There was a time not too long ago when controlling what your kids got up to on the Internet was easy. There was one family computer linked to the Internet by a slow dialup connection and it was probably located in a communal room, so your teenage son didn’t get much opportunity of surfing the seedier side of the Internet ( at least not when the rest of the family was around ! ).

How times have changed. Now broadband Internet connections, WiFi networks have opened up web access to a huge range of devices from mobile phones through to games consoles and laptops, any of which has the potential to be used for nefarious purposes. Fortunately there are a number of ways in which the average home user can fairly easily block or at least monitor their family use of the Internet, this article will discuss a few of the FREE options that you might want to consider.

1. Setup your own Internet firewall.

This first option is the most complex and is probably best suited to those familiar with installing their own PC operating systems. If you have an old PC lying in the garage that used to run Windows 98 that no one wants anymore then you may be able to re-use it as a firewall between your home broadband connection and your network and home PC’s. All that is typically needed then is a pair of network cards, one to connect to your home broadband router and the other to your internal network/WiFi access point. Next head over to a site such as ClarkConnect.com and download their Community software. The download will be an ISO file which you will need to burn to a CD to use to install the system onto your old Windows 98 PC. When you boot up the old PC with this CD in the drive it will take you through an install routine that will help you setup your server. Once setup the server is administered from another PC on the network through a browser interface and the firewalls web filter ( DansGuardian ) can be enabled and configured.

ClarkConnect can actually provide a number of other services to PC’s on your network including email services, file storage, DNS and DHCP services, SQL and much more.

2. Use the facilities of your Operating System.

OS X Leopard introduced a fairly comprehensive Parental Controls solution to Mac users which allows parents to setup accounts for the kids that allow controlled access to applications and Internet services. Not only can you block access to inappropriate web sites, but you can also restrict email usage to only send/receive to and from addresses in your address book, limit the usage of iChat and specify the amount of time each application can be used each day.

To be fair to PC users, Windows Vista does also have a parental controls facility, but we won’t discuss that here….

3. Install 3rd Party Web Filter Software

Before Leopard and Vista the PC and Mac market relied on 3rd party add ons to provide web filtering solutions. Many of these products are not free however, and in some cases rely on an initial purchase followed by ongoing maintenance payments to continue to be able to use the software. There are a small number of free options though if you still have Windows XP or OS X versions preceding Leopard.

K9 from Bluecoat

One nice and free solution is K9 from BlueCoat Software which provides over 60 categories of site to block, allows custom sites to be allowed or blocked, produces reports of sites accessed/blocked and more. As a free solution this is well worth a look and is certainly better than some of the commercial solutions that you would have to pay for.

Blue Coat have also recently released a beta version of K9 for OS X, this requires OS X 10.4.7 or higher.

4. Setup an OpenDNS Account

OpenDNS is a replacement DNS service with a difference. DNS (Domain Name Service ) is the service that computers use to work out the correct address for a particular computer or web site on the network. When you type www.google.com into your browser toolbar your computer uses DNS to lookup the IP address of the Google web server and then goes and requests the web page from that server.

OpenDNS operate a DNS service that you can configure your computers to use instead of your normal ISP’s DNS servers. Once you have created an account and configured your computers to point to OpenDNS you can login to your account Dashboard and define which categories of web sites you would like blocked. After that any computers on your broadband network attempting to get to sites in those categories will get an OpenDNS blocked page instead. Not only that but as the administrator of the account you can see which sites were visited and which were blocked. Obviously a determined teenager can easily go around this by reconfiguring their computer with your ISP’s DNS addresses, but for many this will be adequate protection and offers the benefit of not requiring any software to be installed on your computers.

5. Switch off your Internet router.

Obviously a draconian step, but if you want the ultimate control the simplest solution may be to go back to the old days when control was easier ! Increasingly though with things like Apple TV, Nintendo Wii, Xbox Live and other sorts of Internet connected home entertainment this is probably not a sensible solution and you will need to investigate one of the other options discussed above.