Insomnic Dreams

The How-To Geek has an excellent article explaining how to use OpenDNS to filter your Internet content. Let’s do a quick check on OpenDNS and then we’ll explain why you might want to filter your Internet access.

First let’s explain what DNS is and I’ll try not to be too boring since the details are relatively technical. Every website has two addresses; one for computers to read and one for humans to read. Humans see and use www.howtogeek.com, which is the domain name, to go to a website and computers see and use 208.43.115.82, which is the IP address for howtogeek.com. The Domain Name Service (DNS) is like a phonebook and keeps track of which numbers (208.43.115.82) go to which domains (www.howtogeek.com). So humans type in www.howtogeek.com into the browser and the DNS translates that into 208.43.115.82 which the computer can then use to find its way through the Internet to get you to the website. You can see that this is a pretty important function of Internet usage – and unfortunately still really boring for non-geeks.

Normally, your Internet provider takes care of providing this as a basic function of you Internet service. OpenDNS is a free way of getting the same information but with a bit of a bonus. OpenDNS provides extra features. It’s more like an operator than a phone book. Here are some of their free services:

• Typo Correction – If you misspell a common address it fixes it for you (google.cm automatically corrected to google.com)
• 404 Replacement – If you type an address that isn’t found you get a search results page instead of just a “Page not found” error page which might direct you to the site you want.
• Shortcuts – You can setup keywords that automatically resolve to addresses
• Large Cache – Large directory and frequently updated (basically means the “phonebook” is huge and updated regularly with new additions and updates)
• Filtering – Block aspects of Internet use

All of those services are free and not provided by the DNS service you are getting from your ISP. The details of which are explained in more detail on their website but I wanted to talk about the filtering the How-To Geek explains in his article.

There is one reason to filter Internet content and that is for security (social, moral, technical, or legal sense). Lets go over what OpenDNS provides as a filtering service and I think you’ll see how it can be useful.

• Content Filtering- This provides filtering based on website content. You can choose from 30+ categories such as Auctions, Adware, Chat, P2P/Filesharing, Games, Forums, Gambling, Shopping, etc. This is very useful for limiting what people in your home or even business are allowed to browse.
• Adult Site Blocking – Obviously, this one blocks adult content using a very well maintained black list.
• Domain Blocking- This service allows you to block specific sites. Perhaps you want to allow social networks to be usable, but not MySpace. You would use this service to block just that one site.
• Domain Whitelist – This it the opposite of Domain Blocking. This service would allow you to block all social networks exceptfor MySpace.
• Phishing Protection- Phishing is a tactic used to fake a legitimate website in order to get your information. These sites would look like your bank site but aren’t and once they just use the site to collect your login information.

I think you can see that this service provides a lot of options for making your Internet usage safer for you – especially if you have a family or business. OpenDNS filtering not only provides you with protection from nefarious evil doers online by blocking phishing and adware sites but it can protect your kids from adult content or “too soon” social network usage as well as protect your business from legal issues by blocking file sharing.

I’ve been using OpenDNS for years and find that my Internet usage and experience has benefited from it. I suggest you give it a look and even if it all sounds “too technical”, please check the OpenDNS website and the How-To Geek’s article to see how user friendly they have made their service.

There isn’t a single individual who knows everything about using computers despite what $|_|p2G33|< may say online (that’s “supergeek” in leetspeak – be wary of leetspeek people). That being the case, it is best to keep track of some people who do know a lot and one of the people I follow to learn more is the How-To Geek.

He blogs short tips and guides for Apple, Firefox, MS Office, Ubuntu/Linux, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Other Geek Stuff (those are his official categories). The easiest way to keep up with all of his latest posts is to subscribe to the RSS feed.

What separates his site from many other techie sites and why I’m making a point of highlighting him here is because most other computer sites are geared towards other computer geeks and end up not being helpful to regular computer users. The How-To Geek is a site for the regular computer user and the computer geek. The how-tos that are posted are easy to follow and are useful to everybody.  Be sure to bookmark the site and subscribe to his RSS to get regular helpful tips to make using your computer just a little bit nicer.

For help with using RSS, check out the previous posts.

For many people, a home network is a great way to share an internet connection. For some more adventurous it’s a way to share files between computers as well. The even more savvy use a network to do many things like tranfer files, backups, shared program databases, media sharing, printing, and many other things. This can be a bit daunting for the average home user that just wants to surf the web from any computer and maybe some wireless to use their laptop in the kitchen.

There are advantages though to having something a little more robust going on in the house. Along comes Windows Home Server. WHS is designed to be a simplified version of the server software used in businesses. It is meant to be used by families or people who aren’t such geeks that they have home built servers in their closets – but could still gain from the advantages of what is called a headless server (“headless” refers to a computer without a monitor and controlled remotely).

You can read up at the product site for some of the features and you can go here to see a screenshot tour and some commentary on the product.

Here are the basic advantages for a home with more than one computer:

• Regular backups
• Central location for files and data
• Secondary location for storage
• Media Server
• Remote file access

Now, to be honest… this is really only useful in a household where there are multiple computers. If you have only one computer, you can get similar results with some software and a large external USB or network drive.

So… this does look promising and it will likely bring the networking robustness of a home more prominence for the average computer user. It will probably fall under the “cool but do I need it?” catagory for many people though … I tell ya’ though — many people felt the same way about broadband. You may not need it, but it sure is useful.