David Ulevitch thinks network administrators have better things to do than manage expensive web filtering solutions; he also believes ‘free’ sounds good for a price tag.
Some of the blog elite will spend time debating the merits of prettified news aggregator Newspond today. Those of us who have chewed on a Cat-5 cable or two know the important support technology is never as superficially attractive as the application level.
Where admins turned to OpenDNS to improve responsiveness for web queries, they can now enable filtering via a community-based domain tagging system. If this reminds you of PhishTank the phish fighting service also run by OpenDNS, you would be correct in thinking that.
Ulevitch told Murdok in advance of today’s launch how some intrepid OpenDNS users already started filtering sites with the existing service. People tried adding hundreds of domains through OpenDNS this way, a very clunky way of solving the problem.
Today’s debut gives admins a way to manage web filtering through their OpenDNS dashboard. Numerous domains have been tagged already, and the community will continue tagging them to improve the quality of the filter.
Ulevitch already considered the potential negative side to community tagging. Using a model similar to that of PhishTank, the more accurate a tagger’s vote for a site, the more weight that vote gets on other domains.
This keeps potential smart alecks from tagging adult sites as being healthcare or fashion related, for example. The majority of taggers will label content accurately, and their opinions will matter more when tagging future domains.
To Ulevitch, using OpenDNS saves someone the “protection money” they would pay for licensing and support of a filtering solution. With OpenDNS a hosted option, one also doesn’t incur the hardware cost of a device to handle the web filter.
