Getting Started
We all want to have a safe internet experience but especially for our family. What are some available technologies we can use to minimize coming across the websites we want to avoid, the videos that leave a negative imprint, the technology that is problematic?
One quick disclaimer to get out of the way. There is not perfect prevention. Every system can be circumvented with effort. This is about preventing the accidental, and making it a little harder than easy to get around the security controls. A determined person will borrow a friends phone. They’ll restore the laptop back to factory settings. What goes a long way? Training. In the corporate world training is a needed, albeit at times, overlooked method to keep hackers from entering the network. The end user is the way in. The same concept is needed when keeping kids out of trouble online. Pure technology, without the why and training for when it goes awry, won’t stop the determined.
That all said, a combination of technologies is often a good approach to help keep the problems from finding their way in.
Clean Search
First up is thinking about how websites are found. There are clean(er?) search engines than going straight to “the Google”. A few kid friendly search engines are Kiddle, Kidrex, and WackySafe. You can create a separate login on your computer for your kids and set the home pages to one of these. Otherwise you can set the shared computer’s browser homepage and default search engine to one of these. This sets up your first line of defense.
Set Browser Default Search and Homepage
You found your favorite alternate search engine. Setting your homepage and default search is a good start. But which one are you using? Firefox? Chrome? Safari? Internet Explorer? Edge? Does anyone remember Netscape? I digress. But here are some helpful links to each of these.
Firefox – Change Default Search – Set Homepage
Chrome Directions – Change Default Search – Set Homepage
Internet Explorer – Change Default Search – Set Homepage
Setup a clean Google search
Google offers some family friendly controls. There are a lot of interesting features that allow you to control things across multiple devices. The caveat is you have to be a Google household if you want to control those settings across desktops and mobile devices. Depending on your situation and how many devices you have in the house, managing most access through a desktop may be just fine and not require configuring a bunch of this across all devices.
What about other search engines security features?
Bing has a ‘SafeSearch’ setting where you can adjust the results. I’d recommend configuring an account with Microsoft so this can be remembered more easily by the browser. Without an account to remember settings you’ll find these can be fickle things, a cookie expires on your browser, and the setting is forgotten.
Yahoo? Oh how the mighty have fallen.
Perhaps forgotten by many, but they are still around and have similar capabilities best utilized by setting up an account with them and then setting restrictions on search results.
Umbrella / OpenDNS
OpenDNS has been around for a long time and provides a unique way to filter internet access. Sign up for a free account to use their base level filtering. You need a little know how to make it all work, but they have guides to step you through it. For most, selecting the consumer edition is where you’ll be headed.
How does OpenDNS work?
The way your computer finds anything on the internet, apart from a misguided belief that Google does it, is by a particular system called DNS.
After you create an account on their system you have to choose where to configure it. The most effective place to set it up is on your router, but for many the only router in their possession is provided by the ISP, which doesn’t always let the DNS get set by the consumer.
If you do have your own WiFi router you can modify the DNS it hands out to devices on the network. This will let you control all devices taking and using those settings.
Howtogeek has a simple guide you can flip through if OpenDNS’s directions gets too in the weeds.
Will DNS over HTTPS (aka DoH) interfere with OpenDNS? (Warning: Technical details follow – skip if necessary)
It isn’t supposed to. Chrome and Firefox are changing how DNS works through their browser. To enhance security they are using a newer developed method to look up websites. In the past browsers like Chrome and Firefox have used the computer’s primary settings when using DNS to identify how to get to a website. There are some security issues that come from this way to doing things which dates back to how DNS was originally designed in the early ages of the internet when everyone trusted everyone.
That said, OpenDNS supports DoH, so this isn’t going to cause a big issues when using Chrome. Chrome has said they’ll check if OpenDNS is being used by the computer’s DNS provider, and use it if supported. Firefox will need a little attention though since they aren’t making theirs work in quite the same way, at least by the time of this article being written. Firefox intends to have their DoH configuration query the DNS provider Cloudflare by default.
YouTube For Kids
YouTube can have some wild stuff on it. There are a couple options provided to tame the content. The simplest is to enable restricted mode.
Google is also continuing the kids YouTube app and search engine. Although not perfect (refer to starting paragraph) this is an improvement on raw YouTube browsing.
Final Thoughts
This article covers what I would call inexpensive, perhaps time intensive solutions, which are not an extremely tight net, but they help limit the major ‘oops’ moments when you didn’t intend to go somewhere and got there anyway.
Because there’s so much to this sort of filtering, and many options to attack it with, I’m breaking this up into a series to make it more digestible. Part 2 will talk about actual physical devices you can use on your home network to tame that wild wild west of an internet. These are more easy button solutions that you pay a bit for, but make it easier to manage a complex set of devices most home networks tend to be made up of these days. Part 3 will take another tack and evaluate software that can be put on computers and devices to manage their access regardless of what network they are connected to.
I’ve been using OpenDNS for years. Love it. Simple to setup, and easy to configure.
I have setup a local Proxy Server for my kids devices to filter through. I use Squid as my choice of software. Combined with WebAdmin for Ubuntu I can edit the access controls to block sites on the go, in-addition I use OpenDNS to help filter out sites that I may miss. This setup may be rather Geeky, and not for the average user, but those with some Linux and Networking experience could set this up fairly easy.