Tech by PC

OpenDNS is an easy way to help protect you and your family on the Internet. Before you get turned off by something technical, let me assure you that you can make this simple change no matter what your technical expertise, and it will cost you nothing. If you have just one computer connected to the Internet at home, this change is simple. If you have more than one, then you will want to make this configuration change on your router, but it will still be easy. The OpenDNS team has done a great job documenting how to make such a change, so I am not going to duplicate that effort here. You should go to this page to learn how to make the change, but before you do please continue reading to learn why it will help you.

Please note that this information applies to business users as well. The small business without the budget for an IT department could benefit greatly from making these simple changes.

Once set up you can filter the web on the DNS level by blocking out the type of sites that you don’t want your family to see. Even if you are a believer in open access for your children, you can appreciate the phishing filter. Site blocking can happen by category. Some categories are more important for businesses who want to keep their employees on task than home users.

Categories available are: Adult Themes, Adware, Alcohol, Auctions, Automotive, Blogs, Business Services, Chat, Classifieds, Dating, Drugs, Ecommerce/Shopping, Educational Institutions, File storage, Financial institutions, Forums/Message boards, Gambling, Games, Government, Hate/Discrimination, Health, Humor, Instant messaging, Jobs/Employment, Lingerie/Bikini, Movies, Music, News/Media, Non-profits, Nudity, P2P/File sharing, Parked Domains, Phishing, Photo sharing, Podcasts, Politics, Pornography, Portals, Proxy/Anonymizer, Radio, Religious, Research/Reference, Search engines, Sexuality, Social networking, Software/Technology, Sports, Tasteless, Television, Travel, Video sharing, Visual search engines, Weapons, Webmail

At home I have turned on Pornography, Drugs, Hate/Discrimination, Parked Domains, Sexuality, and Phishing. It is also easy to unblock a specific site that you want to allow, so if something was misclassified or has mixed content you can easily allow it. I rarely run into any of these blocks, so it certainly is not disruptive.

So how does it work? DNS is Domain Name Service which translates what you type, such as www.yahoo.com, into a numeric address. Your ISP normally provides this service, which OpenDNS replaces. OpenDNS replies with a blocked page when the name looked up equals one attached to one of the above categories that you have selected.

There are some instances where this does not work. If a website that is not blocked uses an IP address internally to point to a malicious site then it will bypass OpenDNS. It also takes a while for sites to be classified as one way or another on their filter. The web is constantly changing, so it is difficult to keep up with it, but they are about as fast as they can be with this. It also does not protect against someone looking for a way around it. Your teenager could set his DNS servers back to the ISP’s and get around this service, so it isn’t bulletproof. What it is for me is a simple way to provide protection from the majority of the sites that I want to avoid and protect my family from. This is also not a substitute for a modern antivirus package including host based phishing protection, nor is it a substitute for a firewall if you connect directly to the Internet. If you do connect directly, I encourage you to buy a router such as the Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G. It is a cheap, effective piece of protection that does not require a yearly subscription fee.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Internet, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.