Comments on: OpenDNS Does Free Adult Blocking from St. Bernard!

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:55:27 +0000

@Raul

I agree, MySpace is crap, but I don’t think parental filtering of such sites is on. Why hasn’t your dad given you a chance to discuss MySpace, it’s not like it’s hardcore porn or anything is it? Talk to him. He may have serious misconceptions about the web and what is and what isn’t out there. Gee, there are some sites that try to debunk evolution through pseudoscience, I’d be more worried that my kids were visiting those than MySpace!

Meanwhile, check out this post on how to open banned sites (VPN is the key).

By: David Szpunar

David Szpunar — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:19:07 +0000

@Roul: Sorry, I have tested bypassing OpenDNS as an educational experiment to assist IT people in making informed blocking decisions. I will not provide customized consulting to someone trying to break through web filtering that they are supposed to be subject to. Moreover, I personally do not like MySpace and consider it the source of some of the worst web design in existence, not to mention the malware that has propagated through that site in the past, and thus would not condone getting through filters to get there anyway. Your dad has done you quite a good service to block MySpace in my opinion, if only more people felt the way he does :-)

By: Raul Laforcada

Raul Laforcada — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:13:57 +0000

Hello;
how can i bypass my dad’s opendns service, he’s blocked almost every page now, i can’t get into myspace, and i’ve tried using a proxy anonymizer but he blocked them as well, can anyone please help me.
i wanna try using the translation pages

By: David Szpunar

David Szpunar — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 18:18:25 +0000

@David Bradley: That is good to know; I'm going to have to do some more research on DNS rebinding attacks now! I know about their extended content filtering already; that's another cool new feature! They've taken their PhishTank community-voting setup and moved it over to categorize sites. Good move in my opinion!

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 06:55:39 +0000

OpenDNS is so much more than content filtering (which they've extended by the way). They can now protect against DNS rebinding attacks. db

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 19:19:02 +0000

I’ll this out further an report back if I find out any more. Thanks for taking the time to investigate

By: David Szpunar

David Szpunar — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 14:14:18 +0000

You got me. I haven’t actually tried the Google trick, I’ve just heard about it. So I did a Google search (what else? :-) for “bypass proxy with google translation” and found a plethora of sites…yes it’s a URL hack, according to O’Reilly. There appears to be two alternate methods according to tech-recipes: using Google’s Mobile Device proxy, and viewing pages from their cache.

I tested the URL hack for the translate service and it worked perfectly for me! It redirects links on the site through the translator as well, so other than the top frame it’s pretty seamless. This would bypass the OpenDNS blocks but if you were running something like DansGuardian and it caught a page with the actual content filtering, it would still be blocked.

Also, from what I’ve read, some other commercial filters know about this stuff and look deeper into the URL to block proxies like this. I’m not sure of which ones off the top of my head. But that’s just not possible at the DNS level to my knowledge, since only the top level domain (TLD) is ever passed to the DNS server.

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 10:04:05 +0000

I’ve been using OpenDNS for a couple of days now, having resolved some issues with my ISP, which you can read about on http://www.sciencetext.com/

I too would like to be able to override their filters on an adhoc basis, but don’t believe this can be done.

But, I am intrigued by your comment on English2English translation via Google, how do you do that? Is it simply an obvious URL hack?

By: OpenDNS Releases Adult Site Blocking Service » anchorite.org

OpenDNS Releases Adult Site Blocking Service » anchorite.org — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 21:37:44 +0000

[…] David Szpunar posted about a new Adult Site Blocking service from OpenDNS this morning. This is great news, as that I have had great experience with OpenDNS and so far they have been extremely reliable and responsive. After ScrubIT blocked Google.com, I was hesitant to re-enable them on the church network (especially since we never got a response about what happened). […]