Dyn-Novation: The Awesomeness of Internet Guide and Continue To Site

04.21.2011 By

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: my parents aren’t exactly internet savvy.

They understand email, can find their way around the internet fairly easily and even play a few online games. But they also don’t understand ‘copy and paste’ in Word, downloading pictures can be tough and in general, they don’t go outside the well-beaten path of popular sites. Again, this sounds like nearly every set of parents I know, save for a bit more Facebook familiarity (just to view family pictures, of course).

But even they and their kids occasionally make mistakes by clicking on an errant link to a phishing site and going down a dark alley on a rainy night. That’s why I really love our free Internet Guide (IG) and even better, the changes we recently made to make it the best product of its kind.

What Is Internet Guide?

Simply put, it’s a barrier that allows you to block access to phishing sites or other content (porn, gambling, etc) that you set up and choose to filter, also helping with common typing mistakes (ex. redirects Gogle to Google). In order to identify the bad people around the ‘net, we work with our friends at Barracuda Networks. That’s the equivalent of Hulk Hogan teaming with Randy Savage as the MegaPowers, brother!

For me, IG alleviates concerns about making dumb mistakes. Besides working here at Dyn, I also do freelance writing on the side and in the span of a given night, I do a lot of clickin’ and readin’ on a variety of subjects and there are times that I’m not familiar with the site I head to. IG removes the concern and questioner of ‘Is This Safe?’

That Sounds Great, But What’s New?

Occasionally, there will be a site that is flagged that you want to get to and Internet Guide wants you to be able to get there, provided you understand the risks. However, the process in the past was a bit laborious and was frustrating for many of our users. We listened, we tried it and we agreed. Hence, the rise of Continue To Site, a built-in feature (currently in Beta) that easily and painlessly allows you to pass our filter and access that site we initially suggested you didn’t.

Here’s how it works:

- Go to DynDNS.com and get yourself Internet Guide by setting up a free DynDNS.com account or by simply setting your DNS to 216.146.35.35/216.146.36.36. (Need help changing your DNS servers?)

- After changing the settings, you’ll automatically be protected by IG. If you were to go to a bad site (badguy.com for example), here’s what you would see:

Dyn Internet Guide - Continue To Site
At this point, the choice is rather obvious. If you click Continue To Site, you’ll have between 15-75 seconds (depending on browser) until you reach your destination or you can simply restart your browser to access immediately. After 30 minutes, the site will revert back to the original settings and you’d need to re-do the process to access again.

Why This Rules

- It eliminates a lot of the steps and pain points in accessing potentially bad sites, all while keeping up the intent of security via DNS.

- No one else that offers a similar service has a method of Continue To Site that is this easy to use and process.

- We’re not done tweaking, adding and improving Internet Guide. In a 15-minute conversation about Continue To Site yesterday, three new ideas sprung up about improving IG. It’s only going to get better, ensuring your internet travels are as safe as they can be.

- And yes, it’s free!

Over 500,000 users enjoy the benefits of Internet Guide and I think you should to. Somebody has to keep my parents safe after they’ve had some wine and decide to go off-roading on the internet!

Josh Nason is the Inbound Marketing Manager at Dyn, an IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) company that features a full suite of DNS and email delivery solutions for enterprise, personal and small business. Follow at Twitter: @joshnason and @dyninc.

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Josh Nason is the Marketing Manager for Dyn, the IaaS (Internet Infrastructure-as-a-Service) leader with a full suite of DNS and email delivery services. Follow on Twitter: @Josh Nason and @DynInc.

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  • Nate

    Some questions and comments: (1) Can this be disabled? (2) If one user on a LAN hits a malware site, will the next user be allowed through too? (3) The dangerous choice, and therefore the one that should be in red, is “Continue to Site.”

    • http://twitter.com/cvonwallenstein Cory von Wallenstein

      Hi Nate,

      Thanks for the notes!

      (1) Can this be disabled?

      At the moment, it can be disabled on any site by explicitly blacklisting the site in your Defense Plan. Otherwise, if you’re blocked trying to access a site that is in the *default* malware and phishing content filtering lists, you will be able to Continue to Site. We’re currently experimenting with additional enhancements to this feature, including requiring the user to enter their username and password to Continue to Site, as well as allowing users to explicitly disable Continue to Site entirely in their Defense Plans.

      I’d love to hear your thoughts, use cases, and needs in more detail. I can be reached at cvw AT dyn DOT com.

      (2) If one user on a LAN hits a malware site, will the next user be allowed through too?

