masses. This is your chance to share details of your group with millions of OpenDNS users so go ahead and boast.

One of the best things about the OpenDNS Domain Tagging system is that it’s a community effort, and anyone who uses OpenDNS has the opportunity to get involved and make the Internet safer. Each day, the Domain Tagging Community is submitting, voting on and moderating thousands of domains into neatly organized categories. This makes it easier for parents, teachers, business owners and other OpenDNS users to get easy-to-use and comprehensive content filtering. You can read a quick synopsis of OpenDNS Domain Tagging here.

We’ve always tried to make the process of Domain Tagging so easy that anyone – from IT Pros to parents to academics – who wants to get involved can do so easily while committing as much or as little time a they’d like. And now we’ve taken that one step further.

Behold! The Domain Tagging Firefox Toolbar!

Until just recently, voting on domains was done by visiting the OpenDNS Domain Tagging community page.  Now, with the help of the Domain Tagging Firefox Toolbar, anyone can easily vote on domains on the fly!  The process is easy.

1. Get the OpenDNS Domain Tagging Firefox Toolbar.
2. Choose how you’d like to vote on domains. You can either tag the domain you’re currently visiting or you can get more involved by switching to “Random Domain” mode.
3. Once you’re on the domain you’d like to tag, select from one of the 56 categories available from the drop-down menu.
4. Click “Vote Yes.”
5. Pro tip:  Clicking the “Auto-Cycle” checkbox will automatically take you to a new website to vote on once you cast your vote!

That’s all it takes to make the Internet safer! Once a domain gains enough votes, it moves its way into a separate queue where it is then reviewed and finalized by the OpenDNS team and our worldwide army of OpenDNS Domain Tagging Moderators.  The more votes you cast, the more you help to strengthen the OpenDNS Community and sharpen the content filtering blade.

It’s important that before you use the toolbar, you read through the category descriptions to make sure that you fully understand them and read through the toolbar info page for smooth sailing.

So come on down and cast some votes!  The more you vote, the more you help.  And the more you help, the stronger OpenDNS gets for 30+ million OpenDNS users around the world!

In a show of solidarity with the Internet community, a group of popular websites will “black out” tomorrow to demonstrate what the world might look like if SOPA and PIPA pass. Participating websites include Wikipedia.org, Reddit.com, Mozilla.org and BoingBoing.com.

As the world’s largest DNS provider, more than 30 million people rely on OpenDNS to connect to the Internet. Without functioning DNS, you’d need to know the IP address for every website you visit. And lots of parents, schools and businesses rely on our website to manage their DNS and Web security settings. All that said, taking our service or website down for a day is not an effective way for OpenDNS to show our firm opposition to the bills. Since folks on Twitter and elsewhere are asking, we will be showing our support tomorrow, but we will not be taking OpenDNS offline.

What is an effective way for us to show our opposition is to censor search results on our Guide. One component of our service, OpenDNS Guide, helps give users a more thoughtful next step when navigating the Internet than the dead end of a 404 error. So when users of our free services attempt to visit a website that’s having technical issues, we show them search results that are based on what they entered in their search bar.

For one business day starting at 8 AM Eastern time tomorrow, we will randomly redact the text of search results appearing in OpenDNS Guide pageviews. This is not a decision we take lightly and we’re fully aware it can, and will, create a frustrating experience both for our users, and for owners of websites being censored. But with 30 million+ users we have the equivalent of a megaphone on the Internet. We feel it’s our responsibility to demonstrate the near-random methodology SOPA and PIPA propose to determine those websites contributing to piracy, and also what the Internet would look like if their fate was to be blocked.

It seems the efforts of the Internet community are making progress in the fight against these ill-informed bills. The White House issued a response, and now Lamar Smith has followed Patrick Leahy’s example, backpeddling and vowing to remove the DNS-blocking component of SOPA. Keep it up, friends.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its senate-version counterpart, PROTECT IP (PIPA), are poorly thought-out, ineffective measures that completely miss the mark in their aims to address Internet piracy and copyright infringement. And yesterday, the amassing opposition to these bills won a small victory: Senator Leahy, one of the main sponsors of PIPA, blinked. He backpedaled. Senator Leahy officially committed to an amendment that would investigate the effects of his bill before it’s instituted:

“Through this process, [I] have continued to hear concerns about the Domain Name provision from engineers, human rights groups, and others. I remain confident that the ISPs — including the cable industry, which is the largest association of ISPs — would not support the legislation if its enactment created the problems that opponents of this provision suggest. Nonetheless, this is in fact a highly technical issue, and I am prepared to recommend we give it more study before implementing it.”

It would seem the most knowledgeable people in the world about the Domain Name System and how the proposed technology would impact the Internet — whom are vocal in their opposition to the bills — are finally getting through to Leahy and other legislators. This list of folks includes us, the world’s largest DNS provider. OpenDNS stands firmly against SOPA and PIPA. I’ve spent time in Washington D.C. in an effort to educate decision makers about the detriments that lie ahead should the bills pass. I’ve authored and signed letters. I’ve blogged and spoken out. And our efforts are working.

