Protect your kids online without using cumbersome parental control software
If you're not using OpenDNS Web content filtering yet - take it from me - you should.
OpenDNS, the choice of tens of thousands of businesses and schools, lets you easily block individual or entire categories of Web sites in just minutes. It requires nothing to download or install. It's basically the same content filtering they use at schools, but is now available for home use. And best of all, it's FREE!
It also makes your network faster and more reliable, and gives you tools to easily see which Web sites are most visited on your network. If you see problem Web sites in your network stats, you can easily block them.
The way it works is this. The way traditional parental control software works is by creating filters that catch undesirable web searches. When someone tries to go to a page that has porn or swearing or whatever filters you have set up, it sends out a page with a big stop sign on it and usually a message saying the page was blocked by such-and-such parental software. Your kid then knows that you have stopped them from going to the page.
The way OpenDNS works is rather than using filter software to catch a page after it begins to download, this stops it even before because openDNS stops it at the IP address level. So the message your kid receives is something like "Could not connect. Or not a secure connection," which most kids perceive as the computer not cooperating, not a parent restricting them. My experience is that this solves the problem immediately because your kid can't get to the inappropriate sites, but more importantly, it takes you out of the "bad guy" spot. OpenDNS allows you to customize the web filtering categories yourself and even to add specific sites that you either always want to block or never want to block. Because it works at the IP address level, you set it up once and all your computers on your network are protected.
Another tool I have found particularly helpful is http://www.peacefire.org. Join their email alert list. This site is well known among kids because they provide solutions for getting around blocking software. Since I'm on the email alert list, the minute I get a new URL of a site that would allow kids to circumnavigate my controls, I simply add it to my filtering list at OpenDNS.org!
I hope this helps! If anyone has trouble setting up OpenDNS, feel free to email me and I'll try to help you!
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