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Comment by davidu | Hacker News Reader

It's been years since we did that, and they were not spam pages, and easily able to opt-out.

Well, the fact that people still remember goes to show what a truly terrible idea it really was and that it probably did permanent damage to your brand.

I'm not sure what metric you use to judge it as terrible.

I thought it was great. 10,000 companies pay for my service today. 65 million people use my infrastructure today. Cisco bought the company for more than $650m. It continues to innovate on the decades old DNS in secure and useful ways.

So let me know what part is terrible.

The part where you repeated Verisign's mistake in breaking a fundamental protocol.

NXDOMAIN. Kind of a thing, and important to protocols other than HTTP.

The point is that the company did just fine even having made a mistake. Ignoring that is just being difficult.

No, the point that a company doing just fine is somehow an excuse for its actions is just the reason why we can't have nice things.

"I got mine."

I used OpenDNS for a long time. I eventually switched to Google DNS mostly because its IPs are shorter and easier to remember, and I didn't use any of the power user features for OpenDNS. I remember the page full of ads and to be honest I don't begrudge it. We all expect everything given to us for free these days, and then we don't even want the company to make money showing us an ad on the rare occasion that we mistype a URL. It's hard to get paid these days.

Ironically, those unrealistic expectations are probably a significant factor in the growth of data mining and resell; how else is a free-to-use website that doesn't have any ads (or whose users mostly block ads) going to get paid? You may say "not my problem", but it affects you when you leave the company no option but to resell data on the behaviors they observe from you.

That is not an appropriate tone for someone representing OpenDNS to take.

Why not? It's blunt, but to the point, honest, and passionate. Who cares about tone?

And seems very appropriate for the founder of OpenDNS. Pretty authoritative.

Because it's dismissive.

Everyone has preferences, I guess. I far prefer honest and curt to the kind of anodyne, contentless word-payloads pumped out by so many corporate communications departments.

Say, generating corporate communications seems like a promising direction for neural networks. A Markov chain comes close...

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