OpenDNS says they are being blocked by Verizon
dslreports.com
dslreports.com
How did this happen? We have, in the past, been blocked by Verizon Wireless, either deliberately or due to technical issues, but it is not the case today. I've been a VW customer for a few years, and it's a great service. And today, Verizon FIOS service requires the user to have CPE that doesn't allow the user to change their DNS (same with ATT U-Verse). Sprint Wireless blocks us today, and always has.
In my phone interview, done too hastily or speaking too quickly, I misspoke when speaking about Verizon FIOS and Sprint Wireless as examples of how our customers aren't able to use our service and mixed up the companies. That or the reporter misheard. Either way, this is a good reminder of why it's always better to do email-based interviews. The reporter in this case is a very good one whom I've worked with in the past, so I'm confident the error was mine. In fact, most of the post (it's a Q&A) doesn't really capture the entirety of our discussion, which is unfortunate. My actual sentiments are far less anti-ISP and pro-Google than I think they came out. (repeat, I really dislike phone interviews)
It's unfortunate that I wasn't able to correct the story earlier, though we did work to get the original Washington Post blog updated right after it posted (and it was corrected). Other sites didn't quite seem to pick up the update. I've been trying to update other blogs where I can because it's not fair for VW to be painted in this light. It should have been Sprint Wireless. Some folks on my staff have also worked with Verizon Wireless to make sure that they are not blocking us, and I thank them for their efforts.
I'm hesitant to publicly disagree with the founder of OpenDNS, but I have a different experience. FiOS doesn't require the use of their provided CPE for Internet access. The ONTs installed have both Ethernet and MoCA ports, and I use a non-Verizon device connected to the ONT's Ethernet. Using a non-MoCA CPE will break Verizon's television boxes, but the fix for this is to simply plug Verizon's supplied CPE into both an Ethernet port on the replacement and the shared coax segment.
It seems you've got a work-around. We'd love to update our knowledge base with this. I can't find contact info on your user page, can you email me david at opendns dot com as I have a few more questions.
Consider the example of comcast, an ISP that uses opt-out DNS redirection advertising, but has been forced to give up the practice for its DNSSEC resolvers:
* We believe that the web error redirection function of Comcast Domain Helper is technically incompatible with DNSSEC.
* Comcast has always known this and plans to turn off such redirection when DNSSEC is fully implemented.
* The production network DNSSEC servers do not have Comcast Domain Helper's DNS redirect functionality enabled.
* We recently updated our IETF Internet Draft on this subject, available at http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-livingood-dns-redirect, to reflect this.
It's no different than hearing about the results of a new RFC from google even if you use bing for search.
Of course there are plenty of other ways to blacklist or redirect IPs - using routes, RBL subscriptions in software firewalls or through browsers like the google safe browsing subscriptions. DNSSEC won't be the place to do it, though.
By default they point NXDOMAIN to their own landing page, blacklist 'known phishing sites', and proxy some Google requests through their own servers to defeat clever browser address bars.
Most Internet users believe everything that their ISPs tell them about what is necessary to use their service, especially when it doesn't work until they do it, so getting users to add a new authorised root DNSSEC key is not going to be an impossible hurdle.
It would be similar to an ISP requiring you to trust their root CA so they could MITM your SSL sessions. Sure, some enterprises do this through their management systems, but a big ISP that required this would likely get hit by a large amount of negative reactions.
First, the relationship your computer has with the DNS is as a "stub resolver", meaning that you rely on real DNS resolver hosted somewhere else to do the walk from the roots to the leaf names. DNSSEC doesn't protect (or, more appropriately, disrupt) stub resolution (a different protocol, TSIG, does this instead). If Comcast operates the real resolver and all you do is aim your computer at it, you have little opportunity to "disagree" with the results they feed you.
Secondly, regardless of how much noise people may be making about DNSSEC's impending deployment (and it's been impending about as long as IPv6), the prospects for widespread DNSSEC adoption aren't great. It solves very few problems, is a bear to administer, and creates operational problems. Most of the Internet is (thankfully) oblivious to its attempted deployment.
DNSSEC deployment seems to be going rather well to me, compared to a year ago the root servers are signing, several major TLD's are signed, and common registrars support signed zones in those TLDs. Individual zone signing really isn't that difficult, and besides, almost everyone uses third party DNS hosting. Once a few major DNS hosters start signing zones by default you'll see adoption skyrocketing, don't you think?
DNSSEC is not exposed to applications the way SSL is and so you will never see widespread adoption.
Take Chrome for example. Chrome is in the best position to make use of DNSSEC since it does it's own resolving, and even they don't see the value in it. They may do it in the background, but they won't make it user visible any time soon. Reasons from Chrome devs are very well articulated here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=50874
That said, I do believe that stub resolvers will go away, with every client running a full-blown recursor, but that still won't make DNSSEC solve the problems that need solving.
