hopefully, it will block goatse :0

This is cool. I love what OpenDNS is doing with DNS. I wouldn't use this for myself, but I could definitely see recommending it to friends who ask about this kind of thing since it's free.

I want the stats they give me to be better and when I emailed their CEO it he said they were working to totally redo the way they do stats to make it more useful.

OpenDNS must be high-quality if St. Bernard Software is behind it.

Performance is great.

Features (including Privacy) are great.

Price is right (as in "Free").

What other questions can there possibly be?

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While not interested in a filter that shuts out pornography - at my age I feel competent to protect myself - I thought I'd check Open DNS to see if it could increase my web-browsing speed. Alas, no significant differences could be observed using a TP test for both TCP and UDP from Stockholm. So can it go....

Henri

This might be useful when the kids are young, but I'd be embarrassed if my kid (when I have one) wasn't smart enough to bypass this regardless of how well the machine had been locked down!
There are plenty of online dns lookup sites eg www.zoneedit.com/lookup.html
So he/she could simply get the IP address there and then connect to the website by IP address. A minor inconvenience.

I think the best way to protect your kids from porn is by teaching them, and placing the pc they use in an open area that is easily seen.

Anon> There are plenty of online dns lookup sites eg www.zoneedit.com/lookup.html So he/she could simply get the IP address there and then connect to the website by IP address. A minor inconvenience.

Uh, yeah, that's actually a pretty major inconvenience for most people, especially if the site is using name-based virtual hosting. And there are plenty of less inconvenient methods than the one you propose. A DNS-based anti-porn strategy is nevertheless useful, especially in the case where the user isn't determined to look at port, such as when bombarded with unwanted pop-up ads or html email content.

In my opinion, anyone with the knowledge to bypass the assigned DNS is mature enough to know the penalty. I have a seven year old that watches PS2 videos online, in the living room, with supervision. He makes mistakes typing at times and porn is even included in search results when he does not make a mistake. I have been looking for an easy solution for a while now. This looks very promising to me. When he is seventeen this may not be as valuable to me as it appears now.

Porn? I can easily delete that by using filtering! What about the other crap?

Aside from the fact that it's utterly foolish to think you can adequately and successfully block porn from the internet, how about instead of trying to censor the last great free frontier of human expression, you teach your children that human sexuality is a good thing?

Speaking as someone who grew up with the internet at its wildest, i can say firsthand that porn doesn't warp fragile little minds, in fact it bolsters a wider understanding and creates more open minded people. Censorship even at its best only does the polar opposite.

Devil's Advocate> Aside from the fact that it's utterly foolish to think you can adequately and successfully block porn from the internet,

As has already been stated, it's not requisite to successfully block all porn; the first objective, which this solution addresses effectively, is to minimize the risk of unintended exposure to porn through pop-ups and email spam, or, as Will Mars concisely exemplifies, simple mistyping of URLs. Remember whitehouse dot com?

Devil's Advocate> Speaking as someone who grew up with the internet at its wildest, i can say firsthand that porn doesn't warp fragile little minds, in fact it bolsters a wider understanding and creates more open minded people. Censorship even at its best only does the polar opposite.

As evidenced by your extreme position that the desire to protect children from confusing or harmful content is censorship, or that online porn is a good education on human sexuality? Anyone who thinks that a substantial portion of the online porn content doesn't have the potential to be psychologically harmful to children doesn't know much about developmental psychology. And people who learn sexual technique from online porn are doing themselves and their partners a disservice.

Hey "Devil's Advocate", this isn't amateur hour. Go make some rabble-rousing AC posts on /. and come back when you get modded up "Insightful".

I think Will Mars hit the nail on the head. This was presented as more effective than it actually is. It really is of little to no use for content blocking, as you could also use an anonymizing proxy to serve content without directly sending a request to the blocked domain. The main use would be to prevent either easy, casual access, or accidental access, to these sites. But if a kid is even smart enough to start in safe mode or use restore points to get around software-based blocking, they are probably aware of proxy servers.

Brian,

If your wife didn't know about this 'test,' she does now...

Haha! Yes, Ryan, she knows all about it. She came home the other day and asked how my day was and I sighed, saying I'd surfed for porn the whole day. Not your usual dinner chit-chat ;)

Yes, that should give you a little insight into the lot of the computer forensics people who work on child porn cases. Imagine having to dig through hundreds of thousands of images classifying each one as to what kind of porn it is, in order to build a criminal case--a vile job, and the ones who are saddled with it deserve respect and kind treatment.

It's pretty easy for a kid to simply use an online dns lookup to get the IP of a site they were trying to access, and then access that site using it's IP address rather than domain name. So "monkeying with DNS settings" is actually pretty easy, easier than disabling filters.

Anon> It's pretty easy for a kid to simply use an online dns lookup to get the IP of a site they were trying to access, and then access that site using it's IP address rather than domain name.

Yes, I think we already dispensed with that argument above. Did you read the earlier posts?

When you try to suppress the curiosity of a young mind, you immediately peak that curiosity with the obvious long term effect of turning young minds into staunch rebellious minds at an earlier age. Have we all grown so old and fusty that we've forgotten what that feels like! And we all run the risk of being found out as hypocrites, (young mind = sharp enquiring mind) people in glass houses and all that. Better to direct and teach through clear and honest information rather than suppression and prohibition... My answer is do without filtering altogether, as it's the easy lazy option for lazy parents.

SECURITY FIX?

When you try to suppress the curiosity of a young mind, you immediately peak that curiosity with the obvious long term effect of turning young minds into staunch rebellious minds at an earlier age. Have we all grown so old and fusty that we've forgotten what that feels like! And we all run the risk of being found out as hypocrites, (young mind = sharp enquiring mind) people in glass houses and all that. Better to direct and teach through clear and honest information rather than suppression and prohibition... My answer is do without filtering altogether, as it's the easy lazy option for lazy parents.

stephen clarke> My answer is do without filtering altogether, as it's the easy lazy option for lazy parents.

I see, so you think if parents are unable to keep their children from receiving pornographic spam, and unable to prevent them from accidentally mistyping a URL and landing on a porn site, they're being lazy. And you think that exposing five-year-olds to online rape, bondage, and torture porn will pique (not "peak") their curiosity, rather than confuse or harm them. Am I misrepresenting your views here?