Free Content Filtering - Great for Families with Kids
I had heard about this service called Open DNS a while back on mailing lists, but never really looked into it until yesterday. This looks like the best, easiest, free service to block your children from objectionable material online! Not only does this free, unobtrusive service block content that you don’t want your family seeing, but it speeds up your internet access as well. It even works on REALLY old machines.
Here’s how it works. When you type in www.vortex-tech.com, it asks a Domain Name Server (DNS) what ‘address’ vortex-tech.com points to. Your computer then asks that address for it’s website. OpenDNS replaces the DNS server that your ISP provides and lets you control how names are resolved. Let’s say that you don’t want your kids on social networking sites and have set it that way in your OpenDNS control panel. Now, whenever your kid tries to go to facebook.com, OpenDNS will send back a different IP address than facebook.com normally points to. It will politely tell your kid that they are not allowed to go to that site.
There is tons more that you can do with OpenDNS, such as create shortcuts to your favorite pages, go check it out.