Christopher Dawson has an excellent article on ZDNet this morning about teaching children by example. He makes a good point about the importance of being active in our children's lives and teaching them how to behave, both online and offline, by example. Yes, that's difficult, but we are talking about parenting. :)
Kids learn from the examples we set
Monday, October 8, 2007
Saturday, October 6, 2007
OpenDNS
As I've stated before, one purpose of this blog is to review products that may (or may not) be useful tools for parents. The first tool evaluated and reviewed is OpenDNS.
First some background: All computers on the Internet have a unique address associated with them. This numerical address usually consists of four sets of one to three digit numbers. For example, 17.149.160.10 is the address of a web server for Apple, Inc. The Internet would be a far less useful thing if everyone had to remember numerical addresses for their email servers, favorite websites and so on. So a system called the Domain Name System, or DNS, was invented to provide a more human friendly way of referring to computers on the internet. So, in the above example, we can simply remember that the Apple, Inc. web site is at http://www.apple.com, rather than having to remember the numerical address.
Normally, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) handles this service for you. However, OpenDNS offers an alternative with an interesting twist. With a bit of manual configuration, you can tell your home computer to use the OpenDNS servers rather than those provided by your ISP. The twist is that you can configure your free OpenDNS account to block access to sites known to host various types of content.
To test the effectiveness of this service, I've used it for the last several weeks on my home network. Overall, I've been very pleased with the results. I would rate the effectiveness of the filtering to be quite good, but certainly not perfect. I was able to find many sites via Google and other search engines that were not blocked, though the vast majority were.
I should note that a clever kid could easily get around this filtering, but the same can be said for any other technological solution to content blocking. In the end, the Internet is such a huge place that it's impossible for any company to find and block ALL the content that one may find objectionable. Even with an impossibly perfect filter in place, a child may still be exposed to or seek out content at a friends house or other location. For my family, a reasonable technological measure like the content filtering in OpenDNS coupled with being an active parent is a good solution.
I want to end with a comment on one of the other claims made by the folks at OpenDNS. They claim to be faster than most ISP DNS server, though in my experience there was very little difference. However, your experience may be different. I would certainly be interested in hearing what kind of experiences others have with this product.
Review Overview
Product: OpenDNS
Pros: Free, easy to setup, reasonable content filtering options.
Cons: Filtering not perfect, relatively easy to circumvent.
Final Grade: B
First some background: All computers on the Internet have a unique address associated with them. This numerical address usually consists of four sets of one to three digit numbers. For example, 17.149.160.10 is the address of a web server for Apple, Inc. The Internet would be a far less useful thing if everyone had to remember numerical addresses for their email servers, favorite websites and so on. So a system called the Domain Name System, or DNS, was invented to provide a more human friendly way of referring to computers on the internet. So, in the above example, we can simply remember that the Apple, Inc. web site is at http://www.apple.com, rather than having to remember the numerical address.
Normally, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) handles this service for you. However, OpenDNS offers an alternative with an interesting twist. With a bit of manual configuration, you can tell your home computer to use the OpenDNS servers rather than those provided by your ISP. The twist is that you can configure your free OpenDNS account to block access to sites known to host various types of content.
To test the effectiveness of this service, I've used it for the last several weeks on my home network. Overall, I've been very pleased with the results. I would rate the effectiveness of the filtering to be quite good, but certainly not perfect. I was able to find many sites via Google and other search engines that were not blocked, though the vast majority were.
I should note that a clever kid could easily get around this filtering, but the same can be said for any other technological solution to content blocking. In the end, the Internet is such a huge place that it's impossible for any company to find and block ALL the content that one may find objectionable. Even with an impossibly perfect filter in place, a child may still be exposed to or seek out content at a friends house or other location. For my family, a reasonable technological measure like the content filtering in OpenDNS coupled with being an active parent is a good solution.
I want to end with a comment on one of the other claims made by the folks at OpenDNS. They claim to be faster than most ISP DNS server, though in my experience there was very little difference. However, your experience may be different. I would certainly be interested in hearing what kind of experiences others have with this product.
Review Overview
Product: OpenDNS
Pros: Free, easy to setup, reasonable content filtering options.
Cons: Filtering not perfect, relatively easy to circumvent.
Final Grade: B
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