Another problem facing parents is how do we control which Internet sites our kids are allowed to visit. With so many sites offering content based on illegal activities / Pornography / hate groups / chat rooms etc. etc. what can we do to limit the exposure of our kids.

"Protect kids from Porn"

A simple and sometimes forgotten option is don't allow your kids to have computes in their bedrooms or hidden away spaces. What better control than having to surf the internet sitting next to your Mum !

Windows Vista again offers some basic web site filtering through its parental controls in the form of a "blacklist". Maintaining the list can be time consuming.

There are several companies like Norton's antivirus which can also add controls and filters over which sites can be visited by your kids. These are normally licenced on a per computer basis.

The internet relies on very large directories and search engines that enable you to find out where to go. A bit like electronic telephone directories. Most of the programs that prevent access to web sites rely on finding the directory, accessing the page of information and filtering based upon content or agreed censorship (like at the cinema). Whilst they work very well they can sometimes slow down the apparent access to the internet and can be slow to recognise changes in page content or change of censorship.

OpenDNS is not additional software, its a free service. OpenDNS provides restrictions to which internet sites your computers can go to. However the difference with OpenDNS is that they do their homework on which pages are and aren't allowed and simply remove the entries of the restricted web sites from their directory. This ensures that there is no loss in performance and the hard work of administering (and updating) is done by someone else.

Read more about setting up OpenDNS here. It only takes about 5 minutes to setup on each individual computer. If you have a Broadband router OpenDNS can be setup on the router once which will then secure all the computers using the router.

Once OpenDNS is installed, content filtering is activated via a simple dashboard as can be seen below.

OpenDNS installs a small program on your computer which talks to the OpenDNS service to ensure that your address is kept upto date with their systems. This small program does not slow down your computer at all.

This page was Last updated Feb 2009