Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire OpenDNS
newsroom.cisco.com
newsroom.cisco.com
From the "we just got acquired" FAQ:
> The free service will continue to operate. It’s part of who we are, and Cisco loves who we are. We wouldn’t have entered into this agreement if we believed our free service would be in jeopardy. On contrary, Cisco’s commitment back to you is to maintain OpenDNS’s DNS services exactly as it is today. In their words: “This level of service for all users is a priority.”
And were those words in a press release, or a contract?
> If we believed our free service would be in jeopardy. [emphasis added]
Oh look, good intentions. I'm sure everything will be fine then. </sarc>
Question: if it's based on bad experience, repeated ad nauseam, is it still called cynicism?
To me the discussion is more about the principle: we're relying on Cisco's (or whoever else's) benevolence (and/or competence).
Without writing an essay on the stakeholder theory of value, I just want to say that it'd sure be nice if the users of a service were regarded in some way that's more formal than an FAQ & reassurances.
(If auto updates are on, that pretty much eliminates exploits installing malware. (Assuming no one's gonna waste a 0day to install some spam/ad junk.))
1: The only filtering is client side, an ad blocker so they don't grow up accustomed to adverts. And just for general sanity - the web's rather obnoxious otherwise.
Seriously, you need to get back to us in a dozen, dozen and a half years, before you can speak with any authority about your approach to your kids and today's Internet.
What specific issues do you have with the poster's approach to his kids' internet access?
10 year olds goaded on by friends shouldn't be looking at the kinds of materials that are 18+ on the net today. Heck, most of Reddit isn't appropriate for growing minds.
Occasionally, even with Safe Search turned on, images that I don't want my children seeing will pop up under oddly innocuous searches. And it's easy to accidentally stumble upon it, especially to untrained searchers.
Now I know people will have varying opinions about the subject, but I for one (and I know I'm not alone) don't want to view pornography, and certainly don't want my children viewing it, so a filtering service like OpenDNS is awesome. Beyond pornography, there's a lot of other good stuff that you can restrict as well, like hate/discrimination sites, dating sites, etc.--stuff that I don't need and don't need my kids getting involved with an online dating site right now.
Oddly enough, my only experience with OpenDNS is from me convincing my parents to let me try to set it up on the family router because I broke the other control (which makes no sense from a protection / censorship perspective).
If your kids are going on dating sites and dating unacceptable people or whatever - well how is that different than real life? Or as another poster wrote, about viewing beheadings. If my kids decide they want to watch such things, I suppose they'll find a way. I'd be more concerned why they wanted to watch it; isn't that the real problem, not the technical means on how they accomplish it? (Well I suppose beyond once out of curiosity.) I'd be just as upset to find them torturing small animals, but I'm not gonna hide scissors and knives.
It doesn't seem plausible that any kids are going to decide "Hey I wanna hook up with people online, but I got an error. Oh well. I'll play with LEGO instead."
And hell, if my kids read Stormfront or RedPill and decide "hey, that makes sense", then I've failed so hard at teaching them how to evaluate probabilities. At that point, DNS would be the last problem on my mind.
Accidental viewing, eh, I'm not too concerned. When my daughter was learning to spell, she was searching for monsters. Unfortunately, her phonetic attempt came out "man store", which was some bondage or leather thing. We had a good laugh and moved on. Maybe I'm wrong and something will trouble them for life, but it just doesn't seem likely to the point of spending any effort or worry on it.
Do you really think accidentally viewing something unsavory is gonna be a big deal?
Not really. As a parent its a good first line of defence. i.e. A transparent solution catches the worst/obvious stuff & the good old parenting talk covers the rest.
i.e. It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.
It was fun while it lasted, but personally I don't trust the path forward.
2. Is it sad that while OpenDNS has been a handy stopgap for me while I get other options in place, my first thought is "well, there goes OpenDNS..."
I spent quite a bit of my earlier tech days as a Cisco admin, so I have grown to hate them with a fiery passion only reserved for entities that buck/subvert standards and license companies to death because they have market dominance.
the management of this site has said many times that they are fine with paywalled submissions.
I'm quite happy with dnsmadeeasy. It's a paid service, but cheap enough to compete with the time cost of me setting up DNS on my own servers.
Slowly, I've been more and more adept of paying for the services I do use. Also, more and more, there are good SaaS offerings at the price point that doesn't make me think too much about the expense (up to 50USD/year).
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&url=http://www.w...
There's refcontrol[1] for Firefox. There are other options for Chrome[2].
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/refcontrol/
But do they have any other freemium services like the personal/family tiers of OpenDNS? I can't think of any.
(I started OpenLate)
And in licensing model, be sure to include adding checks to lock out fair competiton ("genuine" checks). There's probably some other shitty things they've done that I'm not recalling ATM.
But otherwise? Well I probably am partial to what I first learned. But I recently tried Fortinet, and the configuration is so braindead stupid, I felt bad for all the times I got annoyed with Cisco.
Support is also a bear. I can't think of a time Cisco has significantly improved an acquisition in the near term.
I think https://www.opennicproject.org is a nice alternative.
I'd probably be very vigilant about their future contributions to Libsodium as well.
Being paid to work on opensource projects is a dream of many, but it rarely happens :(