Sunday, October 03, 2010

qsl.net gone phishing?

OpenDNS is a free domain name server (DNS). Most of you will know what that is, but for those who don't, a DNS is a server that converts web addresses like blog.g4ilo.com into numeric IP addresses like 123.234.345 so the web browser can find the right web site. Most people use the DNS provided by their internet service provider (ISP) and don't think twice about it. However, the DNS provided by many ISPs is slow and unreliable. It was because of that that I started searching for a free alternative and discovered OpenDNS.
An added benefit of OpenDNS is that it provides content filtering. This can be a useful safeguard if you have children who use the computer as it can prevent them accessing various dubious sites. It can also protect you from visiting phishing sites - websites that pretend to be the login pages of various online banks or email services so they can steal your passwords. It does this by converting the addresses of known phishing sites to the IP address of a warning page instead. The web is a pretty dangerous place these days and any extra level of protection is a good thing as far as I am concerned.

However, this afternoon I tried to access a ham radio site at qsl.net, and was informed that this was a phishing site and had been blocked. In fact the whole of qsl.net has been blocked to users of OpenDNS. I have contacted them using the link provided to tell them that qsl.net is a free web host for ham radio hobby sites. I'm assuming, of course, that qsl.net hasn't been blocked because it is hosting malware.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I've just accessed qsl.net now so I presume that they read my note and acted on it.

James said...

I had the same problem last night. That really irked me. I turned that stupid thing off right away. I'm a big boy, I know my way around the Internet having been on it for 13 years now. I don't need a hand-holding DNS service telling me that they aren't going to let me go somewhere. At the very least they should have included a link on the page to let me go where I wanted anyways. I had to go to their website, remember my login and fuss with the checkbox to turn that off. Finally after allowing parts of the page to load via noscript I was able to turn it off and get on qsl.net. I know it's probably going to be great for people who don't know any better but to have it suddenly sprung on me without warning was very annoying. :(