You can install parental control software on every PC, Mac, and mobile device in the house, but the kids can still get online without supervision using a gaming console or some other Internet-aware device. However, when content filtering happens in your home router, it affects every device on the network. That's the idea behind OpenDNS Home VIP ($19.95 per year). It definitely does what it promises, but in the end you may want to supplement it with another type of parental control.
You may find that the free OpenDNS Home is all you need. The free edition retains logs for two weeks, while the VIP edition retains them for a year. The whitelist and blacklist (lists of sites that are always allowed or always blocked) can each hold 25 URLs in the free edition, 50 in the VIP edition. And the VIP edition allows for a whitelist-only mode that restricts Web surfing to sites you've actively identified as safe. Don't need those features? Then you can go free!
There's one more version that deserves a note, OpenDNS Family Shield. This gives you precisely the same level of content filtering you'd get by setting OpenDNS Home to block the most egregious sites (basically porn sites and anonymizing proxies), but without the need or ability to configure the filtering level. In fact, you can use Family Shield without even creating an account, as long as you don't care about getting logs or reports.
Similar Products
Qustodio
Net Nanny
SafeDNS
McAfee Family Protection 2.0
MinorMonitor
uKnowKids Premier
What's DNS, Again?
DNS, which stands for Domain Name System, takes a nice, friendly URL like www.pcmag.com and translates it in to the IP address that's needed for machine-to-machine communication. Typically your ISP supplies DNS services along with your Internet connection, but you're not required to use the default DNS servers.
There are malware attacks that subvert DNS messaging, so that your browser's address bar might display www.paypal.com even though you're actually connected to a fraudulent copy. For many years, OpenDNS has offered a well-known alternative DNS service that's hardened against DNS-based attacks, and that also promises a faster response. OpenDNS Home VIP adds the ability to detect unwanted sites when the browser sends its request to resolve the domain.
Getting Started
Before you can use OpenDNS's parental control tools, you need to create an account that you'll use for configuration. It's a simple matter of registering your email address and a password. Be sure to choose something the kids won't guess.
As with the similar SafeDNS( at Amazon), you must now tweak some DNS settings. The OpenDNS website includes detailed instructions for changing DNS settings at the router level and for setting individual devices to use OpenDNS. Changes at the router level affect all devices on the network, which is what most users will want. For testing purposes, I just changed settings on the test machine, so as not to disrupt other activities on my network.
Configuring Protection
To configure content filtering, you must log in to your OpenDNS dashboard. The first time you do this, it will ask you to confirm your network's IP address; just accept what it proposes.
OpenDNS logs statistics by noting the DNS requests coming from that specific IP address. One tiny problem is that for most users that address is dynamic. The ISP could change it at any time. OpenDNS offers a small utility to handle this kind of dynamic IP address, available even for those using a free edition. SafeDNS also handles dynamic IP, but only for paid users.
You can set OpenDNS to filter at four levels: High, Moderate, Low, and None. For each level you can view just which of the almost 60 categories would blocked. You can also customize the list, and the customization page offers a handy popup description as you point to each category. I did find it awkward to scan the simple alphabetic list; SafeDNS groups its categories into five major groups, so that those most people want to block are all together.
If you want OpenDNS to keep logs and statistics, you'll need to actively turn on that feature. There's also an option to purge the logs, in case you want to start fresh.
Content Filtering
In testing, I couldn't find any inappropriate websites that got past the content filter, and of course it works for any browser, or any program attempting Internet access. A simple site-blocked message reports precisely which categories triggered the block. If your kids think the site shouldn't have been blocked, they can click a link to send the administrator (you) a message requesting access.
Of course, there's no real-time analysis of content like you get from ContentWatch Net Nanny 7 or Qustodio Parental Control 2015(30-day Free Trial Complete Plan - All Devices Full Protection at Qustodio). In testing, I found that those two could, for example, allow access to most of a short-story website while specifically blocking erotic stories. OpenDNS blocks all of a domain, or none.
Even at the Low filtering level, OpenDNS blocks the Proxy/Anonymizer category. That's important, because a savvy teen who managed to connect with a secure (HTTPS) anonymizing proxy could completely evade parental control and monitoring. Qustodio, Net Nanny, and WebWatcher($0.00 at WebWatcher) are among the few parental control products that can filter HTTPS traffic.
Assuming you're using the paid edition, you can configure OpenDNS to display a custom image and message on the page announcing that a site was blocked. The preview function didn't work perfectly in testing (my OpenDNS contacts confirm they need to fix that), but my new image and rich-text message did appear. Paid users of SafeDNS can do something similar, with a bigger custom image but no rich-text option.
Security Protection
Where SafeDNS simply gives phishing and malicious URLs their own content-filtering category, OpenDNS keeps security protection separate. By default, phishing protection and malware/botnet protection are turned on. A third category, called Suspicious Responses, is off by default, and probably should stay off for any users who aren't network experts.
Reading the fine print, it turns out that malware/botnet protection is extremely limited. It protects against Conficker, a threat that was big news in 2009, and against one other exploit. Indeed, when I exposed the test system to 100 very new malware-hosting URLs discovered by MRG-Effitas, OpenDNS didn't block any of them. SafeDNS didn't do much better, blocking just five out of 100.
OpenDNS Home VIP Antiphishing Chart
OpenDNS operates phishtank.com, which is one of the sources I scrape for URLs that have been reported as fraudulent but not yet verified. I thought this connection might give OpenDNS an advantage in my standard antiphishing test, but apparently it didn't.
I simultaneously opened each suspected phishing URL under OpenDNS's protection and under that of Symantec Norton Security( at Amazon), which consistently does a great job detecting frauds. I also checked the built-in antiphishing ability of Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer against these same URLs. OpenDNS's detection rate came in 76 percentage points behind Norton's, and 53 points behind Chrome's. IE and Firefox also beat OpenDNS.
Once a URL has been positively identified as fraudulent and added to the database of frauds, OpenDNS will block it just fine. But real protection against phishing comes from products like Norton, which use real-time analysis to identify fraudulent pages before they've been blacklisted.
Logs and Reports
Some parental control products, among them PC Pandora 7.0 and McAfee Family Protection 2.0( at Amazon), log your children's email conversations. WebWatcher, PC Pandora, and Spector Pro go even farther, recording everything that the child does, right down to logging keystrokes. OpenDNS is quite different from these.
From your online dashboard, you can check stats for your account. An overview screen lets you see an activity graph (based on the number of DNS requests), as well as a graph of unique domains visited, the top domains, and a few other items not of interest to most consumers. As with SafeDNS, the activity graph can reveal unusual online activity, like a spike in requests during a time you thought the kids were asleep. However, there's no way to break down the activity by user, or even by device.
You can drill down for a list of all domains logged by OpenDNS for a single day or range of days, sorted from most requests down to least. As with SafeDNS, many of these are not actually websites. Unlike SafeDNS, you can click on one that is an actual website and choose to block it, or block similar sites. In a similar fashion, from the list or blocked domains you can choose to make an exception for the domain or unblock the entire category.
Those who want the gritty details can fine-tune what's displayed, limiting the display to domains that were blacklisted, blocked by category, blocked as malicious, or blocked as phishing.
What Isn't Here
Anything that requires installation of an agent on local device is not available to OpenDNS. It won't monitor the children's social media activity the way MinorMonitor and uKnowKids do. The detailed activity tracking performed by products like PC Pandora, WebWatcher, and others isn't possible. And it doesn't offer real-time notification of online misbehavior the way McAfee, Net Nanny, and others do.
OpenDNS very specifically filters out unwanted websites at the DNS level. It can't log what user or device made those requests, but it can control access for every device on your network, something few products can do.
Protection for All Devices
If your household contains a mishmash of different device types and operating systems, and if you want a degree of control over what websites all those devices can visit, OpenDNS will give you that. Sure, your kids can still get out from under by using the cellular data network, or mooching a neighbor's unsecured Wi-Fi, but OpenDNS handles everything else.
Editors' Choice parental control products ContentWatch Net Nanny 7 and Qustodio Parental Control 2015 give a lot more insight into specific behaviors by each child, though you need to install them on every device. Consider using OpenDNS (the free edition will probably be enough) in conjunction with one of these top products.
OpenDNS Home VIP applies parental control and monitoring at the network level, for all your devices, and its essential features are available for free. Consider using it in conjunction with a more conventional parental monitoring tool.
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