Parents Block Porn Online

Don't want your children to be exposed to pornography online? Neither do I and any parent should really be concerned about this. Several studies have now shown that children who are often exposed to porn are at greater risk for teenage pregnancy, pornography addiction in later life and even more worryingly, may mimic behaviour that will make them susceptible to sexual predators - offline and online.

 If you are looking for parental control software that will do all the work for you, scroll down to the bottom and see my recommendations.

1) Open DNS Method

This method is slightly difficult to use, if you are not an experienced computer user. First; sign up for an account with opendns.com. This service translates website addresses into numerical ip addresses. Then follow the instructions given to set opendns to control your browsing. This may involve you configuring your router. When opendns is configures, you can choose filtering levels and set to the level you want. If you set it too high, then a good deal of porn and other harmful content will be blocked. This method works if you use a different browser than Internet Explorer.

2) PicBlock Method

PicBlock is a free software available from download.com. It works by detecting the color code of the picture and if too much 'flesh' color is show, it will activate and shut it down. This can be reasonably effective in combination with other methods such as safe search in Internet Explorer and the Open DNS method.

Both these methods work decently, but they are in no way foolproof. They do not block certain keywords for example and they can't filter email and chat messages.

That's something that made me reconsider, because chat and instant messaging is what children are using the internet for most. While my children know not to go on 'those kind of sites', they can't really protect themselves from older children or predators chatting with them in the same way. I think, that's why parental control software is the best choice and the cost isn't extravagant. I looked into several solutions and eventually bought M.P. Blocker, which so far has done what it's supposed to do and done it well. It really is a relief to not to have to worry about your childrens online surfing all the time.