David Ulevitch will be presenting OpenDNS as part of STIRR 1.5 on Wednesday, August 9. He has 60 seconds to describe what we do. If there’s a recording/podcast, we’ll link to it.

Sorry… the event is invitation only, in Palo Alto, California, USA. But if you want to attend, drop us a note and we’ll see what we can do about an intro to the STIRR folks.

Update: Here’s a short (four minute) interview with David from HotFromSiliconValley.com, recorded after the presentation.

For the audio-inclined, I wanted to share with you two recent clips about OpenDNS.

The first is an interview of David Ulevitch by Mark Howson of The Mac Nurse, conducted via Skype on July 20. The interview runs a bit over 14 minutes. Go listen for yourself (link is to web page, not file). Mark put together an interesting slideshow on top of the audio interview.

The second item for your listening pleasure comes courtesy of David Redekop, one of the founders of Nerds on Site. David and his colleagues join host Ryan Spence every Tuesday to talk about technology on Ask the Experts, on Newstalk 1290 CJBK, in London, Ontario, Canada. This past Tuesday, July 25, Redekop told Spence (and his audience) about OpenDNS.

Listen to the MP3 (6 minutes, 53 seconds; 1.6MB). Redekop explains DNS, explains phishing (and how DNS can help…more on this soon), and explains OpenDNS. I’m pleased to hear that he’s been using OpenDNS since he heard about it, and considers it for his clients.

I would clear up one point from the Ask the Experts segment. The search results page you see if

1. OpenDNS cannot resolve the entered domain
2. OpenDNS cannot fix a typo

has both organic (unpaid) search results and clearly labelled advertisements. Redekop says he think that OpenDNS is a service worth using even if all the results are ads on that page (thanks!), but I wanted to clear that up all the same.

Note: In describing OpenDNS, Redekop throws out what he calls “the old phrase”: “There’s majesty in simplicity and simplicity in majesty.” I didn’t recognize the phrase, but a bit of poking around leads us to Alexander Pope, the English poet.

There is a certain majesty in simplicity which is far above all the quaintness of wit.

Learn something new every day.

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.