phishing | Vinny Carpenter’s blog

VMware and Verizon team up for mobile virtualization — Tech News and Analysis – Employees who want to combine their work phone and their personal phone will soon be able to do so with the aid of the VMware Horizon software on their phones
Good to Know – Google – Advice for staying more secure on the web and an overview of some of the security tools that Google offers.
OTN TechCast – Oracle SOA Governance demystified for Architects (SOA Governance@work) – Cathy and Bob discuss why SOA Governance is important to different aspects of IT including on-premise applications and the cloud.
Free JSON API to instantly check the spam score of your email messages – Have you ever wanted to process the spam score of incoming or outgoing email messages, but didn’t want the hassle of managing SpamAssassin? Now you can use our lightweight JSON API and instantly integrate spam score processing in your app
Logging the cloud with SimpleDB – Peecho – The solution? Store logs in SimpleDB. Amazon SimpleDB is a highly available, flexible and scalable non-relational data store. It is perfect for this situation. It is eventually consistent, read optimized, highly available and extremely durable.
A Byteman Tutorial | inject side-effects into a simple Java program – You use Byteman to change how a Java program operates without having to edit the source code and recompile it. Actually, you can even use Byteman to modify a running application without needing to stop and restart it. Byteman will happily redefine the behaviour of both application classes and JVM runtime classes like String,Thread etc.
Coding Horror: Serving at the Pleasure of the King – If you choose to deliver software in the Apple ecosystem, this is simply the tradeoff you've chosen to make. Apple developers serve at the pleasure of the king.
InfoQ: Can the Kanban Method Avoid Becoming another Management Fad? – Benjamin Mitchell believes that Kanban risks to become a fad if it does not cover gaps related to experiencing embarrassment and threat, proposing a solution based on the double-loop learning model.
Spring Framework 3.1 RC1 released | SpringSource Team Blog – It is my pleasure to announce that the first Spring Framework 3.1 release candidate has – finally – been released this week! We have been working on this release for several months, completing our milestone work and recently adding support for Java SE 7 and for Hibernate 4.0 to the feature list
InfoQ: New in Google Cloud: SDK 1.5.5, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Prediction API and Premier Accounts – Google Cloud Services has announced a new version of the App Engine SDK (1.5.5) -the frontend request deadline has been raised from 30 sec. to 60 sec., Python 2.7-, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage and Prediction API are out of Code Labs, and Premier Accounts.
Web 2.0 Expo: LinkedIn’s Big Data Lessons Learned – The BrainYard – InformationWeek – Former LinkedIn chief scientist DJ Patil shares advice on turning large-scale data into useful products.
Scott Adams on Taxes, the Wealthy and a Return to the Ocean – WSJ.com – Driving the Rich Into the Sea. Megaship ahoy! To escape higher taxes, the wealthy could relocate…to open waters

I first discovered OpenDNS on Chris Pirillio's blog – OpenDNS is a free service that is designed to make your Internet browsing faster, safer and smarter. And guess what - it does that. OpenDNS is essentially a set of massive distributed DNS caches that allow faster name resolution and yet obey the TTL rules for each domain. They have a very fast geographically distributed network of DNS caches that allow for blazingly fast lookup times which allows for faster connections to those sites. The traditional ISP DNS lookup connects to one of the root name servers which in turn send you to the name server for the top-level domain which will then probably get you to the name-server that is hosting the DNS entry for the site you are trying to connect to. OpenDNS skips all of that and return the IP address of the site you are attempting a connection two in a single request.

The safer surfing part comes into play with the phishing filter built into OpenDNS. OpenDNS intercepts connections against known phishing sites, based on network analysis and feeds from other network operators including their new venture PhishTank. PhishTank is a community anti-phishing Web site where anyone can go to submit suspected phishes, track the status of their submissions and help verify others submissions.

The smarter bit comes in the typo-correction feature of OpenDNS. So if you're going to google.com and misspell Google, OpenDNS first attempts to correct the typo and get you to the right site instead of the squatter sites that are just waiting for that misspelling to land you on their site.

I have been using OpenDNS for months now since I first read Chris's blog entry about OpenDNS and have been extremely happy with the free service. Can't beat the price – I can't really tell if my surfing is any faster but cognitively I know it is and that makes me happy. 🙂

Another thing that really stands out about OpenDNS is the service - I've had two occasions where I've contacted support to check on some DNS changes I made to move my domains from one hosting vendor to another and I got an almost immediate response both times. John Roberts, who is the VP of Product Development responded back in minutes to my query on both occasions and helped me by force clearing the cached entries for my domain.

Anyone and everyone can start using OpenDNS to surf smarter, faster and safer. Check out their Getting Started page for more information on how to change your router or computer DNS settings to start using OpenDNS.

Vinny Carpenter’s blog

{ “passion”: “software development” }

Tag Archives: phishing

OpenDNS Rocks