Yesterday, some big news happened in the world of Parental Controls. There was a new domain suffix approved for .xxxThis means that pornography sites can now choose to use porn.xxx instead of porn.com. This sounds like great news for parental control software because parents can easily block *.xxx and be safe, right?
However, the key problem with this solution is that there is no legislation to enforce this. Businesses which have an established business will keep their .com addresses (Playboy will still be Playboy.com)
The second, and bigger problem with this is that it gives a false sense of security for parents. Because even if a parent were to block all .xxx domains, it is trivial to discover what the actual address of a domain is. So even if a parent were to block playboy.com, their child could still visit 216.163.137.68
In the end, the new .xxx domain means very little for parental controls.
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Incidentally, I use OpenDNS for our DNS which is a ton faster (in terms of network overhead) way of blocking unwanted things. If you request a blocked domain by DNS from OpenDNS, it returns an OpenDNS IP address, which tells you the site is blocked. If you misspell a domain name, it will correct it, and if you give a completely unknown domain name, you get search results instead.
ReplyDeleteNow, this has the same problem as any blacklist filtering - you're depending on somebody else's blacklist, which is probably not complete.
Since you apply this at your home router, it works on all the computers in your house without reconfiguring the machines. As long as your kids don't have administrative privileges, they can't change the DNS settings for their own machine. At the amount of trouble they'd have to go through otherwise to circumvent the control, you're at a point of better parenting, not better technology. i.e., if your child is willing to go through 20 minutes of configuration or stealing some other Wifi's connection to get to the Internet, then there's no amount of software that can help you, and you need to consider other alternatives - more appropriately look at the sickness (rebellion) instead of the symptom.