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!

OpenDNS moderators are Internet security superheroes that make sure our Web filtering is the safest and most useful it can be for millions of people around the world, and they are invaluable to Internet safety and the safety of our users. It’s a huge badge of honor to wear. So who are they and what do they do?

To better explain what a moderator does, let’s quickly revisit the process for how domain categorization works. First, someone submits a domain (or website) to be classified into the most appropriate of OpenDNS’s 57 categories. Users then vote on how the domain should be categorized.  After a certain voting threshold is reached, which varies from category to category, the moderator steps onto the scene.  Moderators thoughtfully review the websites, with their keen eyes and Internet prowess, and make a final decision on categorization. The domain is then “tagged” in the appropriate categories and blocked for anyone who has chosen to enable filtering of that category.

So what does it take to be a moderator? Well, you don’t necessarily need a Ph.D. in computer science, a job at NASA or fluency in HTML. Our current team of moderators is made up of people from nearly every profession, including (but not limited to) OpenDNS staff members, SysAdmins, software engineers and even stay-at-home parents. And OpenDNS moderators live in places all over the world, including India, Brazil, Italy, Canada, Switzerland and more. What they all have in common is a single passion for making the Internet safer by working together to ensure speed and accuracy in the domain tagging process.

If you think you’re a good fit, and want to have a vested interest in making the Internet a safer place, simply fill out the form below and we’ll contact you soon. It’s that easy

Late last week, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) gave final approval to a new top-level domain, or TLD. It’s one that people have been debating, proposal, advocating for, and advocating against for years — .XXX.

Over the past 11 years, .XXX has been proposed and voted on a number of times. And while it still isn’t clear when and how .XXX will be implemented, it’s certainly of interest to those of us in the DNS and Web content filtering space.

Here are some initial thoughts:

1. There is no incentive for an adult website to leave their .com domain and move to .xxx. Most sites will probably end up having both a .com and a .xxx domain, but there’s no reason for a successful adult website to move entirely over to .xxx. There may not even really be justification for a new adult site to make a home in .xxx.
2. .xxx doesn’t make it much easier to block adult content, because even though an entire TLD can be filtered, it certainly won’t be comprehensive (see point #1).
3. Overall, introducing .xxx now — instead of 11 years ago when first introduced, or even better, when the primary TLDs were created — will have little to no effect on the adult industry and their domain name TLD choices.
4. There’s a significant monetary aspect to adding .xxx as well. While most domains are $10 per year, .xxx domains will cost $60 to register. Certainly registrars have a vested interest in seeing .xxx approved for their own gain. The cost to registrants and trademark holders will be significant.

Though .xxx websites aren’t available yet, we know keeping adult content off networks is a big priority for our millions of parents and businesses using OpenDNS in their workplaces, school districts and homes with children. If you enter .xxx as one of your blacklist options on the Web content filtering section of your dashboard, you can block the .xxx TLD today so that when it does go live, you are already configured the way you want to be.

We haven’t decided if we’ll add the entire .xxx TLD to any of our categories just yet; it might be too crude a hammer to try and block content with, as there will likely be significant non-adult sites in the .xxx TLD once it goes live.

Kids get into all sorts of things they shouldn’t get into online. And we know parents want to protect their kids from what’s out there. They want to know that what they’ve set up is effective, up-to-date and always working.

Today we’re introducing a new service called FamilyShield and it’s the absolute simplest and most straightforward way for parents to protect kids from the bad stuff online. There is no complicated set up and no software to install on your computers.

FamilyShield is different from — and better than — the majority of parental controls software choices parents are faced with. For starters, ours is free to use. And when set up on your wireless router, FamilyShield does more than block adult content on computers; it blocks it on Wi-Fi devices like the iPod Touch or the Nintendo DS and on video game consoles like Xbox and Wii. In addition to blocking adult content, FamilyShield also blocks proxies and anonymizers, which are how enterprising/tech-savvy kids often get around parental blocks.

In addition, because FamilyShield leverages the OpenDNS content filtering system, the list of sites being blocked is constantly updated, 24/7. These updates happen automatically, without requiring any changes on the user’s end.

Last but not least, because it runs on the global OpenDNS network, it will make your household Internet faster and overall more reliable. With the OpenDNS perfect 100 percent uptime record, you won’t have to tolerate annoying, intermittent Internet outages anymore. This, of course, is in stark contrast to parental controls software that is often known for slowing down your Internet experience.

