DNS is an acronym for Domain Name System. Now you know. But you can forget the long form…just remember DNS.

DNS is the quiet hero of the Internet. For nearly 20 years, since 1987, DNS has translated human-readable addresses into the numerical locations that computers demand. Easy-to-remember names (e.g., craigslist.org) become the numbers (e.g., 66.150.243.20) that load the popular classifieds website.

The end result? The Internet works. Websites load, emails are delivered, and the world continues on its merry way.

Right now, no one cares that DNS is at the heart of all that activity. That’s OK for now. But DNS is a prospect to be the next acronym that matters.

Previous crossover acronyms

Tech is lousy with crossover acronyms: RAM, MB, GB, CPU, GHz, HTTP, and so on. But I’ll focus on two critical acronyms — HTML and RSS — which have crossed over, to a greater and lesser degree.

HTML — If you asked anyone who’s ever touched a computer what HTML is, I expect you’d hear that HTML has “something to do with how web pages are created.” Still, few outside the tech world would correct expand the acronym to HyperText Markup Language. And there’s nothing wrong with that gap in knowledge…a measure of HTML’s success is that the full label is irrelevant.

RSS — RSS is moving along that same adoption/understanding curve: a significant minority of the Internet population now understands the benefit RSS brings, whether they know that Really Simple Syndication is the leading meaning of the acronym. As a label, RSS has come to encompass even other formats (like Atom or RDF) which compete with RSS in delivering the same benefit. Rather than rename RSS, the supporters of syndication technologies should simply enjoy the acronym becoming the brand. RSS is not quite Kleenex™, but in this case, becoming a genericized trademark is a positive development.

Transition: from invisible to shorthand

Two decades after its introduction, DNS may be the next acronym which crosses over from the tech world to the entire world.

At OpenDNS, we’re convinced that the next big thing in the Internet is really a re-working of one of the oldest things in the Internet. Our success lies, in part, in explaining how OpenDNS improves DNS, which in so many ways has not advanced from its roots in the late 1980s. To be direct, using OpenDNS for your DNS service will speed up your Internet experience and help stop phishing attacks.

Back to the point about acronyms. It’s more difficult to explain the benefits you’ll get from our free DNS service if you don’t understand what DNS does for you today.

My mission is to speed DNS along the acronym trail, so DNS moves from invisible to shorthand for “what makes the Internet work.”

Some work to do… but remember, you heard it here first: DNS is the next acronym that matters.

P.S. If you do want more details on DNS, read what OpenDNS does, which has links to more details on DNS generically.
P.P.S. By the way, RSS stands for either Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary or…well, never mind. My favorite definition of RSS is:

Smart bookmarks that tell you when your favorite sites change. [diveintomark.org]

If you want to keep up with OpenDNS news and notes (like this one), I suggest you subscribe to the OpenDNS RSS feed.

I’m a little late to the blogging phenomenon, but here we go. I started working on OpenDNS last November to create a new kind of DNS service that can be used by anyone to make their Internet experience better. Since then I’ve been working hard to bring this to fruition by assembling a fantastic team, developing some really great software and deploying a world-class network. Now I’m thrilled to introduce the free service we’ve been building. It’s ready, and I want you to try it. You will love it.

DNS in two (or three) sentences

DNS is what allows you to type in a web address and end up at a website; DNS is transparent and yet fundamental to the operation of the Internet. There are two sides to DNS, the authoritative side which give out answers and the recursive side that ask questions on your behalf and holds onto them in case you ask again.

OpenDNS provides the latter, the world’s first highly-available, high-performance recursive DNS service customized with features to make the Internet safer, faster and smarter for you. (Clearly, I belong in Marketing.)

Some background

To understand why I created OpenDNS requires a little background. I’d moved to San Francisco after graduating from Washington University in St. Louis, and was managing EveryDNS, a popular and reliable DNS management service which I started five years ago. While helping scale and run operations for a startup run by a friend of mine I watched EveryDNS continue to grow and do well on its own and I missed it. Running a world-class DNS service for five years taught me a lot not only about DNS and networks but also about the people who use them. As a result of all this work I discovered ways to make DNS better by making it more resilient, safer and faster. I also began to see and understand how a lot of spam, spyware and phishing sites abused DNS to operate.