DNSCurve makes no attempt to authenticate the source of the DNS data and instead relies on only securing the connection between the the client and server (or server and server). In this way, DNSCurve does not prevent a service provider like openDNS from replacing NXDOMAIN returns with their own sponsored pages.
DNSSEC instead aims to "protect DNS content from third party modification" which would include third parties like openDNS. Performing this modification is the basis of DNS redirection. OpenDNS's strong complaints about DNSSEC and adoption of an obscure replacement (DNSCurve - About 6,620 results; DNSSEC - About 6,730,000 results) would seem to confirm my original suggestion much better than I can do myself.
Paul Vixie on the matter:
The problem statement for DNSSEC was: "how can we protect DNS content from third party modification?" The first parties in this case are the the zone administrator who produces the primary zone content and the ultimate end user or application who consumes that content. Third parties include Dan Kaminsky or anyone else who might bombard a client with spoofed replies attempting to guess transaction ID's and port numbers; secondary name server operators or hackers who break into those systems; recursive name server operators who may want to rewrite www.google.com to their own search page or to rewrite negative responses to point to their own advertising servers; firewall and IDS operators who might want to rewrite all answers containing profanity or pornography or other illicit content to point at a walled garden. From DNSSEC's point of view, only the zone administrator should be able to produce content within the namespace of a zone. There are no exceptions.
And anyways, Paul has changed his thinking since then on this subject too. He now prefers the model that OpenDNS has done since 2005: http://www.isc.org/community/blog/201007/taking-back-dns-0
He may disagree with the NXDOMAIN wildcard that we do (which we will probably phase out in the long run anyways) but there is no question that allowing end-users to control their responses as they see fit makes tremendous sense.
Do you think you should have to receive all email sent to your mail server? Of course not.
Why should DNS be any different? Your network, your rules.
Clearly any client that wishes to can simply fail to set DO and ED and will receive a traditional, non-validated response.
If the client identifies that they wish authenticated data, they still have plenty of opportunities to act once they receive the authentic zone response. You mention mail host blacklisting, but typical DNS based blacklists have always been based on secondary lookups ie - 1.2.3.4.dnsbl.example.com - and not by forging the originator domain records.
I'm returning signed content from my server to an end user, whether I am a root server, tld, or single domain server. There is no more reason you should have the authority to alter that data than there would be if I was returning an HTTPS response.
It's only in the case where the client explicitly asks you to provide authenticated original zone data but you wish to return to them unauthenticated and modified zone data that you run into problems with DNSSEC.
I believe that should change, as I mentioned previously, but even the DNSSEC proponents pretend to assume the edge is DNSSEC-aware. It most certainly was and is not from their design and implementation stand-point. A position I find ridiculous.
But back to your point -- Of course, we could support DNSSEC and validate responses and then modify them as we see fit. Which is exactly why DNSSEC does not prevent our service from working. We already have some of the largest companies in the world forwarding DNS to us, when we enable DNSSEC validation for them, nothing will change. FWIW, none of them have us wildcard NXDOMAIN responses either, which is not surprising. They do have us block content, however. Some of these are Fortune 50 companies, btw.
I don't know or care why OpenDNS pushed for DNScurve adoption (I don't use or approve of OpenDNS; I think its performance benefits are apocryphal and that its NXDOMAIN interception breaks the Internet in more pernicious ways than any Verizon filter). But I do object to the subtext that DNScurve --- or critiques of the vast, unruly briar patch of DNSSEC standards --- must have ulterior motives.
And as someone who cares about (but does not always live up to) the debate standards of Hacker News, I object to the way you responded to a factual correction by kicking up dust about motives. It was wrong for you to imply that DNSSEC was going to be a serious technical hurdle to NXDOMAIN interception.
(Funny story; my work laptop has some software installed that only allows ssh connections to be made when connected to the VPN. But when connected to the VPN, there are no routes to the Internet, so I can't check my email while traveling with my work laptop. Change my sshd to bind port 443 in addition to 22, though, and ... the restriction is gone.
Censoring the Internet is hard, even when you control the network or client machine!)
Or roll out your own. It probably won't be the fastest option but close enough and, more importantly, fully under your control.
In addition, my /etc/hosts file includes the hosts file from http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/, which aliases ad and tracker site domains to localhost.
Ad blockers suppress ads, but do not provide positive reinforcement. Site blocking software systems filter unwanted content, but do not substitute desired content in its place. It's not enough to slap the user's hand.
The domain name filtering service OpenDNS displays a block page at http://block.opendns.com if a site meets the criteria for filtering. This is negative reinforcement. OpenDNS might provide positive reinforcement if users could to substitute something else, for example, an online to-do list such as http://rememberthemilk.com, for the block page.
Maybe OpenDNS could provide such a service.