One week ago, OpenDNS opened up its free DNS service for everyone to use. It’s been a fun week, with lots of feedback. It’s great to be listening to customers, rather than predicting (guessing) what the reaction will be.

We’re reading everything and responding where possible. Probably still a few dozen of you who deserve an email response… it will come! Most of our public responses have been on individual blogs, to make sure the individual sees the response. David, our CEO, has been an active member of the NANOG and dns-operators mailing lists for years, and he’s contributed in those forums, too. We’ve heard from you over the phone, via email, via blog comment, in person and over IM (our team addresses are listed).

I’ve been flagging blog and media mentions on del.icio.us, and you can see the most recent 20 items listed in the OpenDNS press center. Or you can watch the del.icio.us page directly, if you prefer. Not every reference is positive. Fine… we learn a lot from listening to our critics. If we’ve missed a worthy reference, please bring it to my attention, either via email or even via a for:pencoyd tag in del.icio.us.

So far, we’ve been adding to our FAQ to address concerns and questions which we’ve seen come up in multiple places, whether blogs, articles, email or IM. If you haven’t read the FAQ in a while, take a look. It doesn’t shrink!

It might be more helpful for us to start responding on this blog, too. In the next few days, we’ll provide more details here about our identification of phishing sites, how we’re handling DNSBL and mail servers (hint: click on the new preferences link, top right of every page), our network buildout, additional stats and more.

Note: one of our favorites, a thorough review, with actual testing of the speed for that individual.

Tom Merritt and Veronica Belmont from CNET Buzz Out Loud took a few minutes on Monday to talk about OpenDNS.

Listen to the brief clip about OpenDNS (3 minutes, 10 seconds long; 1.5MB).

Thank you to Tom and CNET for permission to host the clip, which was pulled from the Buzz Out Loud show for July 10, 2006. They make tech pretty fun every day.

In the clip, Tom does a good job succinctly explaining what DNS is before talking about the service more broadly, rightly saying that it’s a pretty easy switch to make. Tom tried it personally, and both of them liked the idea (listen for yourself).

Tom and Veronica also discuss how OpenDNS interacts with corporate networks, and that’s something we should explain more.

Internal resources — for example, a web tool you might use for reporting vacation days — often takes advantage of local DNS resolution. In that case, using OpenDNS may prevent you from getting to those resources and you will have to turn off OpenDNS while you use them. There is no logical way for us to address internal resources, yet. On a related note, if on a VPN to a corporate network not using OpenDNS, you will be using the corporate DNS server, rather than OpenDNS, until you leave the VPN.

Of course, we encourage network admins to use OpenDNS as a forwarder, where internal requests are handled internally, and external requests are handled by OpenDNS. Happy to provide more details and help to anyone interested.

“Site-Lookup Service Foils Fraud” is Ryan Singel’s Wired News writeup about OpenDNS. Ryan and Kevin Poulsen, senior editor at Wired, publish 27BStroke6, a blog about security and privacy, so they grokked what we’re doing — putting some new intelligence into DNS.

Ulevitch’s seven-person startup is an attempt to revolutionize a layer of the internet’s architecture in order to clean its underbelly of scammers and spammers.

One important feature which is not yet available, but will be soon, is self-service control over the DNS settings. Ryan’s article, understandably, doesn’t mention this capability, since it’s not yet live.

The point? We’re going to put more control in your hands, so if you want to turn off features like typo correction or phishing prevention, you’ll be able to. Account management is the top priority now, to help demonstrate the power of control over your DNS. We think transparency and control will show you (not just tell) that we’re making the right choices. (UPDATE: July 17, 2006: try the preferences out. First step, with more to come. November 7, 2006: Set up an OpenDNS account.)

I encourage you to read the article for yourself. Having worked to explain what we do via our website, it’s rewarding to read an external description of OpenDNS that makes a lot of sense. Lots of people are reading the article and submitting excellent questions: we’ll be adding to the FAQ today.