Last year CBS live streamed 63 games of the March Madness college basketball tournament for the first time. Since the games happened mid-day on weekdays, basketball fans across the U.S. watched them at work – a headache both for network admins working hard to keep their networks zipping along, and for management accountable for lost productivity. (A study referenced in this article estimates $1.2 Billion in lost productivity is caused by the tourney.)

This year will no doubt be more of the same. When the 2009 tournament starts one week from today, more than 7 million people are expected to tune in, eating your bandwidth and slowing your network down. The good news is you can easily block the sites that live stream the games with OpenDNS. Then, if you so choose, unblock them when the tournament’s over.

Just log into your account, and go the Settings tab. On the Content Filtering page, scroll down to the bottom and add http://mmod.ncaa.com to your “always block” list.

Today we made two announcements, each very significant to all OpenDNS users. Here’s an overview to get everyone up to speed on what OpenDNS has cooked up.

The first announcement is about the comeback – and improvement – of the much-loved and anticipated Stats System. Stats are invaluable to network administrators: they give you insight into what’s happening on your network coupled with the tools to do something about it. The old system, which was overloaded and barely processing our nearly 9 billions DNS queries per day, was down for awhile as we made improvements. Sometimes you have to take a step back in order to take three steps forward. Thanks to everyone for your patience as we got it back up and running. I hope you’ll find it was worth the wait.

New functionality in the Stats System includes the comeback of the Top Domains report. This feature gives you a list of the top Web sites visited from your network and affords you unique insight into where your resources are being consumed, and which inappropriate or unsafe websites people are seeing. Top Domains now integrates directly with our Web content filtering system. This means you can look at Top Domains, see something you want blocked and block either the site or the category it fits into with a single click. (Example: Facebook.com is one of your Top Domains. Without leaving that screen you can block with Facebook.com or “Social Networks.”) Check out this screencast, narrated by the engineer who built it, Richard Crowley, to see the new system in action.

The second announcement is significant to all OpenDNS users as well as the entire Internet community. Today we’ve rolled out a way for you to see if Conficker is living on your network. The Conficker worm, also called Downadup and Kido, is massive. Some estimates of how many PCs are compromised are as high as 10 million. What’s interesting about this particular virus is that it uses the Domain Name System in a unique way: Conficker contains an algorithm that checks 250 new domains per day for instructions on what it should do. This puts us in a unique position to keep you safe since we’re in the unique position of providing insight and intelligence into your DNS service. We’ve teamed with Kaspersky Lab to identify those 250 daily domains, and stop resolving them. This means if you’re using OpenDNS, Conficker will do your network no damage. Yet another reason for your friends and colleagues to make the switch. While OpenDNS represents just a tiny drop in the sea of the Internet users today, we think this is a smart move forward.

To find out if Conficker has penetrated your network, simply log in to your account and select Stats on the left sidebar. From there choose Blocked Domains and filter “only domains blocked as malware.” This will generate a list of malware sites your network has attempted to connect with.

This is just the beginning, folks. We’ve got a year’s worth of new features we’re cranking hard on to make your network better performing and more secure. Stay tuned…

Today kicks off the March Madness basketball tournament and in case you haven’t heard, CBS is broadcasting all 63 NCAA games live – and free – on the Internet. All you need is broadband to tune in.

What makes this particularly relevant to YOU is the fact that many of the games are being played during the workday.

According to an article in the San Jose Mercury News, network admins are blocking the site(s) broadcasting the games because they’re concerned all that streaming video is going to slow down their networks. Unlike the reasons you might block adult sites or social networking sites, there’s nothing inappropriate or unsafe about the NCAA tournament. But without question if several people on your network were watching the games, it could slow things down.

The SJ Mercury is doing a poll, asking people if video is blocked where they work. Right now it’s almost a tie between yes and no answers.

Are you blocking the games?

(If you aren’t and want to, it’s as easy as signing into your account and adding NCAASports.com to your block list. )

This morning we launched a new service that will undoubtedly change the way budget-conscious network operators and IT administrators filter Web content. The system that powers the service is inspired by the success of PhishTank, our anti-phishing site, and works in a similar way. By leveraging the intelligence of our community (all of you) and our global network of servers we can provide a level Web content filtering that is robust and effective. And, like everything else we do here, we’re offering this for free.

Here’s how our game-changing system works:

People add Web sites to our system and tag them with a category. For example YouTube.com would be appropriately tagged “video sharing” and MySpace.com would be appropriately tagged “Social Networks.” Other users come along and verify the accuracy of the submitters tag by voting. Once a site crosses a predetermined threshold of votes, it gets added into the category in the OpenDNS system. All this adding and voting happens on our new Community Site – if you haven’t yet seen it, stop by and cast a few votes. Every day this system will get more and more comprehensive, thanks to the help of 100s of 1000s of IT folks who have accounts with us and the millions of OpenDNS users.

