Internet in the home: Protecting Your Family
Working with technology as I do, the Internet has been an incredible help to me in my work. For instance, part of what I do has me communicating with people in places like California, Bogata, Barcelona and Hong Kong. I also work between the office and a home office and regularly move a lot of information around as we work on tools to communicate the gospel to people around the world.
But the Internet is of course a double-edged sword. If you have an email account you already know that our email boxes are bombarded with SPAM, some of it rather vile, unless you have a filter. It's not much of a leap to see how Jesus' warning in Matthew 24, "Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold..." (in that rather chilling chapter about the end times) is at our door now.
Our greatest defense is a close walk with the Lord as we 'put on our spiritual armor...to quench the firey darts of the evil one' (Eph 6:11,16). I've also found that there are tools available that you can use in your home if you have an Internet connection so that you can filter out things like pornography and other killers to your walk with the Lord.
The first line of defense is your router. If you bring Internet into your home over DSL (phone line) or through a cable company provider, you already have a router if you are sharing the Internet connection with several devices. There are 3 ways to filter the Internet. You can install software like Safe Eyes on each device that uses the Internet. Another way is to filter the Internet through your service provider - some companies offer filtering that you can set for your entire home. The advantage of this is that it operates for every device in your home and you don't have to buy a license of filtering software that covers every device that is used in your home (these days even mobile phone, cable boxes and iPad's use an Internet connection).
Right now I'm using a 3rd method. It's a service you can use for free called OpenDNS. All you have to do is sign up for a free account at OpenDNS. Once you do, you get sequence of 4 numbers that you put into your router, and from that point on you can control what is available to everyone in your house because OpenDNS is doing the filtering rather than having your connection coming unfiltered from your Internet provider.
For instance, in my routher's 'Network Setup' page there is a section for 'DHCP Server Setting'. In this section there are 3 lines where you can enter these 4 numbers from OpenDNS. In my case they are labelled Static DNS 1, Static DNS 2 and static DNS 3. So I just enter the 4 numbers in this area. For instance, OpenDNS gives me 1 set of numbers for the main DNS server, and a second backup one - so I enter the first set of numbers in the DNS 1 and DNS 3 lines, and put the backup on the DNS 2 line.
What this does is every Internet address you type in - and everthing referenced on every page goes through the filtering you set up on your OpenDNS dashboard. So you can filter out pornography, chat, Youtube - anything you want. They have handy presets that you can customize - and if anything is blocked a message screen comes up telling the user in your home why that search was blocked. Even more important, many legitimate pages or you access might have adds coming from places that you would find objectionable. When these are filtered out the ads never appear!
One other important notes for those of you with teenagers - your router also gives you the ability to set times when your Internet connection is not available - so that your kids are not tempted to stay up to all hours!
If you have comments or questions on this, let me know, and perhaps I can post follow ups to help you set this up for your home.
But the Internet is of course a double-edged sword. If you have an email account you already know that our email boxes are bombarded with SPAM, some of it rather vile, unless you have a filter. It's not much of a leap to see how Jesus' warning in Matthew 24, "Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold..." (in that rather chilling chapter about the end times) is at our door now.
Our greatest defense is a close walk with the Lord as we 'put on our spiritual armor...to quench the firey darts of the evil one' (Eph 6:11,16). I've also found that there are tools available that you can use in your home if you have an Internet connection so that you can filter out things like pornography and other killers to your walk with the Lord.
The first line of defense is your router. If you bring Internet into your home over DSL (phone line) or through a cable company provider, you already have a router if you are sharing the Internet connection with several devices. There are 3 ways to filter the Internet. You can install software like Safe Eyes on each device that uses the Internet. Another way is to filter the Internet through your service provider - some companies offer filtering that you can set for your entire home. The advantage of this is that it operates for every device in your home and you don't have to buy a license of filtering software that covers every device that is used in your home (these days even mobile phone, cable boxes and iPad's use an Internet connection).
Right now I'm using a 3rd method. It's a service you can use for free called OpenDNS. All you have to do is sign up for a free account at OpenDNS. Once you do, you get sequence of 4 numbers that you put into your router, and from that point on you can control what is available to everyone in your house because OpenDNS is doing the filtering rather than having your connection coming unfiltered from your Internet provider.
For instance, in my routher's 'Network Setup' page there is a section for 'DHCP Server Setting'. In this section there are 3 lines where you can enter these 4 numbers from OpenDNS. In my case they are labelled Static DNS 1, Static DNS 2 and static DNS 3. So I just enter the 4 numbers in this area. For instance, OpenDNS gives me 1 set of numbers for the main DNS server, and a second backup one - so I enter the first set of numbers in the DNS 1 and DNS 3 lines, and put the backup on the DNS 2 line.
What this does is every Internet address you type in - and everthing referenced on every page goes through the filtering you set up on your OpenDNS dashboard. So you can filter out pornography, chat, Youtube - anything you want. They have handy presets that you can customize - and if anything is blocked a message screen comes up telling the user in your home why that search was blocked. Even more important, many legitimate pages or you access might have adds coming from places that you would find objectionable. When these are filtered out the ads never appear!
One other important notes for those of you with teenagers - your router also gives you the ability to set times when your Internet connection is not available - so that your kids are not tempted to stay up to all hours!
If you have comments or questions on this, let me know, and perhaps I can post follow ups to help you set this up for your home.
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Irv