Today we announced one of the most significant DNS innovations of the last 25 years. SmartCache, our new DNS record-handling technology, renders frustrating authoritative DNS outages irrelevant for OpenDNS users. It’s both incredibly simple and invaluable to Internet users.

Here’s how it works: When an authoritative DNS provider suffers an outage, all of the Web sites it provides service to are taken offline. They’re inaccessible for everyone on the Internet. But no longer for OpenDNS users. Our servers will now immediately look for the last known good address for the site in our caches, and use that to load the site. So effectively OpenDNS users will be able to access Web sites that appear down for everyone else. For our millions of users at businesses, schools and libraries around the world, saving them Internet access interruptions and the time they waste is invaluable.

Authoritative DNS outages happen frequently and can be a big problem. Just a few weeks ago, it’s reported that major authoritative DNS provider UltraDNS suffered an outage that took Salesforce.com, Amazon.com and Petco.com offline for several hours. In such a case, SmartCache would fix the inaccessibility problem and allow people to visit the sites through the outage.

This is just the latest in a long series of DNS innovations we’ve developed and passed on to you. Most recently it was blocking the Conficker worm from phoning home. By blocking the domain names the worm used, we were and continue to be able to protect people around the globe. Trust that we’re committed to continue to innovate and give you easy-to-use services that make your Internet experience better.

SmartCache is available immediately as an opt-in feature. Just log in to your dashboard and look for the check box in your Advanced Settings. For those tech geeks, this only applies to queries where the authoritative server hands back a SERVFAIL response code in addition to any query that simply goes unanswered.

Let us know what you think of the new feature in the comments here.

This is a big week for OpenDNS, if press coverage is any measure. (It is. ) Yesterday we saw excellent features on OpenDNS publish in both Forbes and the newspaper of Silicon Valley, the San Jose Mercury News.

The Forbes feature first. The article looks at OpenDNS in the wake of Dan Kaminsky’s 2008 discovery of a major flaw in the global Domain Name System. (We saw many of you start using OpenDNS initially to protect your networks from it, only to fall in love with all of the things OpenDNS does.) The writer, Andy Greenberg, paints a colorful picture of Dan and OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch first meeting at BlackHat in 2001, and even then collaborating to make the Internet better. Fast forward to 2008 and Dan recommends everyone use OpenDNS as it’s one of the only DNS services insusceptible to the major flaw he found. Oh, and this story will be in the upcoming print issue, so keep your eyes peeled.

Next the San Jose Mercury News feature. This one ran on the front page of the paper’s technology section. It’s written for a consumer audience, explaining how OpenDNS works fundamentally, and how it makes the Internet safer, faster, smarter and more reliable. The writer, Elise Ackerman, definitely did her homework. She cites several school districts in her jurisdiction using the service - Menlo Park City School District, Mountain View-Whisman School District and Fremont Unified School District to name a few. She even interviewed the network administrator from La Honda-Pescadero Unified School District.

As always, we post media mentions of OpenDNS on our Web site here, so if you like to read up on what people have to say about us, check back often.

Here at OpenDNS we’ve spent the past several months working to keep you safe from the Conficker worm. Using the OpenDNS service is widely considered to be one of the easiest and most guaranteed ways to protect your network. And today we roll out a free Conficker detection tool to give you actionable insight into whether or not you have Conficker on your network.

As David mentioned here, we’re in a unique position as your DNS provider of choice to block the worm at the DNS level and prevent it from phoning home. We’re also in a unique position to tell you, based on DNS queries coming from your account, if your network has been infected with Conficker. Log into your OpenDNS account now and you’ll see a banner indicating you either have Conficker or you don’t. This is a tremendously valuable service, and representative of a key innovation on the DNS. If you have friends or colleagues not using OpenDNS yet, we urge you to recommend the service.

Even though we prevent the worm from phoning home, we advise everyone with Conficker to run the disinfection tool. Microsoft offers a great one here.

Also today we’re sharing data about geographic distribution of the worm’s C-varient to date. This information is based on OpenDNS data alone, so is not necessarily representative of overall geographic Conficker distribution.

We’ll continue blocking Conficker for all of our users, through our on-by-default Botnet Protection feature. And we’ll keep you posted with updates about the virus, if/when we have them, on this blog.