On May 5 2007 I wrote about OpenDNS’ initiative to offer web content filtering for the masses. At that time I thought the service will be offered for a fee, but to my complete surprise, David Uletvitch has decided to turn this project into a community effort.

Hundreds of thousands of websites have been manually tagged by volunteers and the result is given back to the public domain in the form of free web content filtering.

Deploying the system is straight forward:

1.  Use OpenDNS’ servers for DNS resolution
2.  Create a free account
3.  Add a network to the account (Yes, dynamically assigned IP addressed are supported too! )
4.  Pick the web categories you want to filter out – there are more than 30 categories!
5.  Turn on content filtering
6.  All done. Wait 3 minutes and test .

I would definitely recommend this project to anybody looking for a way to control the web access. First thing that comes into mind is keeping kids safe online. However, I’m sure that it’s hard to practice what you preach so if you use this system to protect your child, remember to "turn off" the OpenDNS resolver whenever you want to browse the web .

Nevertheless, a great tool indeed!