Safety, speed come with a switch to OpenDNS
Making this change can help you keep tabs on your children’s Internet use and protect you from websites that wish you harm
M ost people would rather just turn on their computer or mobile device and let it do its work without having to make technical adjustments or read detailed help documents about how to use it. However, making a small adjustment to your computer, tablet, or router could speed up your Internet access, let you control your children’s Internet use, and protect you from a multitude of malicious websites.
Unfortunately, to make the adjustment that will give you all of these benefits you need to understand a bit of the mechanics of how your computing device finds websites on the Internet.
There are millions of websites and they all have names for which you can search in Google. In reality, computers and the Internet are based on numbers and a website’s easily remembered name, such as www.google.ca, is actually identified as a great long string of numbers called an Internet Protocol or IP address.
When you manually type the address of a website into the location bar of your browser or click on a Google search result, the computer sends the request to a computer in the Domain Name System, or DNS for short. This is akin to a gigantic telephone directory of the Internet. The DNS looks up the name of a website and converts it to the IP address that a computer or network can understand. Without the DNS at your service you would have to memorize lengthy strings of numbers instead of nice convenient names.
The company that supplies you with your Internet service routes all of your requests through a Domain Name System that it has chosen, but you could gain all kinds of useful services and potentially speed up your browsing if you were to switch to an alternate, free system called OpenDNS (www.opendns.com).
OpenDNS will do the routine work of finding the IP addresses of the websites you want to visit, but it has numerous other unique features. It’s these additional controls that explain why numerous corporations and schools use the services of OpenDNS to add a layer of protection from malicious sites and prevent employees and students from engaging in inappropriate Internet surfing. The free service works in the background and usually no one will ever know it’s there.
OpenDNS maintains an updated list of phishing sites in its Phishtank and will warn you of danger. There is another free feature called FamilyShield which is designed to protect young children from visiting socially unacceptable and possibly disturbing websites.
You might also notice that sites load faster because OpenDNS caches websites, which means that it takes a snapshot of the most popular sites and you load an image of a site from the OpenDNS server rather than having to make an additional trip on the Internet to get it. If you register for a free account you’ll have access to your own personal “dashboard” where you can customize what types of sites to block, and which ones to exempt from the lists.
To enable OpenDNS you have to make a change to the Internet settings on your computer or mobile device and the settings will apply to that computer. If you make the change to the settings of the wireless router that your home computers use then any adjustments you make with your “dashboard” or FamilyShield will apply to all of the computers in your household.
Before you dismiss the whole thing as too complicated, be assured that the complete system and its setup have been designed with the computer novice in mind.
To begin, register for a free account and follow the detailed instructions for changing the DNS settings in your computer or router. The instructions cover just about every operating system and model of router although you should record the existing DNS numbers so that if you don’t like OpenDNS, you can revert to your old settings in a flash. A nice feature is that your dashboard is password-protected to prevent tinkering by anyone but you.