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Comment by mdellabitta | Hacker News Reader

> It's ridiculous to say we broke things for many people.

Two weeks ago, I had to swap my company's network over to OpenDNS because Google DNS was having an outage. And then a day later, I spent 2 hours trying to chase down a problem running something that turned out was a result of OpenDNS feeding a page full of ads to something that was expecting JSON.

You might not have broken things for all the people that continued to use your service, but you broke things for people like me. And this is a place where people like me hang out....

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The application broke because it couldn't handle unexpected input, I think you stated the problem and it was the application. OpenDNS has been clear about returning an HTML page of adverts. I appreciate the category level filter and the ability to block known harmful sites from my family's casual browsing. When my wife or kids want to browse to gun, gambling, typo-squatting or hate sites they'll need to learn how to resolve IP addresses (and I'll be proud of them). I also hope they'll learn to code and safely handle unexpected input. [Edit: you didn't say your application unsafely handled the input, just making the point and not meaning to sound too snarky]

The application worked fine as long as long as dns worked the way it was supposed to.

However robust an application is it can't handle being fed html ads instead if application spesific json.

When you are finished rethinking this you can go on to think a second time about censoring your wifes Internet access. Do onto others etc....

OpenDNS worked the way it was supposed to. It wasn't the right DNS solution for this situation.

I also don't think OpenDNS is a tool of censorship, as it is so easily circumvented. I hope my children learn how to circumvent tools of censorship and this can be their first practice... Until then it reduces the risk of accidentally going to phishing websites.

> I also don't think OpenDNS is a tool of censorship, as it is so easily circumvented.

Was the first version of Great Firewall also no censorship since it was easily circumventable?

> I hope my children learn how to circumvent tools of censorship and this can be their first practice.

Children, yes. I didn't comment on them.

When happens when DNS lookup fails and JSON is missing? Need to handle that case.

Correct.

I'm only pointing out that in this spesific case it had nothing to do with the robustness of the application.

More specifically: A better application might have warned you about the failing part so that you won't have to go looking for it. Fixing the problem would still include either replacing OpenDNS or working around it.

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