There’s a great, simple way to filter your internet connection for free. When a user on your computer, or home network tries to access a website, the computer makes a request to a DNS server to translate the website name to an internet address the computer can understand. A free service is available to intercept these requests and block categories of websites that you choose. Read on to find out what’s involved
OpenDNS is a free DNS service that can effectively filter your internet connection by blocking DNS requests for specific categories of sites and services. It doesn’t require a download and can work on entire networks, or single computers.
It can optionally block any of these categories:
- Advertising
- Adware
- Alcohol
- Auctions
- Blogs
- Business Services
- Chat
- Classifieds
- Dating
- Drugs
- Ecommerce/Shopping
- Educational Institutions
- File storage
- Financial institutions
- Gambling
- Games
- Government
- Hate/Discrimination
- Health
- Humor
- Instant messaging
- Jobs/Employment
- Movies
- Music
- News/Media
- P2P/File sharing
- Parked Domains
- Photo sharing
- Portals
- Radio
- Research/Reference
- Search engines
- Social networking
- Software/Technology
- Sports
- Television
- Video sharing
- Visual search engines
- Weapons
- Webmail
Additionally, it can block phishing attempts and allows you to brand the pages returned when a website is blocked.
The quick version: Set the following as your DNS servers in your network connection
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220
You can do this by opening your network connections from the control panel. Right click your internet connection and click properties.
Click Internet Protocol/TCPIP from the list and click Properties as below.
Click OK, then close.
Visit https://www.opendns.com and follow their instructions if you need to configure your home router to protect your entire network.