Why did we launch FamilyShield? For about as long as OpenDNS has been around, we’ve heard demand from you, our users, to provide a pre-configured version of the service that automatically blocks adult content. The idea has been submitted to IdeaBank, the part of our community where anyone can suggest new OpenDNS features and functionality, a few different times. (For example, here and here.) We aim to give you what you want and FamilyShield is just that.

How does FamilyShield work? Much like how OpenDNS Basic works, you just follow our simple two-step instructions to configure our special FamilyShield IPs on your router. Unlike OpenDNS Basic, there’s no account to configure, no complicated settings to customize, and no downloads or software to install. Even if you have a dynamic IP address.

FamilyShield’s IPs are:

208.67.222.123
208.67.220.123

What does FamilyShield Block? The service blocks pornographic content, including our “Pornography,” “Tasteless,” and “Sexuality” categories, in addition to proxies and anonymizers (which can render filtering useless). It also blocks phishing and some malware.

If you’re using OpenDNS Basic today without any filtering and think FamilyShield looks just simple and straightforward enough for you, just follow the simple instructions to point to the new IPs. But, if you use OpenDNS, love OpenDNS and know of a family who could use a parental controls service that also makes their home network faster, let them know about FamilyShield.

At last week’s Workshop on the Economics of Information Security — an annual conference held at Harvard — new research (PDF) was presented showing the link between pornography and malicious online practices. When the study’s researchers surveyed adult websites, they found that many were aimed at “manipulating and misleading a visitor to perform actions that result in an economic profit” for the Web site. Free sites used these tactics 34 percent of the time, while paid sites used them 11 percent of the time. What types of tactics are we talking about? According to the study, methods include:

1. Javascript catchers that hijack the user’s browser, making it difficult to leave a site.
2. Blind and hidden links that prevent an address from being displayed in a web browser’s status bar. This can be used to mask malicious activities, like cross site scripting or cross site request forgery attempts.
3. Redirection scripts that redirect users to different websites. This occurs on a server, so there’s no way for a user to know it might happen until they click.
4. Malware that triggers malicious behavior including “code execution, registry changes, or executable downloads.”

In addition to misleading activity, the level of malware found on adult Web sites was surprising to the researchers too; almost 3.5 percent of adult websites had this type of behavior, compared with previous studies that found less than one percent as malicious. Spyware and Trojan downloads were the most popular types of malware.

The good news is, it’s simple to block adult content and pornography with OpenDNS. In a couple of steps, you can nip the issue in the bud by blocking content you know causes issues on your computer and network. To block adult content, navigate to the Settings page and select the network you wish to manage. You’ll then see a Choose Your Filtering Level option under Content Filtering. To block all adult content, make sure to block the following five categories: Adult themes, Nudity, Sexuality, Pornography, and Tasteless.

Since we already block malware for all OpenDNS users (Enterprise users get more comprehensive coverage), blocking pornography is just one more step you can take to protect users on your network from coming in contact with malicious tactics online.

Does this sound familiar?

You labor, with the best of intentions, to keep everyone on your network safe and their comings and goings secure, only to be met with successful attempts to bypass your efforts? Well, we have a new feature for you today, and it might make some 14-year old kids cry a little.

We now let you block Web-based proxy sites.

We added a new category to our Adult Site Blocking functionality called “Proxy/anonymizer.” This category, like the other adult site categories, is provided by our friends at St. Bernard.

Here’s how we describe the new category:

Proxy/anonymizer

Sites providing proxy bypass information or services. Also, sites that allow the user to surf the net anonymously, including sites that allow the user to send anonymous emails.

If you are blocking most adult sites, you probably want to block Web-based proxies too. Like Adult Site Blocking, this is free, too.

As usual, this was added in response to your awesome and helpful feedback. Thanks for using OpenDNS.

When we launched OpenDNS Adult Site Blocking in June we gave you the power to block adult websites with simple categories. However, when blocking categories of sites there is sometimes a need for exceptions; that’s why we’re happy to announce the launch of a Domain Whitelist feature.

The Domain Whitelist feature is pretty simple, and I like how we explain it in the Dashboard:

A whitelist is a list of domains that will never be blocked on your network regardless of the content filtering categories you’ve turned on. For example, if you are blocking adult-themed sites but really want to visit celebrity gossip site tmz.com, you can add it to the whitelist below and get all the benefits of adult site blocking but still get your Paris Hilton fix.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in to tell us they wanted this feature. Even more thanks to Aaron, Joe, and Noah for making this happen on our side so quickly.