Internet filtering in Black and White

There are basically two options when it comes to Internet filtering. Whitelist and Blacklist.

Whitelist is a list of approved sites. It is great for younger children. You find a list of websites that you think are approved and only allow those sites. However, as kids grow, this approach becomes less and less ideal. They hear about great sites from friends and you spend more and more time approving sites. Eventually this becomes a chore for the parent.

Blacklist is a list of sites that are not allowed. This list is much more complex to determine and is the basis for most commercial parental control software. Companies spend their time scouring the internet to determine where the filth is, so you don't have to. Blacklisting allows your children a certain freedom to roam more of the magical interwebs while still being somewhat protected.

We here at Safernets have, until now, used whitelist. Some of the frustrations I had figuring out whitelisting are why I started this blog. With such a wide range of ages in this house, whitelisting is a good solution, but for my older kids, it is becoming more and more apparent that a whitelist is no longer good enough. I have several friends who use OpenDNS as their blacklisting solution, in fact, Will wrote a great piece on his blog today outlining some of the other benefits of OpenDNS.

The obvious benefit of OpenDNS is that it resides at the router. This means that any computer connected to your router will not be able to access sites in the blacklist. This also means that devices that do not go through your router are not subject to your blacklist (iPhones, Androids, etc). Having the blacklist at the router saves loads of time for the parent as you are not required to make sure all the computers are up to date. Currently, when I want to add something to the whitelist for my children, I have to add it to three different machines. Consequently, there are sometimes some machines that can access more sites than others.