I went to visit Dkos this evening and rather than being greeted with the familiar orange interface, I was shown an error message to the effect of:
This site is blocked by your network administrator because it is categorized: Blogs, Hate/Discrimination.
The message was provided by OpenDNS, the normally kick-ass free third-party DNS service. (DNS-domain name system-is the technology that translates internet addresses, eg dailykos.com, into numbers so that traffic can be routed). I am my own network administrator and I do have my setting set to block "Hate/Discrimination" (as well as adware and a couple others). But Dailykos has always worked. In fact, it was working just a couple hours ago.
So I looked to see what I could find.
This is important because the service handles 10 billions DNS queries per day and has users ranging from homes like myself to corporations to institutions like New York K-12 schools. Nashville uses the service for its free municipal wi-fi.
First a little about OpenDNS. From Wikipedia.
OpenDNS offers DNS resolution for consumers and businesses as an alternative to using their Internet service provider's DNS servers. By placing company servers in strategic locations and employing a large cache of the domain names, OpenDNS usually processes queries much more quickly[1], thereby increasing page retrieval speed. DNS query results are sometimes cached by the local operating system and/or applications, so this speed increase may not be noticeable with every request, but only with requests that are not stored in a local cache.
Other features include a phishing filter, domain blocking and typo correction (for example, typing wikipedia.og instead of wikipedia.org). By collecting a list of malicious sites, OpenDNS blocks access to these sites when a user tries to access them through their service. OpenDNS recently launched Phishtank, where users around the world can submit and review suspected phishing sites.
I've used the service for a while now and heartily recommend it. Part of the power of OpenDNS is in its crowd sourcing. The phishing filter and domain blocking are powered by user reports and voting. In general, I've felt it's a good system, but this epsiode shows that it can be subject to manipulation.
One problem I see here is one of numbers. Here is OpenDNS's page for dailykos.com. It shows a total of 28 voters for the domain name, which to me seems like a small number to get a site labeled as something as disreputable as "hate." And the way the site is presented there's no way to know exactly how many votes either way the site received.
Another problem is that once a site has been "approved" for a category, the community can no longer vote on it. A moderator must review the classification.
It's not hard to imagine a small group of people working together to game the system by submitting sites with opposing views and voting as a bloc to earn a classification. Indeed, a quick look at the domain tagging voting page of the hate category shows that a surprisingly few handful of users are submitting domains into that category. While some, based on the name alone, clearly belong there, others are innocuous, like ask.yahoo.com, lazyboy.com and myspace.com, while others aren't even close, like motherjones.com and emptywheel.firedoglake.com.
For now, until a better system is in place, the best thing we can do is 1) visit dkos's page and flag it for review to have the "hate" label removed. (be nice, opendns itself is not at fault here). 2) registered users keep an eye on the domain tagging to help contribute our votes and keep legitimate sites from being labels as hate