How to Protect Home Computers from Obnoxious Web Content

I have a cable modem based internet access at home. The wireless router connected to the cable modem serves about dozen different devices on the home network, which is typical these days for most homes. So, I was looking for an elegant way to make sure content delivered to these home devices are clean.

You can go around installing PC based software for each PC to block hate, pornographic, drug related sites. But then you need to make sure the licenses and individual PC configurations are updated regularly. I don’t like loading a lot of bloatware on individual computers. In addition there are no such options available for some of the devices such as gaming consoles (Nintendo Wii) connecting to internet via your home network.

Next option is to setup filters on the gateway router at home. But home routers do not provide enough sophistication to allow/block all you need.

After some research, decided to use OpenDNS service for now. As you may know, whenever you try to access a website on the net, the site name such as www.cnn.com that you type in is converted into an IP address, which is a set of numbers before the content from the website is brought down to your computer. This translation from website name to IP address is accomplished with the help of DNS (Domain Name Server) your router is setup to access. Service provided by OpenDNS makes use of this process.

To use it, you go to opendns.com and register yourself. Then change the DNS server address your home router uses to the ones provided by OpenDNS (208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220). There are instructions on the site for various routers as to how their DNS entries should be updated. It is a simple one time change you need to make by accessing your home router via a web browser. Once you set this up, whenever you access any website, OpenDNS will provide the IP address for all the allowed websites and alternately display a message saying “Access to this site is not allowed from your network” for all the offensive sites. Check out http://www.opendns.com/home for more details.

1. They seem reputable with millions of clients with various media vouching for them.

2. By default they don’t track what sites computers in your network access. So, no major privacy concern. But if you want you can turn on logging and see what sites are being accessed from your home network.

3. You can delete the logs whenever you like if you had enabled logging.

4. Basic service is free for homes.

5. When you login to their site, you can customize what sites need to be blocked. For example, you can choose to block any one of or all of porn sites, gambling sites, hate speech sites, drug sites, even video streaming sites (like YouTube), social networking sites (like Facebook), shopping sites, phishing/malware sites, etc. You can login and change the settings (for example disable all controls to allow access to all kinds of sites) whenever you like.

I am sure there are other similar services. But this one seems decent. Give it a try and let me know if you find it useful.

(Disclaimer: I am not an employee of OpenDNS and do not benefit in anyway if you choose to use it or not use it. This article is just to let the world know about a service many parents may find useful as children grow up.)


People also view

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *