Tru’s been digging on Star Wars videos on YouTube lately. That’s fine, but he’s also figuring out the address bar in a browser and just kinda being the 6-year old information sponge he’s supposed to be. All good. But a little worrisome since you never know what he’ll come across (no, I don’t sit right next to him the entire time he’s on the computer).

Amy and I’ve been kinda wondering out loud when/if we should get some kind of ‘kid safe’ software or whatever. Instead, I ran across the coolest alternative ever. And it’s not just for kid safety, either.

OpenDNS is a free service that basically routes your Internet connection through their servers. The benefits to this are multi-fold:

• Super easy adult site blocking
• Phishing protection using PhishTank (which they also operate)
• Domain correction (if you enter craigslist.og, it’ll correct it to craigslist.org)
• Domain whitelisting (in case you want to include a site that’s otherwise blocked)
• Domain blocking…you can even add a custom message about why it’s blocked
• Network shortcuts…this is really cool. If you’re on our wifi and you type ‘bh’ (without quotes) into a browser address bar, you’ll be taken to http://bikehacks.com. You can set up as many of these shortcuts as you like. They’ll work on all the computers on your network.

And there are lots of options behind all that stuff, which makes it super flexible in terms of usage.

I’m really stoked about this. I know my kids are protected, and since we leave our wifi open for our neighbors, I know their kids are protected too. Setup is totally easy–they’ve got great tutorials for a ton of different routers. Our basic fios router was in their list and I pretty much followed the instructions word for word. Had to change settings on both the wifi and the Ethernet parts, but the whole setup took about 5 minutes, tops. Easy.