As we mentioned over on the PhishTank blog, Mozilla, maker of Firefox, announced today it selected PhishTank data as the benchmark for comparing phishing protection in Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7.0. This is a big deal, considering the number of phishing-data sources to choose from.

The results? Firefox blocked 243 phishing sites that IE7 missed, making it the better of the two at blocking phishing sites, according to third-party evaluator (hired by Mozilla) Smartware.

Check out today’s articles about the testing in Slashdot, SearchSecurity and The Washington Post.

If you’re not a member of the PhishTank community yet, we hope this validation is the motivation you needed.

John and Allison
(picture by David)

LaunchPad area
for first-time exhibitors

Kiosk O
for OpenDNS

For three days this week, three members of the OpenDNS team were in Santa Clara, California at ISPCON, sharing OpenDNS with a bustling group of ISPs and infrastructure vendors of all sizes.

The show operated smoothly, and we got the chance to tell lots of new folks about why OpenDNS can deliver great DNS for ISPs and their customers. Tuesday and Wednesday were pretty busy. Thursday morning was quiet, but by that time, so were we!

Launching Accounts for the conference was useful, mostly because there are some great features for ISPs and others running large networks that will be built on top of Accounts.

Many thanks to Denise Miller and the rest of the ISPCON team (The Golden Group) for running a good show and helping us out with some special requests.

See the new tab up there, at the far right? It says My Account. Go ahead and take a look. Or read on for why you’ll want to create a free account. You can find the tab and Sign In link at the upper right of every page of the OpenDNS website.

OpenDNS invited the public to use its free, reliable DNS service for the first time on July 10, 2006. Less than a week later, we introduced preferences for OpenDNS, which gave the individual user the opportunity to manage their DNS in a way that had never before been possible. Later, at customer request, we used our platform to offer choice in their response to Cameroon’s TLD policies.

OpenDNS Accounts represents the next step in our commitment to give our customers choice and control.

We talk a lot about “Safer, Faster and Smarter” DNS built on a rock-solid and reliable foundation. A big part of being safer and smarter means giving you control. That’s what OpenDNS Accounts is all about.

When was the last time your DNS improved?

It doesn’t matter if you have one IP at home that you manage or a massive network of disconnected offices — OpenDNS Accounts is for you.

Secure
Registration, sign in, and all profile and preferences are managed with a username and password on a secure, encrypted site using SSL (like your bank does).

Dynamic DNS Support
OpenDNS Accounts support the use of dynamic DNS (DDNS) update mechanisms to allow you to securely manage your Account and get your preferences even with a dynamic IP address. Read for details. Note: Because OpenDNS uses SSL, there are several very good DDNS clients which do not (yet) work. We are going to encourage various developers to add support for SSL to their otherwise very strong DDNS software.

Statistics
Everyone from individuals to network operators will enjoy a bit of insight into statistics about their DNS usage. How many DNS requests per day do you make? How many individual domains per day do you resolve? On that pretty graph I see for the OpenDNS service, what am I contributing? Basically, we’re taking the stats we show the public and giving you similar insight with the stats that relate to your DNS traffic.

Just as a heads up — while DNS resolution is blinding fast (as always), our stats processing happens (as our network guys say) out-of-band and is done separately. You will not see statistics immediately (at least, not just yet). It may take as long as 48 hours for your stats to appear.

We feel strongly that this is a platform for DNS unlike anything that has ever existed before and continues to help OpenDNS bring about evolutionary changes to the DNS that dramatically change the end-user experience.

P.S. If you have OpenDNS preferences, they will continue to work until they are superseded by an OpenDNS Account with the same IP address. We suggest that anyone using OpenDNS preferences set up a free account now and verify your IP address.

We have so many great users and have been considering, for a while now, different ways to show our love. Out of those discussions the idea of “Five questions with an OpenDNS user” was born. This will be a recurring post category in the OpenDNS blog. Read and learn.

Richard Hughes
Technical Director
MaxWiFi, London, England

OpenDNS: Please describe your organization, and your role there.

RH: I am the technical director of MaxWiFi. We plan, install and manage temporary WiFi networks for media centres and large events. Recent events have included the PGA European Tour in London, The World Rally Championship in Wales and last year we provided a service to the Royal Marriage of Prince Charles & Lady Camilla Parker Bowles. We shifted over 18Gb of traffic on one day without dropping a single packet with a user base of over 400 media from around the world - all packed into a pub in Windsor.

OpenDNS: How did you first hear about OpenDNS?

RH: I was following a blog trail and came across OpenDNS. We are always looking for find ways to streamline our configs and installs and don’t always like to rely on the ISP services we are given. OpenDNS seemed like such a simple opportunity to speed up searches and to improve the end user services, by providing security from phishing sites and intelligent DNS resolution to take care of spelling mistakes!

OpenDNS: What changes have you noticed on your network since switching to OpenDNS?

RH: It’s always hard to measure network performance, especially when your network is rebuilt and relocated every week. We truly became aware of the improvements at the PGA tour when we had snappers (Photographers) commenting on just how fast the network was. We tested it against another network we had running, that was using local DNS, and there was a perceptible difference. On top of that we saved time on writing the configs and when the ISP DNS servers crashed and took down other network’s on-site we just kept running.

OpenDNS: What advice would you give to others who are considering switching to OpenDNS?

RH: It’s so easy to change and test, we would strongly recommend it. In fact every network we install uses it. I use it in the office and at home. Best of all if you don’t like it swap back - nothing ventured nothing gained!

OpenDNS: What is the strangest thing you’ve ever seen while providing WiFi at an event?

RH: Hmm, my favourite was when an American journalist (never known for being quiet or thoughtful), shouted from the middle of a packed press room, “Your WiFi is C*** - I can’t log on or even see the SSID.” We quickly got over to him and after looking at his laptop for a few minutes explained to him he would need to have a Wireless Card or Centrino in his laptop for WiFi to work!

Second fav was a reporter who was at the Royal Wedding due to broadcast Coast to Coast in the USA. We were impressed by her calm before speaking to such a massive audience. When she came back in she was red faced and explained she had just referred to Lady Camilla as Her Royal Horseness!

Anyway, good luck to you all at OpenDNS and we are looking forward to the London site coming on stream.

My cousin was one of the many people to send me a link to David Pogue’s blog post at the New York Times titled “A Faster Web–for Free” about OpenDNS and how much he and his wife love it. That’s just awesome!

For those of you who don’t know, David Pogue is the consumer technology superhero for the non-geek population. In addition to his usual column he also does a bunch of really great video podcasts that you can watch.

Pogue writes in his column:

“In short, Open DNS works by caching Web-page requests from its thousands of users, so that the site you want is blasted to you in a fraction of a second.”

Just to clarify, we cache the DNS requests only. DNS is the part of a web request where your computer says “how do I get to site xyz.com?” DNS is a significant part of the latency in your web experience and that’s where a large part of the speedup comes from but we don’t actually cache web pages from other sites.