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OpenDNS Should Be Accepted By Schools and Government |
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Tuesday, 21 August 2007 |
Schools, libraries, and government offices from county all the way up to national government for the most part all have some sort of internet filter. They all pay for the majority of them, and waste spend millions of our tax dollars on the subscriptions. For instance, my college uses Websense, which costs for each mac address on the wireless and for each wired IP (and is really easy to bypass). In a model, say that every government office in America, every library, and every school used Websense. Multiply the cost of the average number of users by all of the government offices and institutions. What a staggering figure!
There are free alternatives that will do just as well as this. While Dan's Guardian / Squid are pretty good, they constantly have to use bandwidth to upgrade their lists, which are very large, and they require their own dedicated server that goes between the users and the internet. While a firewall is always a good idea, this type of setup can really decrease internet speeds, and thus decreases productivity. Also, the fact remains that it costs to have the type of hardware needed to run such applications.
Currently, most states allow their schools' internet access to be strictly controlled by some state contracted company. I know that these companies put a heavily locked router in the school, which isn't allowed to be modified by the schools' network personnel. This leads to other problems, as IT staff have to deal with waiting on crappy service from a government contractor.
Why do I mention all of this? Because the methods of filtering above don't work as well as you'd like. Less-than-hacker type people and up can get around these filters by use of browsing by IP address. Proxies are always going to be out there, and they are really the only loophole that allows one to browse unrestricted internet (among other things I won't disclose because I need loopholes on public computers) in a blocked environment. As soon as one pops up and is blocked (both PHProxies and old-style IP proxies) another 10 come to take its place. The majority of employees and students in these offices, schools, and libraries don't know about this, though.
All of that to get to the real meat of the story, my proposal. I propose that all of these agencies, offices, libraries, and schools make the switch to filtering only with OpenDNS. OpenDNS is free to use. It is reliable, and it would allow IT staff to do more than block all the various sites that somehow offend the government, or are deemed inappropriate. They don't have to update it, as it is done daily by OpenDNS, and it is as close to blocking at the source as you can really get. It not only blocks bad domains but their IP addresses too! We would have more money in our pockets, and more money in the various coffers if OpenDNS would be accepted by the various governments..
So, write letters to various dignitaries in your local, city, state, and federal governments. Write more than 10, even if they say the same thing, as many offices won't allow the representative to even read such letters until they have gotten lots of them on the same subject. We can do this, and fix this problem.
On a side note, OpenDNS is free, and it seems faster than the DNS servers of my ISP. I doubt that OpenDNS logs your actions as much as your ISP does, too. Why not give it a shot? Whether on one computer or a network of them, OpenDNS is free, and works like a charm!
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