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Free Parental/Web Filter

As much as we use the internet today in ministry, we are often exposed to stuff that we don’t want to be exposed to. There is a lot of bad stuff out there from sexual explicit sites, to online gambling sites,  to phishing sites, all sorts of things that are bad for a ministry related person  to see and be exposed to. Also as a parent of a budding resourceful teenager who goes all over the internet I am concerned about him going to sites that are not appropriate for children to see. Also, our supporters probably would like to know that we are taking steps to protect ourselves as ministry leaders from this same material. A 2000 Christianity Today survey found that 37 percent of pastors said pornography is a “current struggle” of theirs. Fifty-seven percent called pornography the most sexually damaging issue for their congregations. We need protection!We have all tried different solutions, ones that we had to pay for, others that make the computer painfullly slow. I personally got so frustrated with most of the ones that I have used in the past, I just gave up and hoped that my talks were enough.

In the last couple of months, I have been asked about what is available. I want to share about two free solutions K9 Web Protection and Open DNS (here is an article comparing the two) that don’t bog down the computer, is good at blocking most “bad” sites and most important, is capable of monitoring internet use, which allows a level of accountability for the internet user, seen as the most effective way of stopping addictive “bad” internet use. The trick is to find a solution that will not block you from sites you need but blocks you from sites you don’t in a way that is generally unseen and unfelt when you are doing the right thing.

For the last few years I have been using a software product called K9 Web Protection. K9′s producer is Blue Coat. As they put it,

Blue Coat, based in Sunnyvale, California, is a high-technology company with a focus on “Making the Web Safe for Business.” As the Internet has evolved, companies rely more and more on the web and the web browser as a primary tool for connecting with all kinds of resources. But as the Internet has evolved, so have the threats that can come from malicious content, inappropriate use, and poorly-constructed web applications.

Their main products are not for the consumer market but are designed for businesses to protect them from the internet and its misuse. But they made a decision to allow their web filtering technology be made available for the consumer for free as a service to the community thus K9 Web Protection was born. It is an industrial strength solution that places a small easy-to-install driver on one computer at a time that drives all internet traffic from that computer through their commercial quality web filtering/traffic logging servers. So regardless of what browser you use, this technology will be able to filter it.

You are able to configure what is allowed and not allowed through a password protected interface that is tied to your account. You can even turn off the filtering but you can continue to monitor internet surfing.You can also decide what is allowed and what is denied by selecting from 58 different categories from “Adult Mature Content” to “Violence/Hate/Racism.” You can even block other “less bad” categories that may become a distraction like, “Online games”, “Auctions,” “chat rooms” etc. You can also limit the hours that the internet is available.  You can also create “Exception rules” where certain sites are always allowed to pass and others are always blocked. For example, “Youtube” and “flickr” is generally blocked because of some questionable content by its members but we use both often for ministry to share pictures and videos and so I set is as a site that should always be allowed.

When an attempt is made to get onto a questionable site, the computer literally “barks,”  a screen comes up telling the web surfer why their request was rejected, and it allows the user the options to unprotect that site temporarily or permanently IF they have the administrator’s password. Regardless of what the user chooses, this event and their choice is logged in the K9 system. The nice thing about K9 is that is does not take up a lot of system resources and it has very few false positives and does not lock up your system. I have had these problems with programs like Covenant Eyes.

You also can get a copy of where people have been surfing at different levels of detail any time through their “View Internet Activity“. It will categorize the types of sites people have been going to and “red flagging” the sites that were rejected. You can then drill down to the actual site and page to see where the “infraction” occurred. One weakness is that it flags sites based on the URL and becuase sites like youtube, myspace or yahoo360 have some questionable material on it, it will block the whole site. So it behooves the person who is monitoring to check the details before confronting the user.

Open DNS – I just recently found OpenDNS. A “DNS” or “Domain Name Server” is a server that takes the websites names you put in and converts it into an address of a server that can be found on the internet. It acts as a sort of “directory” of names and addresses for the internet. There are more than one of these. No doubt your ISP uses one of their own. OpenDNS is one such server that you can link to directly. It is generally faster than most other servers and that is one added advantage of using OpenDNS. But the ingenious thing that Open DNS did was it added a website filtering and monitoring function to their DNS server. So as you go through their server, what you are looking at is seen, logged and filtered. It’s primary purposes are to protect against phishing and worm site (two types of BAD virus delivery vehicles) and to correct types when you enter a URL wrong, but it can be set up to filter things as well.

The one weakness of OpenDNS is that it takes a few more “technical” steps to set up. The easiest way to set it up is through your router. All you have to do is set the Primary DNS addresses to 208.67.222.222 and the secondary to 208.67.220.220. In the default condition, this then sets up the whole network serviced by the router to be protected against phishing attacks. If you want to protect against other things including blocking sites, you need to go to the OpenDNS website and set up a free account. Once you have an account, log in and select “Networks” and set up the network you just set up, with its IP address. Once that is completed, you can click on settings and select what types of material you want to filter. You can also set up a single computer with Open DNS. Go to the Internet settings in Windows and then have the PC use the above DNS Server. (See explicit instructions here)

There are 52 different categories that you can choose from. Their method for entering exceptions (always and never block sites)  is not as clean as with K9. Using the stats page, you can see what site in each category had been seen. The fact that you can do this, for either software, acts as a deterrent for people going to inappropriate site. The nice thing about Open DNS is that you can protect a whole network (without putting software on every PC) and it does speed up finding web pages and it is conceptually simple and more transparent to the user, which is a huge plus but it is harder to install and configure and use on the fly than K9.

Either solution is a great way to cheaply protect yourself, your students and your family from sites that they should not be going to in your ministry for free. The added bonus is both solutions are built on commercial strength engines and so are not likely to crash or have major problems. Companies cannot afford to have these products take them down so they will not likely take your system down.

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