I think OpenDNS is rather clever. I hate how Yahoo pays to hijack the installation of other programs.

As an IT professional this has really infuriated me as it acts just like any twopenny browser hijacker out there, changing my browsing experience without my say so or permission.

Can’t think of a better way to alienate people from your product than to force it on them and tell them they can get around it by signing up!

Just like the scumware that infects peoples machines telling them they have multiple viruses and the like that can only be removed by paying them $19.99 for their virus removal software (which only removes their hijacker.. sometimes)

Is there a lawyer launching a class action lawsuit against this company, as I would like to write a statement for court about how they took over my browser and cost me several hours of time and I STILL can’t get rid of it?

I’ve edited the text slightly. At the end of the day, yahoo gives you money in return for information about what websites your clients are browsing for. That qualifies as selling your clients’ data. The exception in your privacy policy further allows for a large range of behaviors to which many folks would object. It seems to me, for example, to allow you to affiliate yourself with NebuAd for the purpose of providing more targeted advertising to your clients. There’s a broad range of such possible objectionable activities that fall under the rubric of affiliated advertising services.

What’s most troubling about opendns is that the system is opt-in and opaque to most users, as strongly indicated by the fact that the very bright and technology savvy Doc Searls can’t figure out why his firefox has suddenly broken. That he can opt-out by signing up for an account on your system and wading through the preferences is completely beside the point. A quick look at the search page shows a tiny ‘why am i here’ link in the top right that doesn’t explain at all that opendns has injected itself into the dns process. It’s one thing for someone to visit yahoo voluntarily and submit his info to them. It’s another for the opendns search page to be injected into the browsing session via a deep and opaque mechanism.

It sounds like the problem is that your network setup got changed somehow so that you are now using opendns as your dns server. Most likely, whatever isp you are connecting through has changed to using opendns as their default dns server. So the change didn’t happen in firefox. It happened in your underlying network configuration as pushed to you by your isp, and firefox is just making the change apparent.

To verify this in windows, go to the command line and type ‘ipconfig /all’. If the dns server listed is opendns, that’s the issue. To get the search as address bar fall through working again, you’ll need to manually change your dns server back to some non-opendns dns server (or call and complain to your isp and get them to change back to a non-opendns dns server for their network).

If you go to about:config in Firefox and look for keyword.url you can change that to whatever you want.

If you want to stop us from responding to address bar search requests, login to your OpenDNS account and turn off “OpenDNS proxy.” Note that if you do that, shortcuts and other typo correction features will start to break.

Two things you seem to miss:

1) We let you revert your address bar behavior. Just login to your account and disable the OpenDNS proxy. The vast majority of our users like it as it makes shortcuts work reliably and gives people their custom guide page. It’s using YDN right now for results, but we hope to switch it to BOSS. If we knew of an API to use Google, we’d obviously love to give our users that choice too.

2) We have never sold, nor do we have any intention of selling any customer data ever. You have completely taken that line from our privacy policy out of context. All that means is that when you click an ad, our advertising partner (Yahoo) will see your IP address and the typo you made that resulted in you seeing the ad you clicked on. Nothing more.

And of course, you can disable logging if you’d like. We provide all logging for your benefit, to show you your stats. If you don’t want it (it’s off by default) we don’t store any logs about your DNS patterns.

Please update your post accordingly.