It’s critically important that Leahy follows through on his commitment, and that everyone in the technical community continues to use their expertise to educate non-technical government officials associated with the bills. Because while Leahy appears to be acknowledging that his bill is imperfect, SOPA co-sponsor Rep. Lamar Smith is standing his ground. “It is amazing to me that the opponents apparently don’t want to protect American consumers and businesses,” he told Reuters. Sadly, his rhetoric couldn’t be further from the truth. Hopefully someone on his staff will show him this blog post to point out the ridiculousness of his bill.

So, a small victory, but for now the battle against both bills rages on.

If you want to get involved, AmericanCensorship.org is an excellent resource.

The holidays are upon us, but it’s not all gift giving, tree trimming and eggnog drinking. This is also the time of year when scammers come out in force. While OpenDNS is the single best way to protect yourself and your loves ones from phishing and forgeries, education is key. To complement our great phishing quiz my colleague Erin posted about here, we’ve compiled a list of the most common, and tricky, holiday phishing scams. Brush up, take note and avoid getting duped.

Scam: Air Travel Deals

With so many travelers still scrambling to buy last-minute air tickets, it’s important to be extremely careful when clicking through to an airline’s website from a promotional email. Phishing websites like this one spoofing American Airlines are not legitimate. The URL for this one, www.aa-advantager.com, is the giveaway — even though it’s close to the real domain (www.aa.com).

Scam: Holiday Shopping

If you’re like me, you’re doing most of your holiday shopping online this year. So it’s no surprise that scammers are spoofing websites like eBay (one of the most spoofed brands in phishing scams all year long) and trying to trick shoppers into entering their login credentials. When doing shopping online, the safest way to get to your destination site is to type its URL directly into your address bar.

Scam: Money Transfers

For better or worse, lots of people skip the gift buying altogether and just give cash. That’s why we’re including money transfer-themed phishes on our list. We can’t stress enough: any time you deal in currency online, be extra careful. The safest way to get to a website is to type its URL straight into your address bar.

Scam: Connect with Loved Ones

No doubt Skype usage increases during the holidays when the revolutionary service is used to see the smiling faces of family members abroad. But we all need to take great caution when phishes this sophisticated exist. Note that while the URL (http://skype.host.org/account/signin_form.php) is very convincing, it’s not the real Skype domain.

Today we unveil DNSCrypt, a new security tool we’ve developed that has been on our minds for a long time. It has a simple but important function: encrypt all DNS traffic between you and OpenDNS. Nothing else like it exists, and we have very high expectations for the positive impact it can have on the Internet security and privacy of millions of people around the world.

DNS is a critical part of the Internet’s infrastructure, and though a good deal of attention has been paid to improving its security in recent years with DNSSEC, an important part has been overlooked. It’s what’s often referred to as the “last mile,” or the connection between you and your ISP or your DNS provider, if you use a DNS service like OpenDNS. It’s in this “last mile” that bad things are most likely to happen — snooping, tampering, or even hijacking traffic. Anyone who knows what they’re doing can eavesdrop on your Internet activity and see exactly which domains you are resolving, and in many cases, what websites you’re visiting.

It happens all the time on insecure networks at coffee shops, and even residences. Some ISPs have even been accused of spying on their customers’ activity. What’s worse, the “last mile” is ripe for man-in-the-middle attacks, where an intermediary injects themselves into your traffic path masquerading as your intended destination, but all the while, being able to see and modify your traffic. This leaves little confidence for the Internet user.

DNSCrypt changes this and has the potential to completely revolutionize Internet security. DNS has, unfortunately, always had some inherent weaknesses because it’s transported in plain text. DNSSEC has never attempted to address that (crazy, I know). Encrypting all DNS traffic means a fundamental change to the security of the system on the whole and a strong improvement. It’s not the only solution, and there’s still an important place for verification and validation of domains like DNSSEC provides, but it’s a very strong first step.

We’ve been sharing DNSCrypt with security experts over the past several weeks and the feedback has been phenomenal. A tool like DNSCrypt is critically necessary to ensure the security of DNS going forward. DNSCrypt is a “technology preview” today, and the code is being open-sourced. For the über-nerds, our implementation is the first (known) implementation of the forwarder ideas expressed in the DNSCurve community, which many will recall, we were one of the first to implement.

Download DNSCrypt today and try it for yourself.

One of our most important goals at OpenDNS is educating people on Internet dangers so they can make informed choices on how to best manage their networks. Last week we released a phishing quiz, hoping we could show people just how difficult it is to spot the difference between a phishing site and the real website.

The quiz was designed to be difficult, but our users were hoping for something more than a challenge. The comments poured in, encouraging us to create a powerful educational tool that you could use to help teach people how to avoid getting phished.

You had our attention. Many of you, who know that cyber criminals can create exact replicas of real sites by simply copying the image and hosting it at a different domain, were frustrated that the quiz didn’t include URLs. Others, hoping to use the quiz to teach friends and family about the dangers of phishing, asked us to create something that showed why seemingly legit sites were actually phishes.

So, we incorporated your feedback into a new version of the quiz. We hope you’ll find this to be a useful tool to help people learn the dangers of phishing, and how to avoid them. As always, the easiest way to avoid getting phished is to use OpenDNS. That’s because OpenDNS runs PhishTank, the world’s largest community-powered online clearinghouse for phishing, and uses it to automatically block phishing sites for all OpenDNS users.

Take the quiz now!