The Canadian television broadcaster CTV, recently ran a story about how helpless parents are in dealing with sites such as chatroulette dot com. In its national news broadcast, imitating many global media, CTV put on an expert who suggested that parents have little or no control, as even products such as NetNanny may not exclude chatroulette and in any event are not difficult for kids to circumvent.
This culture of helplessness is not only destructive, it is simply wrong.
In fact there are numerous tools parents can use.
OpenDNS
The simplest, most effective and entirely free solution is OpenDNS.
With OpenDNS there is nothing for the kids to circumvent because the protection is put in place at the level where the family’s internet connection tries to look up an internet address to connect.
The quick explanation for complete novices is: for any computer to connect to any web site, it must first send the web name(eg. “securesurfing.net”) to a “domain name server” to resolve that name into a numerical address. Normally the dns server that is contacted is that of your own direct ISP.
OpenDNS replaces that ISP dns server with one that you can directly control.
What is more, OpenDNS not only allows you to completely block access to sites like chatroulette, but it provides possibly the best layer of defense against Phishing attacks, child porn sites and other varieties of hostile or undesirable web addresses. All under your own control. You can find a full explanation here.
CTV and other media are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by continuing to air so-called experts who repeat that citizens in the modern internet age can do nothing to protect their privacy, let alone their children.
