OpenDNS

Ran across a service this week called OpenDNS. Basically, they offer to resolve names for anyone who cares to point to them. Pure and simple. That's just for starters though... They have done some really nifty tricks that I haven't seen done before in the DNS layer.

• They can fix basic typos in the web address of your browser. Yep, if you happen to screw up ".com" or ".org", the service will take a guess and redirect you to the most obvious root domain. I haven't yet tested the extent of this, but it is a clever trick. Yeah, it's not revolutionary, but still, it saves a few seconds.
  
• They claim to block phishing sites. This is probably a good thing, but frankly just not something I really need. If you're reading this and you, for some insane reason, click on any link that is sent to your email, then yes, you want phishing sites blocked. I wasn't able to determine from their website where they get the list of known phishing sites. My hunch is that it could be stale at any given point in time.
• They also block adult websites. This is historically a difficult thing to do as these websites come and go very quickly. It looks like OpenDNS has partnered with another company that reviews websites and maintains a blacklist. The really interesting thing about this feature is doing it with DNS. No proxy software to install only to have the teenagers work around it. No web filtering crap that tries to load into your browser. It's just simple and clean. An enterprising youth could likely still get where they wanted to go by running through a proxy server that isn't resolving against OpenDNS, but at least this keeps the honest kids honest.
• They do some other tricks with hostname redirection to provide the ability to do "shortcuts" in your web browser. Some may find this useful. I, personally, do not. Sites that I frequent enough to need a shortcut seem to find themselves in my Firefox history so I rarely type a full URL anyway.

Anyway, I was also impressed with was the clean and professional look of their website and the excellent documentation. You can check them out here. You may or may not run into problems bypassing the DNS servers provided to you by your ISP. Chances are you will be fine, but if they are offering some services internally to their own customers, then it is likely these will be invisible to you after switching your computer to use the OpenDNS service.