Family friendly internet

Scott Hamilton

Senior Expert in Emerging Technology

Did you ever wonder if there was a way to protect your kids from seeing adult content on the Internet without paying for a filtering service? Or protect your computer from Malware sites that create the crazy, “YOUR COMPUTER HAS A VIRUS PLEASE CALL US AT 1-800-XXX-XXXX TO ASSIST” messages that connect you to a guy named Dave in India. Dave in India then gives you instructions to grant him access to remote control your computer so he can clean your computer from the virus, and your bank account from all your money.

I used to think the only way to protect yourself was to be knowledgeable of computers and never trust anyone else to access your computer. Never trust pop-up messages, and avoid shady websites. This is getting more and more difficult as the Internet grows exponentially each year. Interestingly enough I was on a phone call this week with a co-worker in France when he told me about a new service being offered by CloudFlare.

I don’t know if you recall the article, but twice last year I wrote about Internet outages caused by the Domain Name Service (DNS) providers on the Internet. CloudFlare was one of those providers. CloudFlare is the largest and fastest DNS provider in the world. They provide service to large corporations like Google, Microsoft and Facebook, but they also provide service to the rest of the world as well.

CloudFlare has a unique business model. Google provides a free DNS service but Google uses its service to gather information about your internet usage. They track which sites you visit, how long you stay on a particular site, how often you visit the site, etc. They use this data to provide targeted advertising on your G-mail, Google search page, and web pages with Google ad services enabled. You see Google is not an Information Technology (IT) company, but an advertising company that gives technology away for selling advertising. CloudFlare actually makes all its revenue from providing the IT services, so when you use CloudFlare DNS instead of Google DNS no information is traced about the websites you visit. That right there is a huge advantage and great reason to make the switch. CloudFlare is free for you because companies like Google paid for it, whereas Google services are free because you pay for them with your private and personal information.

I have been using CloudFlare for my DNS services for well over a year now, and it was a simple matter of editing my Network Connection to use 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 as the Nameservers in my network configuration and stop most of Google’s tracking. What I did not know about until one day last week was CloudFlare’s family offering. CloudFlare has two additional sets of free Nameserver addresses that you can use in your network configuration. You can use 1.1.1.2 and 1.0.0.2 and get the added value of blocking known Malware sites from your computer, getting rid of Dave from India’s pop-up messages. Or you can use the ones I have set on my home network, 1.1.1.3 and 1.0.0.3, which not only block Malware sites, but also adult content on the web. CloudFlare has excellent instructions on the use of these services at their website https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/setup-1.1.1.1/windows/.

I will also provide links to additional instructions for setting up custom DNS on your other devices when the article goes live on my website sometime next week. Until then, stay safe and learn something new.

Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to sh*******@te**********.org or through his website at http://www.techshthepherd.org.