Not everyone on the Internet is as nice as you are

Spammers, Phishers, Botmasters and other Internet Bad Guys use DNS as a vector for running their attacks and schemes to send spam, spread malware and operate phishing sites. Some of these Bad Guys used EveryDNS to manage DNS nefariously. When I found out about this, I took action and cleaned up EveryDNS. We wrote code to filter out the Bad Guys and began collaborating with other DNS providers to share information on bad users and bad domains so that these bad actors would be unable to jump from service to service. The Bad Guys went away and my part of the Internet was clean (and still is). The problem was that the Bad Guys just moved onto easier targets — other DNS services that didn’t care as much as I did and didn’t collaborate with the major DNS players. The abuse continued to be levied on the Internet and I was unable to stop it. By cleaning up my neighborhood all I had done was drive the abuse into another one. So I created OpenDNS to deal with this and many other limitations of the existing DNS.

OpenDNS is a DNS service designed for you: instead of relying on all the unknown DNS providers out there to clean up their act (more on this in a future post), we act like a crossing guard in front of your house. We direct the good stuff towards you and send the bad stuff away.

Improving the DNS

DNS — the Domain Name System, a foundation of the Internet for 20 years — has loads of room for improvement. Most people don’t realize the possibilities, but the DNS software most of us are using (via an ISP or corporate server) hasn’t evolved fast enough or far enough from the software written in the 1980s. There’s a huge opportunity to learn from the past and address and fix some of the problems that crop up at the scale of today’s Internet. I decided that adding security features, performance improvements (we all want a faster Internet, even with broadband), and some smarts (fix typos for me… that’s what computers are supposed to do) would evolve the existing DNS without breaking the old. Don’t worry about us hijacking your traffic like one of the many browser toolbars that get automatically installed — having had my first tastes of unix and networking at a mom-and-pop ISP, I was schooled with the importance of making things interoperate nicely and not messing with peoples’ computers or Internet.

Improving the Internet

What do I mean by “improve the Internet”? If you’ve read ”The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell you know the story about how New York City made the subways safer by focusing on the fundamentals rather than trying to catch every criminal. By cleaning up subway graffitti and catching fare-cheaters the law-abiding citizens of New York returned to using the subways and to taking pride in their clean city. These small changes led to a massive downturn in crime numbers in New York. We’re applying the same techniques to the Internet and cleaning it up.

• We’re blocking phishing sites that are set up to steal your banking and other sensitive data.
• We’re impacting the ability for botnets to organize and disrupt networks.
• We’re improving the collective intelligence of the DNS to provide insights into many forms of Internet abuse and fraud.

More than five years running EveryDNS showed me a lot of the shady practices by the folks who have made phishing, pharming, botnets, spamming, and other nefarious practices something we all contend with every day. (Who thought phishing would be a widespread term?) They do this because it’s easy for them and there are no counter-measures. Now there’s OpenDNS. Of course, we’ll also speed up your Internet without changing your ISP, computer, or browser and perform some simple but useful tweaks like fixing typos. A barrage of testing and feedback has told us that people really notice a faster Internet experience, and that they appreciate getting an intelligent search results page rather than a “page not found” error. That is just the beginning.

EveryDNS

The primary service of EveryDNS is free authoritative DNS. Not registering domains, not hosting websites, not doing anything more than let people with domains administer their own records in the global Internet “white pages” known as DNS. Nearly 100,000 individuals, organizations and companies depend on this free resource and have for many years. EveryDNS is supported by donations and advertising, and has always been profitable. I have automated nearly ever aspect of EveryDNS and along with the help of a fantastic team of volunteers, I am free of day-to-day involvement. You can find more information at EveryDNS.

