Easy Family Friendly Web Filtering, And Best of All it’s Free

One of the easiest protections that I use on my home network to prevent inappropriate websites from finding their way onto my children’s screens is a DNS Web filtering.

DNS stands for Domain Naming System.  The easiest way to describe this is that DNS is the phone book of the internet.  A web address is a name, and the web servers IP address is the phone number.  When you key in a website or click a link your computer sends the website address to the DNS server which returns the correct IP address for your computer to contact for the content it is looking for.  DNS Filtering simply does not give back the correct IP address to your computers when trying to reach inappropriate web sites.

OpenDNS is a free DNS provider that offers a simple an easy to use product called Family Shield.  Click the following link for more information: Family Shield.

Once Configured, when a user attempts to access an adult website either accidentally or out of curiosity (We are all curious, especially in our youth…) they are redirected to a standard block page:

OpenDNS provides basic configuration instructions Here: https://www.opendns.com/setupguide/?url=familyshield

The recommended configuration is to configure your home router to issue these servers to any device that connects using your internet connections.  This allows you to easily and automatically configure this protection for every PC, Laptop, tablet, iPod, Cell phone, or Gaming console that connects from inside your home network.  However you can easily set this up on individual devices as well.

In the coming days I hope to provide a tutorial video on configuring a router, as well as a utility to easily configure a single Windows PC with Family Shield protection.

Comment below if you have any questions!