You probably already understand why this is far superior to the way security companies categorize sites and deliver filtering services, but allow me to explain briefly the three main reasons our service is better:

• It’s more comprehensive. Our system has tens of thousands of people like you submitting and verifying the accuracy of Web sites’ inclusion in categories. This is in stark contrast to the handful of people employed for this job by security companies.
• It’s faster moving. New Web sites and changes to existing Web sites are constantly being published to the Internet. Other Web content filtering tools update only once nightly, or even less frequently, and therefore fail to catch and categorize everything right away. OpenDNS has the advantage of tens of thousands of people adding and tagging sites at any given time, so users benefit from real-time updates.
• It’s free to use. No longer are you forced to pay top dollar to security companies simply to protect your networks.

Log in to your dashboard now and you’ll see the new filtering categories available to you, and know it will get better and more thorough with time. We launched with just over 30 categories, but if you have a need to block a category not represented in our system let us know and we’ll be happy to accommodate.

Finally, this service (like everything else we offer) is optional and can be enabled in your free OpenDNS account. Let us know if you have any feedback, about any part of the system or how it works. We built this for you.

Admittedly, I was late to the game.

When I finally created a Facebook account +/- one month ago, I was shocked to see all of the people from various phases of my life who’d beat me there. There were childhood friends, high school and college friends, colleagues from all of the different professional positions I’ve held, even family members. I was hooked right away. I know it’s not a competition, but my 86 Facebook friends definitely make me more invested in the site.

What’s more, my job as community manager of OpenDNS is to do just that – have a hand in everything that touches our awesome community. Imagine my surprise to find the group OpenDNS is the Stuff with forty-something members and a moderator whose name I didn’t recognize. (No doubt the coolest Facebook group. If you haven’t yet joined, you really should.) The fact that the group was born outside of our doing is great, but just because I didn’t build it didn’t mean I wasn’t going to be a part of it. I scanned the members, got familiar, intro’d myself to the moderator. And these things take time.

This is all ironic, of course, since I work for a company that blocks Facebook for thousands of businesses, organizations and households around the world. We did a survey recently and found that Facebook was the No. 2 most blocked domain on OpenDNS-using networks. (I’ll give you three guesses what the No. 1 most blocked domain was.) Since I’ve been using Facebook I’ve seen that the site is not unsafe for adults like me. No, not at all. But it does make me unproductive. Someone in my position, with my enthusiasm for Facebook, could easily pass a few hours during the workday tending to their account.

When we launched Web content filtering we weren’t sure who, besides parents and network admins at schools and libraries, would use it. Not everyone wants to be a censor. But I think my Facebook fixation and my acknowledgement that [me + work + Facebook = work not done] is pretty representative. When you’re on the clock, sites like Facebook can be a serious distraction. What you do on your own time, off the clock, is up to you.

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.

We’re launching a powerful new feature today. We are giving you the power to block specific websites. That means you can protect your computer, your house, your office and anything else that uses DNS from being able to service domains that you don’t want to load. Oh, and best of all: This service is totally free.

When customers started to ask for this feature we wondered who would want this. The geeks here in the office remarked that this kind of blocking would be trivial with a Linux server and some proxy/filtering software installed. Then it quickly dawned on us. (Eureka!) It’s not just mom and dad at home who have no easy way to just block an individual domain with any ease but it’s also network administrators at offices. Network administrators can now block problem domains for their entire office in a simple way without having to pay 1000′s of dollars in new hardware and time to achieve similar functionality. Does your ISP’s DNS server let you do this?

Blocking domains is really easy. Here’s how you do it:

1. Sign in to your OpenDNS account and make sure you have a network configured.
2. Go to the Networks tab in your account and click on the Settings icon () for your network.
3. Click on the Blocked domains link and add a domain to be blocked.

You can delete or edit blocked domains on that same page. When you block a domain you block what is technically called a “zone.” This means it also blocks all sub-domains. Here’s an example. If you block craigslist.org then you’ll also be blocking la.craigslist.org (Craigslist Los Angeles) and sfbay.craigslist.org (Craigslist San Francisco), etc. If, instead, you just blocked newyork.craigslist.org then the rest of the Craigslist properties would load just fine.

When you try to visit a domain that is blocked in your network you’ll see a page that looks like this:

Since this is your network, we will show your logo on the blocked page, just as we do on the Guide pages. What? You haven’t uploaded your own logo yet? Go do it now, and go block some domains!

Let us know what you think!