Wierd. I'm blogging.

I just wanted to point out to everyone (yeah...both of you.) that there is a link to OpenDNS in my blogs Link List. OpenDNS is an open source (read FREE) web filter. You can set it up to be very strict (as in "allow only these sites") or very loose (as in only block phishing and attack sites). All of this is performed by address filtering rather than keyword filtering.

Now of course this has it's drawbacks. It doesn't necessarily catch brand new sites (though you can add them yourself if you find such a site.) but it also won't stop people from getting to their E-mail.

Here's how it always worked for us with Cybersitter. A patron would come in and get a computer. They would sit down and start over to their E-mail and then they would call us over because it wouldn't load (and who knows how many DIDN'T call us over and just left instead) we would look things over and almost universally end up turning off the Cybersitter so they could get their E-mail which probably had porn spam in the junk box or something. Well now the filter is off so it does NOTHING. For me this defined an impotent defense.

Now that we use OpenDNS I have been called over about a blocked site 3 times in 3 months. Two of those ended up being phishing sites so it was good that they couldn't get there and the other was a web E-Mail client which was marked for adult themes. I looked it over and determined it was not sufficiently heinous to really need to be blocked so I un-filtered it and everything is cool.

~0ps