I think I’d heard of OpenDNS before today, but it was the announcement of their latest funding round that got me looking more closely.

There are many things to like in terms of the reliability and security aspects of the offering; though I have concerns that the filtering angle quickly runs into the censorship territory that I suffered from over the past few years stuck behind corporate net filters.

I’m working at my club today, so I was intrigued to see that they had an OpenDNS server at the top of their search list from DHCP – cool. What’s a lot less cool is that there’s nothing to stop me from signing up an account using the club IP, self certify ‘ownership’ and then turn the filters up to the max as self appointed arbiter of club decency and web surfing habits.

This probably hasn’t been much of an issue for OpenDNS yet, as I imagine that few WiFi providers are choosing to use their service; but something needs to be figured out so that users can’t pwn censorship rights over networks where the admins have been smart enough to choose a ‘better’ DNS service, but not smart enough to take active control over its management (something that will become a much bigger issue as smaller ISPs choose to give up on running their own DNS sloping shoulders in OpenDNS’s direction).