Thursday, August 13, 2009

Block Inappropriate Content on the Internet in Your Network without any Software

The Internet hosts billions of web pages but a large chunk of this material may be inappropriate for your young children. Therefore, let’s explore a couple of easy ways that can possibly help parents prevent kids from viewing the dark side of the world wide web.

You don’t have be a tech-savvy person to implement any of the following stuff on your home computer(s) and all the software tools / services discussed here are available for free via the Internet.

Block Adult Sites Automatically

Since you don’t want kids to accidentally see any of sites that contain adult content, an easy option for blocking such sites is OpenDNS.

You don’t have to download or install any software - just go to opendns.com/start in any Internet browser, choose the "Computer" option (let’s keep it simple) and follow the instructions on the screen. Once your computer is configured with OpenDNS, go to Dashboard -> Settings and set the Filtering level to either Moderate or High.

Now whenever your kid mistakenly types a URL of some adult site in the browser (e.g. whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov) or clicks a link that may be pointing to an inappropriate site, the OpenDNS filters will match the address of that site against their own database of adults sites and if there’s a match, the underlying web page won’t be displayed on the child’s computer.

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