Hey guys,

So there is a member in our house who is looking up porn on one of our brand new computers. Just like a "Lady of the Night" these are good places to pick up bugs. Do any of you know of a good program that is free for download to block such sites, Thanks in advance fore your help!

Try https://onlinefamily.norton.com/familysafety/loginStart.fs
This is a free download from Norton I use it on all our home computers, works with Win & Mac

Mike

Your Broadband Router may have a URL content filter access setup page on its Firewall. This will allow you to remotely control content on all/individual clients on your network.

The BEST thing you can do in that case is to use a different browser, anything other than Internet Explorer and Firefox. And make sure you keep everything up-to-date (especially Flash). Most of the anti-virus software out there is useless against the current spyware/malware threats that are the most common. They do nothing but waste PC resources. Using a different browser (Opera for instance) will keep any of the browser specific bugs (those that target a specific vulnerability in a particular browser) from affecting you, as the people writing these things generally target IE, and Firefox.

If you really want to stop it, download a Linux LiveCD, confront the porn viewer, and tell him to use the LiveCD to boot into linux to view his porn.

Blocking the "popular" sites will only stimulate a lot of creativity in finding workarounds or other sources of the material. Which do you want - someone who visits a few sites on a regular basis or someone who visits A LOT of different and NEW sites to find what you're trying to block him from finding? To me, at least, it would seem that the risk of infection is proportional to the number of new sites visited...


Either take the bullet by the horns (actually talking to this person...) or find a way to lower the risk (securing the browser, system etc). Porn is not the only source of malware/spyware/grayware/adware/whatever-ware, so any steps towards increased security is well advised anyhow.

free to download, i use avast. its security but it does not replace common sense. helps when i am trying to find info for a paper and catch one of those interesting links. to lock the sites for free i would use the firewall settings. but i would only allow access to sites that i had approved.

if you are looking for a better firewall than the tissue paper windows version i would look here and search for "firewall" its free.

standard disclaimer. not affiliated. just am happy with the site.

Ditch windows, go Ubuntu, rest easy.

I would suggest that you use OpenDNS
http://www.opendns.com/solutions/household/

Also consider creating a hosts file
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm


How would that stop anything? Only "advantage" using a Linux Live CD in this context is that it will not leave any trace of the surfing history.

The spyware/viruses/etc won't run under linux the few that do its easy to prevent them from doing so. Thats how it will stop it.

Thats depends on the level of filtering on the Routers Firewall and the feature set. My Vigor 2100 router has the ability to deny web based requests for ActiveX, Executable files, Mulimedia files, Cookies, Java, Proxies etc as well as key word denial and accepting IP subnet ranges. Along with the time scheduling a reasonably robust filter can be setup which will be more tricky to disable if physical access to the router is denied. As with any filtering even with the programs which run in the PCs background the same issues apply, the end user of the PC will be just as creative in finding a workaround (and will have physical access to the computer) The user of the PC may have admin rights (or have the ability to gain admin rights, if they know what they are doing) and will quickly be able to disable or modify the web filtering security software. BTW no web filter works perfectly, far from it. Opera browser is also a good idea, which is what I use.

Good video showing the security features of the Draytek Vigor 2820 router.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6qIiYk6Lkc