Personal history

You can read more about me on my corporate bio or check out my personal website at david.ulevitch.com. I’m a DNS expert and I live in San Francisco. If you have any questions, please get in touch.

A week ago, The New York Times published an entertaining article by John Markoff and Saul Hansell about Google’s new data centers in Oregon, “Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks More Power.” Since the link soon may lead to TimesSelect (read: $), I’ll pull one sentence to show the larger point of the article:

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are spending vast sums of capital to build out their computing capabilities to run both search engines and a variety of Web services that encompass e-mail, video and music downloads and online commerce.

Google’s reticence on the subject makes for some amusing anecdotes in the article, but mostly the article serves as a useful reminder that the Internet still obeys the laws of physics. Heat, energy, and physical space still matter, just in different ways.

Why do Google and others distribute their datacenters around the world?

Google has found that for search engines, every millisecond longer it takes to give users their results leads to lower satisfaction. So the speed of light ends up being a constraint, and the company wants to put significant processing power close to all of its users.

It’s not just search engines who need to deliver at (ahem) light speed. You can’t load google.com or yahoo.com or any other website without first making a DNS request (or several). That’s one reason (there are others, like redundancy & reliability) that OpenDNS runs its service from four geographically distributed locations, with more to come.

OpenDNS isn’t building datacenters, but we’re running our service from some of the best ones in the world. Also, we’re not so secretive that folks need to invoke Voldemort when referring to our company! From the article:

“No one says the ‘G’ word,” said Diane Sherwood, executive director of the Port of Klickitat, Wash., directly across the river from The Dalles, who is not bound by such agreements. “It’s a little bit like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in Harry Potter.”

A note on being global

We know our coverage of the world beyond the United States can improve. London, England will be the next location online, probably in mid-July. Fortunately, in the short term, connectivity to the United States is quite good, and many Internet users outside the United States are relying on U.S.-based servers for much of their Internet experience already. That’s not ideal, of course. We want to be as fast for someone in Singapore as we are for someone in Seattle, but the speed of light will be a factor for now.

Let us know where in the world you are, as we make our future plans.

Earlier this month, I noted that the OpenDNS privacy policy was posted using a Creative Commons license (ShareAlike 2.5, to be exact).

I’m pleased to follow the same practice (and the same license) for the OpenDNS Terms of Use. At the bottom of each document, you’ll see the notation about the license.

For the Terms of Use, we started with our own document, but the point here is to aid others in this process in the future, if they so desire. Good lawyers (like ours) are expensive; maybe this will save you some time (read: money). You will still need to consider the differences between your business and ours, of course. If you use our Terms as a starting point, please let us know. I’d even go so far as to ask for a link…but it’s not absolutely required.

The Terms of Use is not an exciting document, I’m afraid, but the Terms are important. They cover such areas as conduct, liability, indemnity, registration, (no) warranties, and more. Please read ours. Ask questions if you like.

For updates to the Terms of Use, we’ll post notice here on the OpenDNS blog, flagging the entry with the dull-but-descriptive category “OpenDNS Terms of Use.” The resulting category page should be refreshing simple. I’d be thrilled if it was only a single post for months or years at a time. Of course, if you read the Terms, you’ll notice that, ultimately, it’s still “your responsibility to check the Terms of Use periodically for changes.” Had to mention that.

One of my favorite movies is Amadeus, the fictional biography of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (Metacritic, IMDb)

In the film, Mozart’s patron, the Emperor, comments on one of Mozart’s new pieces:

Your work is ingenious. It’s quality work. But there are simply too many notes, that’s all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect. [emphasis added; source: IMDb]

In the context of the film, this appeal for brevity is patently ridiculous. The emperor has a tin ear for music.

However, Seth Godin, while getting support for his MacBook Pro, reminds us that sometimes fewer words are better:

If you’re not sure what to say, say nothing.

Why do I bring this up?

Because I’ve been writing instructions for how to change your DNS settings, with different pages based on your situation (see Get Started), and I’m trying to limit myself to necessary words and steps, without skipping anything that matters.

Please let me know if there are too many words…or not enough.