Internet Filters
What are they?
An internet filtering service or software should block access to dangerous or offensive web sites and provide as much flexibility as possible to the user, parent or employer to blacklist or approve specific sites or entire categories of sites.
There are a number of alternatives available, but you should choose with great care as this may be the single most important piece of your securing surfing toolbox. Making the wrong selection could be worse than using nothing at all because you will have a false sense of security.
Relying on one of the commercial “anti-phishing” filter services can leave you exposed to privacy intrusions.
Choosing a net nanny type of program could drive older children to explore dangerous sites or engage in unsafe practices away from the home computer.
A terrific free and reliable internet filtering service is provided by OpenDNS. (Read our full recommendation of OpenDNS here.)
This service prevents your computer from ever connecting to bad sites, let alone be infected. It is an outstanding service for everyone, including businesses, since it prevents accidental loading of hostile or fraudulent web sites. At its most basic it will simply block known malicious sites but can be configured to block pornographic, social networking and many other kinds of sites. It also allows the user to blacklist or whitelist individual web sites.
If you use OpenDNS to block sites like MySpace, be sure to discuss this with your children and possibly include site blocking in your family’s version of the Contract.
