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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

>NXDOMAIN hijacking //

You and waffle_ss both mention this, can you expand on what problem you're facing. I use OpenDNS because of the filtering abilities and because I found on test that they were marginally faster for me than Google.

Next to never do I see their domain redirect page and whenever I have it's always had the domain I've been after at the top of the page - for example, http://guide.opendns.com/?url=ycambinator.com. Yes it has a couple of text-ads but for the 2-3s you're on the page I can't see that I really have any problem with this at all ... it's way less intrusive than the ads on most websites now.

So what's the issue? Is it really akin to being robbed at gunpoint?

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It's really just a quirk that I would rather not deal with. If I run dig on a hostname, that means I want to know about whatever records are associated with that hostname. If I try to get a program to connect to an invalid hostname I want it to say that's the problem instead of waiting a minute or two for the connection attempt to time out. It's also kind of backwards. If I want that kind of functionality, shouldn't that be in the browser?

Hmm.. minor correction.. It seems that, with OpenDNS, test.invalid returns NXDOMAIN, test.invali gives me 67.215.65.132. Oh well. When I made that other post I assumed they would be the same.

You seem to be taking offense to something that wasn't said. The term "hijacking" is used here in much the same sense as "signal hijacking" or the program Audio Hijack. The relevant part of the "hijack" imagery is forcibly taking over the way a transport. It essentially means they are causing DNS requests to return against-spec responses.

Hyperbole blah-blah-blah.

>they are causing DNS requests to return against-spec responses //

That's part of their service. If there was no way to switch it off then I can understand being annoyed but you can just choose to use your ISP's DNS.

It just appeared to me that both comments concerning this were of the form "ZOMG they has borken my internetz"; could be I read the tone wrong.

So anyway, for the service that OpenDNS are offering is it wrong of them to simplify the situation for users making mistakes entering domain names in their browser?

I think "wrong" is a good word for it. Users typing things into an address field in a Web browser is not the only use case for DNS, but this breaks DNS for the whole system, which is the wrong solution. Correcting mistakes in the address field is something browsers should take care of. Firefox and Chrome both do — I know Safari doesn't, and I can't remember what IE does. In fact, Chrome has to employ a rather ugly hack to work around this behavior from noncompliant DNS servers.

>not the only use case for DNS //

Of course. But I think that's exclusively the use case that OpenDNS target in their consideration of non-resolving domains.

The problem with DNS hijacking is not breaking the Web, it's breaking a lot of other protocols. I dont know which of the issues are worse, but see for yourself:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=nxdomain+hijacking+break+dns

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