      It’s a 30-minute bypass for that specific site for that WAN IP only. So, if you’re behind a NAT gateway, everyone else behind that NAT gateway will be able to access that site for 30 minutes.

      It’s important to note it’s a “specific site” bypass, not a “bypass everything in list content filtering category.”

      (3) The dangerous choice, and therefore the one that should be in red, is “Continue to Site.”

      Great point.

      Thanks Nate!

      Cory
      VP, Product

      • Nate

        Thanks Cory! My company uses Internet Guide Pro. As an IT guy I would prefer to make users come to us for unblocking in this category. We haven’t had many false positives in phishing/splyware.

        But overall I think this sounds like a *great* feature, especially if I can choose which categories to use it on. E.g. we blocked gambling but then some employees were unable to check their lottery numbers, so we manually unblocked those sites. This would be a perfect solution for those cases.

        • Ben Anderson

          Hi Nate, I’ll see about getting an off button into Internet Guide asap, since it seems like a lot of people will want this for a work LAN.

      • http://profiles.google.com/dougsk Doug Skranak

        Hi Cory,

        I’m with Nate, I’d really like to be able to not give my users the choice to continue on. I would prefer to have to whitelist something in order for them to make it there. As a paid user, is there a difference between this feature in the paid and free version? I use a free account at home, and a paid account at work. I noticed this popup some time ago on my home account, but I’ve forgotten about it until I got the email about it today. For home I think this is a great deal. For work, I abhor the idea, and would really need an OFF button on this feature.

        Thanks and I still dig the internet guide.

        • Ben Anderson

          Hi Doug, I’ll see about getting an off button into Internet Guide asap, since it seems like a lot of people will want this for a work LAN.
          Thanks for your input, we’re always looking out for new ways to make our services better and cater to what our users want.

          • http://profiles.google.com/dougsk Doug Skranak

            Ben you rock thanks a bunch!

  • Steve HH

    This is great. I hope something similar can be added to the News filter, which is riddled with false positives.

    • http://twitter.com/cvonwallenstein Cory von Wallenstein

      Steve,

      Great idea. I can’t think of any reason why we WOULDN’T add this to the News feed! I’ll see if we can make that happen.

      Cory
      VP, Product

  • Ben Anderson

    @Steve HH, we’ll be adding Continue to Site to every category in some form soon. We’ll have a few different options for how users want it to behave.

    @Nate:
    1: At this point, Continue to Site is turned on ONLY for Phishing/Spyware sites (the default blocklists), there is currently no way to turn it off for these categories. We will be adding new options soon to enable configuration on a per-category basis, including enabled and disabled options. Any site you block specifically by domain will override Continue to Site settings, so you could block specific sites that you know you want it disabled for.

    2: Yes and no, if your LAN is using NAT ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_translation ), when a person clicks the Continue button, it will indeed be unblocked for everyone on the LAN for 30 minutes. If everyone on the LAN has public IPs, it *should* work on a per user basis, provided your DHCP or hard-coded DNS settings were set to our IPs.

    3: Duly noted, we’re looking for ways to make improvements to Continue to Site, so thank you for your feedback!

  • Les

    Well, I like the idea, and I setup both Paid and free versions for my customers.
    BUT, we are doing this to block spyware / phising etc sites and Porn. We would have to have the ability to turn it on or off. OR what is the point of using internet guide if it can be bypassed at the click of a button. I like the idea of turning it on by catagory, and maybe you could use a “cookie” or something to get down to the PC instead of the whole LAN. Great idea, just don’t break what we have now, “a great – keep the people out the crappy places, – tool”.
    PS, “Our” customers that have the pro version, as mostly using it to block facebook and twitter etc. SO if you could make that work better that would be great also. I have it in the Blacklist, but you can access “facebook” from so many sites, it’s hard to make it fool proof.

    thanks for a great product though.

    Les

    • Ben Anderson

      Hi Les,
      We will soon be adding the configuration options to turn this on and off, in addition to other improvements. I’ll see if we can get this feature into Internet Guide asap though, as a lot of people seem to want this.

      As for a ‘cookie’, it’s not really that simple unfortunately, due to NAT ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_translation ) on many LANs. We’re always figuring out new ways to do things, so we might be able to do this somehow, just not yet.

      • Les

        Great on the On / off part, the “cookie /NAT part is fine, we can live with the whole lan On/off, it’s not that big of a deal. Someday, you’ll get it working. We would be happy with just a Admin username / password bypass if that helps any. Just a thought.

        thanks
        Les

        • Ben Anderson

          That’s actually something we’re already looking into. Thanks though!