Which DNS service you prefer and why?

[Phone Man]

i am also currently using norton dns, and it has not pooped up for me either.. but i dont go to malicious sites so i dont know

I also dont go to malicious website on a regular basis. Its just today i had nothing important to do so thought about testing Norton DNS. I dont expect it to block everything but a ocassional warning would have suggested it is working perfectly. Right now I am waiting for some reply from norton forum.

I guess the first thing to check is that you are using Norton DNS. Go to this link and it will let you know.

Norton DNS

If it shows you are then go here to check the "bad" websites and see what Norton says. Norton DNS uses the Norton Safe Web data base.

Norton Safe Web, from Symantec

Jim

 

[gautam7]

Thanks phone man for pointing out about norton sefe web. I am currently using norton. May be i should try with a larger sample size.

 

[gautam7]

Ok today also tried some testing. This time i carefully selected those url from malwaredomain list which are considered as malicious by Norton Safe web. Out of those 15 url, Norton safe Web detected 4 as dangerous and other 10 as suspicious, 2 or 3 of those suspicious websites are considered as phishing site by Norton Safe Web. 1 website is not detected by Norton Safe Web but that site was considered dangerous by 7 scanner of urlvoid.

This time Norton DNS indeed blocked 3 of those 4 dangerous website. Suspicious websites are not blocked by Norton DNS. Norton DNS also allowed 1 website which is considered as dangerous by Norton Safe Web.

So i guess Norton DNS does give an additional ( not very effective though) layer of protection.

 

[MaxPayne]

Ok today also tried some testing. This time i carefully selected those url from malwaredomain list which are considered as malicious by Norton Safe web. Out of those 15 url, Norton safe Web detected 4 as dangerous and other 10 as suspicious, 2 or 3 of those suspicious websites are considered as phishing site by Norton Safe Web. 1 website is not detected by Norton Safe Web but that site was considered dangerous by 7 scanner of urlvoid.

This time Norton DNS indeed blocked 3 of those 4 dangerous website. Suspicious websites are not blocked by Norton DNS. Norton DNS also allowed 1 website which is considered as dangerous by Norton Safe Web.

So i guess Norton DNS does give an additional ( not very effective though) layer of protection.

So are you saying Norton Safe Web is better?

Sent from my Gingerbread on Dream using Tapatalk

 

[gautam7]

So are you saying Norton Safe Web is better?

I am not comparing anything. I just wanted to know if norton DNS do what it says, because DNSbenchmark showed that for my system and location google DNS is the fastest then come my own ISP's DNS then openDNS. So if i am to use norton above all other it has to be for extra security. For all practical purpose i find all those three DNS service delivers almost same speed for me. So i have not got a problem with norton speedwise. And now it showed it can block website which are considered dangerous by Norton web Safe. ( it blocked 3 out of 4). It did not block the website which are considered as suspicious by Norton Safe Web. Which is actually a good thing because lets face it if Norton DNS block everything from suspicious to dangerous, it would be really inconvenient for use and annoying, isn't it?

At Norton forum they also said these same thing that Norton DNS does use Norton Safe Web blacklist. And Do block website but it is not a replacement for other security measure.

With regards

 

[DBone]

I set Chrome's default search engine to Norton Safe Search. Some here will hate it because it's powered by ask.com, but I like the ratings when I search, and I don't have to host some app on my machine to get it like WOT.

 

[Phone Man]

Norton also offers for free Norton Safe Web, from Symantec - Safe Websites | Norton Safe Web Lite which is a toolbar and will give you its ratings no matter what search engine you use. I no longer use WOT as it is based solely on user input while Norton Safe Web sites are tested by Norton and also has user input. Give it a try and see what you think.

Jim

 

[DBone]

I'm not a toolbar guy, but thanks for the info.

 

[Phone Man]

I believe you can hide the toolbar and it will still work in all your search engines.

Jim

 

[pparks1]

I use OpenDNS as it provides elementary blocking of websites that my young kids don't have the know how to get around yet (6 and 4).

 

[Golden]

Norton also offers for free Norton Safe Web, from Symantec - Safe Websites | Norton Safe Web Lite which is a toolbar and will give you its ratings no matter what search engine you use. I no longer use WOT as it is based solely on user input while Norton Safe Web sites are tested by Norton and also has user input. Give it a try and see what you think.

Jim

I did the same last night - swapped from WoT to NSWL - I do like it.

Jim: how do you hide the toolbar, let still let it work?

Regards,
Golden

 

[gautam7]

If anyone is using norton DNS then they don't need Norton Safe web. Norton DNS do seem to work according to Norton Safe web blacklist. I don't use any website rating add on because IMO they are not always accurate (FP rate is high due to use of a single scanner) and i find it slightly irritating to see all those green red bar all over my search result. I have VTzilla add on, which gives the ability to scan suspicious link in mail or url in virus total by right clicking the link. And since virus total uses 16 url scanner so they usually give accurate result.

Also in my second experiment to test effectiveness of Norton DNS i secected 15 url from MDL which were considered as dangerous or suspicious by norton safe web. And to get those 15 url i had to scan around 50 url with norton safe web. Some of them are considered as safe by norton safe web but those url are considered as malicious by avast as well as by multiple (around 6-7) scanner of urlvoid. Some of the url when tested with Norton Safe web give the result as "not tested". SO my point is its not very benifacial to rely only on a single scanner to report a site as safe or dangerous. IMO when in confusion scan the url with Virus total or urlvoid or jitti.

Besides sandboxing the browser while surfing the net is still the best possible option available to us to remain safe online.

With regards
Gautam

P.S: I do like the concept of webrep in avast or wot, which only gives you the personal opinion from the user of the website. For example If i go to a shopping site and see a lot of bad rating it helps to avoid those shopping site not because those site are malicious but simply because many other people had problem from them while shopping.

 

[Phone Man]

Norton also offers for free Norton Safe Web, from Symantec - Safe Websites | Norton Safe Web Lite which is a toolbar and will give you its ratings no matter what search engine you use. I no longer use WOT as it is based solely on user input while Norton Safe Web sites are tested by Norton and also has user input. Give it a try and see what you think.

Jim

I did the same last night - swapped from WoT to NSWL - I do like it.

Jim: how do you hide the toolbar, let still let it work?

Regards,
Golden

I use NIS 2011 and its toolbar has SafeWeb. I went to Options and unchecked the Norton Toolbar and then did searches using different search engines and SafeWeb worked on all of them. My tool bar looks the same as the SafeWeb bar except for the added Identity Safe. You just have to try this with the SafeWeb toolbar and then do a few searches.

Jim

 

[Golden]

Cheers Jim - will give that a crack.