Thursday, September 18th, 2008
Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin had her email hacked. I frankly find the event unsurprising. It only confirms just how little most people understand security and technology and where it’s going. It reminds me that the people I follow and enjoy online and the geeks around me are a small segment of today’s society. That a large part of the people in the world today don’t fully understand the potential, the danger, or the ease by which information can be found and shared.
A website I am a regular reader of is Heal Your Church WebSite. Dean Peters actually wrote an article about password before the news broke of Gov. Palin’s misfortune. And wrote a follow-up after the news was out.
So if you are wondering how to avoid Gov. Palin’s embarassment then read the following two links. Good, sound advice:
Tags: email, Heal Your Church Website, Password, Sarah Palin, Security
Posted in Communication, Security | No Comments »
Friday, May 9th, 2008
I’ve been using OpenDNS on my router at home for just about three months now. OpenDNS is a free service that claims to be smarter, faster, and offer more protection from evil on the internet than your ISP’s typical DNS service. If you don’t know what DNS (short for Domain Name Service) then do some reading before you try OpenDNS. Be sure you know what you are doing.
Anyway, the OpenDNS features I was interested in playing with were the phishing protection and the content filtering. I have a four year old at home who is learning more and more about the many things on the internet. There are some things that I’m not ready to explain and I didn’t want her to discover an adult site or a dangerous site accidentally. OpenDNS has many categories to filter by. OpenDNS makes me feel better knowing that it is far less likely my daughter will stumble upon some of the evil and ugliness of the internet.
Filters go beyond the adult only sort of thing I am trying to protect my daughter from if you need to block other sites. Also allows for blacklists and whitelists if you need to block or allow a specific site. It all depends on how draconian and involved you wish to be.
I can’t say I noticed it being faster than other local DNS’s I’ve hit. But it was reliable. I only had one issue and I was able to explain that as not an OpenDNS issue. I had my laptop setup for a while to use the OpenDNS servers but I ran into some problems with an intranet at work. Since my laptop was only looking at OpenDNS and OpenDNS not aware of the local network then some in-house servers required additional changes for me to get to. There are ways to work around this. It was just easier to run OpenDNS only on my home router and not on my laptop
OpenDNS is not hard to setup but you do need to be comfortable editing your computers network settings or your router.
So it is a small piece of comfort for me. If you are considering filtering in your house then you should check out OpenDNS.
Tags: DNS, Domain Name Server, filtering, OpenDNS, phishing, protection, Security
Posted in Security | No Comments »
