Archive for April, 2008

Not going to list the full name of the school.. This is more of a battlefield journal that I’m keeping. I have to maintain my secrecy so my enemy doesn’t pick up any strategy that I may release here.

It’s so funny fighting these kids for sites they can goto on the internet. I do contract work for a local school system and one of the things they pay me to do it keep the kids off of bad sites. Well up until about a month ago I thought that the war was turning in their favor. Every day they figured out a way to get around my Norton web security protection. It was a feeble weapon against their mighty google searches for “proxy sites”. It seems that every week I would be manually adding sites to block to this security program. It would take them minutes to find a way around it. The moral on my side wasn’t doing very well.

Then… an ally at another school system told me about a new weapon that was more powerful than the “proxy” search weapon that had been dealing a horrible blow to my troops and their cause. OpenDNS was my saving grace. It allowed me to change the DNS servers on my router and Windows box. It would handle the domain look ups from now on. It asked me what categories I wanted to block from my invaders. Within minutes the blocking began. I heard many “ohh’s” and “ughs” from my opponents. Myspace didn’t stand a chance and the sites that before were my kryptonite had been blocked as well! I sang many songs to honor this great service which also fell under the free category which I know and love.

It seems that the war has made a turn for the good in my favor. Occasionally I will add a site to it’s wonderful “manual domain blocking” section. My enemy is both bruised and beaten now. They forget to clear their history before leaving the PC allowing my spies to follow their browsing and block what few sites they still have access to. With my adversaries on the retreat, they are forced to only look at school and educational related sites, while the games and inappropriate sites are now a thing of the past. The battle continues, but the war is all but won. Three cheers for OpenDNS and three cheers for the troops who have been fighting a strong fight.