Remember the good old days when adult magazines and videos were so hard to acquire they were basically considered contraband and sold at exorbitant prices? The time when young people had to go out of their way just to find get a peek? Well those days are long past as the growth of the internet has also seen the increasing proliferation of adult sites and ease at which these can be accessed. It is therefore valid for parents to be concerned about what their children are seeing over the internet.
If you’re a parent with such concerns, then you may consider using porn blockers on your home computers. But before we go any further you should understand one thing: blockers are not 100% effective for a number of reasons; the foremost is because the determined can find a way to circumvent blocker programs using means which can be considered tedious, agonizing and time consuming. So basically, what these blockers do is make it very difficult for people to access sites with adult content.
One of the most popular methods of blocking adult sites and content over the internet is by using the OpenDNS service. DNS (Domain Naming System) is basically a labeling system which transforms IP addresses into the website hostnames. Upon signing up for the OpenDNS service, users are asked to configure their Internet DNS to use the OpenDNS servers instead of their Internet Service Providers. Once signed up, the users are then able to configure their internet settings to filter a variety of categories, most notably sites and imagines which contain adult content.
The result is that when users, for example children, attempt to access pornographic sites, the OpenDNS servers block these sites and displays a message saying that the site is not allowed based on OpenDNS settings. OpenDNS is great because it prevents even the most basic display of search results from sites with adult content and because its free.
OpenDNS also has a blacklist system where users can input sites which they think fall under a certain category. This means that if you find a site which you think contains adult content, you can petition to have this added to the blacklist of sites to be blocked. It should be noted that before the said site can be added to a category, it has to first be approved by a number of other registered users. The consensus based system allows for its users to input new site to update the categories.
As great as it sounds though, allow me to reiterate that there is no 100% effective methods of filtering or blocking and Open DNS its fair share of weaknesses. Because DNS is domain based, it uses keywords of domain names to identify whether a site is to be filtered or not. In the case of pornography, files and pictures can be easily available from sites which don’t normally provide such content. Also, the number of adult sites continues to grow and new sites are being set up almost every day, hence the categories and listed sites may not be up-to-date.
OpenDNS is an excellent means of filtering the access of data in the internet for your children but remember it can be bypassed and what is needed is to use OpenDNS in conjunction with other monitoring software to better ensure that even if you can’t absolutely restrict all access to pornography, you can at least make it down-right difficult to do so.
