Tag: DNS

This week we're running a series of posts that tackle common Windows networking issues, and some tips and tricks that might speed up or improve your network stability. You can find more tech tips in our Tips index. There are plenty of good reasons to use a custom DNS server on your computers. Some services -- like Google DNS -- can provide a speed boost to your Web browsing. Other services -- ...

Coming up with a good domain name these days is akin to finding a parking spot in New-York. Accordingly, tools for finding free domain names abound, and most of them offer some sort of a "brainstorming interface". The idea is to help you come up with a domain name nobody (including yourself) considered before. Domize is one of the nicer attempts at this sort of thing. At its simplest form, it's a ...

Google Chrome's (and Chromium's) about:flags page is becoming quite the playground for intrepid feature testers. In a recent Chromium snapshot build, another handy new feature has appeared: user-specified DNS servers. Being able to specify custom servers right in the browser might not be a big deal on other operating systems -- where you can already do that in your network settings. On Chrome ...

Finding a nice, catchy .com domain name is not exactly an easy task these days. It can often seem like all of the good ones are taken, and you're left with something like www.my-awesome-new-project.com. Brute Force Naming attempts to alleviate this problem by systematically filtering through a ton of options in order to see if any of them are free. You provide it with a bunch of possible ...

There's one thing pretty much all of my retail customers could use: a little extra help avoiding malicious websites and links while browsing the internet. Sunbelt Software -- who develop a handful of very capable antivirus and firewall apps -- think so too, and are offering a new service called ClearCloud to provide that help. ClearCloud operates just like OpenDNS and Google Public DNS. Simply ...

It's only been live for a few hours, and Google hasn't yet published before-and-after comparisons, but it looks like speculative pre-connection is now built into the developer tree of Chromium. As with most of these clever under-the-hood type changes, it's hard to describe just how much this will improve your browsing experience, but I'm going to try. Basically, pre-connection opens an HTTP ...

This bit of news is really over the top: It turns out that China required GoDaddy to obtain photo headshot identification of all Chinese nationals who tried to register domains with them. They were then to transfer this identification to a Chinese authority called the Network Information Center (CNNIC) so that they could "review" it. Not only that, but they were supposed to do it retroactively, ...

DNS hijacking and poisoning has been around since the dawn of time -- it just didn't enter the popular media until recent high-profile attacks on Twitter, Baidu, and the success of China's Golden Shield Project. Basically, DNS in its current form is incredibly insecure when compared to corporate infrastructure. With DNS hacks it's very easy to set up pharming (think 'farming' combined with ...

As reported by TheNextWeb in the wee small hours of the morning, the most popular search engine in China has just been hacked by the 'Iranian Cyber Army'. This is the same group that brought down Twitter and an advocacy site supporting the Iranian presidential protesters. Comments on TheNextWeb suggest that the site (Baidu) wasn't down for long. It was also the same kind of attack on Twitter: ...

Google's Public DNS has been up and running for a few days now, and the reviews and benchmarks are slowly starting to trickle in. Initial results seem to suggest that it works well, but may not be a blanket solution for all, or even many, Internet users. It seems to depend wildly from ISP to ISP. If you're fortunate enough to have an Internet provider like Verizon's FiOS that runs a ...

Don your tin foil hats, ladies and gentlemen. Take the following news with a pinch of salt and admire their noble privacy policy. Now brace yourself: Google, with the benevolent and seemingly-altruistic intent of speeding up the Internet, have just launched a public DNS service. What is DNS? Computers on the Internet don't actually have names -- they have numerical IP addresses. DNS maps names ...

IPv6 authoritative nameserver records are in the process of being added to six of the world's thirteen DNS root servers. Root servers are the computers at the top of the DNS hierarchy that are crucial in helping you turn downloadsquad.com into an IP address for your computer's benefit. This change means that networks using IPv6 will be able to use the root servers to resolve Internet hostnames ...

digg_url = "http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2008/01/17/n-dakota-judge-rules-that-host-l-command-constitutes-hacking/"; A North Dakota judge issued a ruling in Sierra Corporate Design v. Ritz that has some pretty stunning implications about the use of the "host -l" command when accessing DNS records. In the judgment (which was prepared by the plaintiff's counsel and sent to the judge), the use of ...

digg_url = "http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2008/01/15/dls-interview-opendns-founder-and-ceo-david-ulevitch/";We are long-time fans of the free DNS-lookup service OpenDNS, which serves as a replacement for your ISP's DNS. We recently got a chance to ask the founder and CEO of OpenDNS, David Ulevitch, for a quick history of OpenDNS and for an update on the service. DLS: What got you involved in ...

BIND, the Berkley Internet Name Domain server, is the decentralized name-to-address service upon which the internet runs. Older versions of BIND were very vulnerable to attack, and it's taken years and major changes to reduce the risk of nasties like domain poisoning from ruining your day on the net. A new advisory warns that the current version is vulnerable to similar attacks, and suggests ...