Monday, August 29, 2011

OpenDNS = Very Cool!

I surprised my seven year old daughter by setting up an old laptop and placing it in her room.  She is getting old enough where she needs exposure to a computer and what a great way to get her started.  Obviously, setting it up and simply placing it on the internet wide open is not a good idea.  After doing a bit of research, I came across a free service called OpenDNS.  Basically all you do is create an account, setup a profile, then point your PC to their DNS servers.  As a parent, you select the sort of sites you do or do not wish for that specific computer to visit.  When an attempt is made, it throws up a friendly error page saying the site is blocked.  Very simple, but powerful idea and appears to work well after attempting to visit several sites which were not light in nature :')

http://www.opendns.com/

They also have some basic reporting as well.  I am sure when she gets older, this will become more and more important.  Once she becomes a bit more computer savvy, I will need to enlist a local policy which prevents the NIC settings from being modified.  Obviously, changing the DNS servers back to your internet provider would completely circumvent OpenDNS.

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