Google Chrome Mobile has new feature that bypasses OpenDNS
I have Google Chrome on my iPhone. It recently asked me if I wanted to enable Bandwidth Management (see https://developers.google.com/chrome/mobile/docs/data-compression). With this Reduce Data Usage mode enabled, "the browser uses Google’s servers to condense image file sizes and perform other optimizations to reduce bandwidth consumed by the page."
I tested this mode and discovered that I can get to pages that I have blocked by OpenDNS on our home network, even with Proxy/Anonymizer category blocked. I disabled Reduce Data Usage mode during testing yesterday and today the feature is not available on my phone. It's currently in beta so disabling it must've removed me from their pilot.
Can anyone else confirm what I've found?
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Yes, this has been around for quite some time in Chrome Beta, and I am partly responsible for it.
When enabled, all your queries are going to Google proxies running mod_pagespeed. You phone doesn't send DNS queries any more when using this kind of proxy. Which, on a mobile device, is a huge win in term of web performance . The flipside is that OpenDNS can't block anything, since OpenDNS doesn't see the web sites being accessed.
There are many other web browsers with the same feature, the most impressive one on Android and iOS being Puffin. These browsers still need to send a very first query to resolve the name of the remote proxy/remote headless web browser. So, OpenDNS blocks some of them as "proxies". But Google is not something OpenDNS will block, especially when clients are running Android.
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Using Google Chrome BETA on my Google Nexus 4 - Today I clicked on a USA Today link from my Twitter feed and it blocked the article (nothing that would normally be blocked by OpenDNS). I was also unable to go to the Fandango site. I have used Google BETA for months and OpenDNS for about a month and this happened for the first time today. Did something change with OpenDNS today 1/16/2014?
I switched to Google Chrome (not beta) and things are working well.
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"the screen stays blank"
Oops, this is not an OpenDNS block page then. What is the exact OpenDNS URL? Something else is wrong, with the browser or whatever. If you have a rooted device, post the complete plain text output of the following commands here:
nslookup -type=txt debug.opendns.com.
nslookup example.com. (where example.com are domains where your problem occurs with)Else best would be to open a support ticket.
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The url is: http://block.a.id.opendns.com/?url=
After the "=" there are several numbers and letters. I believe it is as jedisct1 described in the first comment.
To get around it you either turn off bandwidth management in chrome or you browse in incognito mode.
rotblitz, I will try nslookup tonight when I am back on my network.
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"The url is: http://block.a.id.opendns.com/?url= "
This is an incomplete attempt to redirect to the OpenDNS block page. Further redirection is needed but doesn't seem to take place, because the browser would ingnore it or is simply not capable to do it.
"I will try nslookup tonight when I am back on my network."
This will be of minor use, because if the browser uses a proxy, it doesn't use your system settings as nslookup does.
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@esanchez123
I don't understand. What is the relation of your question to the topic "Google Chrome Mobile has new feature that bypasses OpenDNS" of this thread?Better wanted to open a new thread in the "Netgear Live Parental Controls" section of this forum?
https://support.opendns.com/forums/21313122-Netgear-Live-Parental-Controls
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