Put up a Firewall

There’s been a lot of noise recently about the Australian government’s plans to implement a national firewall to protect the nation’s internet users from illegal content. I’ll not go into details here but at the time of writing it’s looking like the firewall won’t be erected.

The theory behind a firewall is fine: a firewall is a piece of software that sits between you and the internet, blocking any traffic that violates a set of pre-determined rules. In practice, the Australian national firewall seemed easy to bypass and would most likely have caused internet speeds to slow dramatically as every bit of data that flowed into or out of the country had to be checked.

However, just because the nation isn’t being firewalled doesn’t mean you can’t implement your own.There are a number of firewall products available, but I’d like to use this article to talk about OpenDNS.
OpenDNS is free, relatively simple to implement and can be set up on your internet router to affect all traffic, no matter whether you’re using a PC, Mac, Playstation or iPod.

With OpenDNS, you get to choose the type of content that your family can view, and they make it simple for you by grouping websites into 55 categories such as ‘Games’, ‘Health’, ‘Tasteless’, ‘Chat’, and so on…
You can override these categories for specific sites too. Let’s say you block the ‘News/Media’ category but want to access the local newspaper, you can simply add the newspaper’s website to a ‘whitelist’. Similarly, you may not want to block the ‘religious’ category but are concerned about a specific religious website. Simply add that website to your ‘blacklist’ and it’ll be blocked.
The free version of OpenDNS lets you blacklist or whitelist 25 domains.

If somebody in your house visits a blocked site, they see a page with a message and picture that you can customise explaining why the page they want to view is blocked.

OpenDNS doesn’t just let you block sites. It also keeps a track of all sites that have been visited, allowing you to check what was viewed and when. If you find that certain objectionable sites are being viewed, you can then decide how best to stop them being viewed.

As hinted at before, you can subscribe to premium versions of OpenDNS, with a family pack available for just under US$10 per year.
I’ve only covered the big features of OpenDNS here: content filtering and logging. There are a few more strings to its bow including anti-phishing technology. You can read all about it on the OpenDNS website.

Of course, monitoring and blocking what your kids do online has its limitations and, in the opinion of this dad, must play second fiddle to teaching your kids how to stay safe online.

Finally, an admission: I don’t use openDNS myself because my kids are not yet old enough to read and so are not yet likely to get into chatrooms or similar places. I let them loose in places like the excellent CBeebies website and remain watchful in case they find a way of clicking out of it. Once they get old enough to type search queries into Google or have an email account, I’ll certainly be looking for ways to keep objectionable content from their eyes.