I was here before it was Slashdot...

What are you talking about? You might not have like the ads, but we never lied about anything. Our service was super clear about how it worked. And for those who didn't like the redirection, it has always been possible to create an account and disable that part of the service.

We have been building a data privacy and data usage policy document that we plan to release soon.

One of the many, many reasons to turn off ads is that we had to share some potentially personally identifiable information with ad partners (indirectly when making ad requests, they would just see it in the ad request), so by turning off ads, our privacy / data policy will be a lot more clear and will not need to have weird "certain third parties for certain services" kind of language to address the advertising business.

We're waiting to turn off ads, we'll get the document cleaned up, and we'll publish it.

-David

Nope. Never.

We wouldn't make such a case for turning off ads if this was our business model going forward. You could visit our site and see how we make money. We sell security services. We never could have done it without first being a consumer service, but we're not selling your data. Come on.

-David

Nope. Never. We've never sold our data. We've never even used it for marketing purposes internally.

We've only ever made money from one of three things: Ads, selling individuals an ad-free version, and enterprise security services.

Today, most all of our revenue, and all of our growth, comes from selling enterprise security. If you work in IT, it's worth checking out to improve your security posture. There's a lot more to it than you might guess.

-David

As long as my UID still exists and shows up... I'm all good with the changes. :-)

Yeah, it's pretty low.

I guess this is an appropriate post for me to comment in. Nice work Slashdot, still going strong.

Happy to answer questions about this work.

If it were a competition that mattered, I feel like I could compete. :-)

You guys provided the platform which educated, informed and helped shape my views on technology and the Internet.

Thanks for all the fish. :-)

-davidu

He titled his blog post "In a CDN'd world, OpenDNS is the enemy!" not "Using third-party DNS resolvers can in some cases cause suboptimal server targeting."

I thought my response and followups were fairly even-keeled all things considered but appreciate the feedback. I have no ill will to the author and welcome his further tests.

I always encourage testing and was actually happy to see you posted your scripts. You can email me at david at opendns dot com if you want to discuss further. I just don't think your testing methodology backs up your rather bold claims.

What you're suggesting is really just another way of saying a "Man in the middle" attack. IE, someone in transit can copy, inspect or re-route your packets and do bad stuff. That always exists when using insecure channels, and is a different concern. DNS will never eliminate that concern actually. Even with DNSSEC. End to end dynamic ad-hoc encryption would, but that's a pipe dream. :-)