Security

There are lots of free anti-virus, spy-ware/malware detection and firewall apps out there to choose from. So if you’re running Vista or XP and contract a virus – there’s really no excuse for your PC being unprotected with all the free options to choose from.

My favorites at the moment are AVG-Free A/V, Comodo Firewall and Spyware Blaster

Still you can never be too careful when browsing the internet.

OpenDNS provides a DNS service for your PC or internet connections router which can:

• Filter out certain website types from your browser. Great for keeping kids out of trouble.

• Speed up your  internet browsing experience overall. Who doesn’t want some of that?

Best of all you don’t need to install anything. Well if you’re confused – here comes the techie bit…What the heck is DNS anyway?

Put simply DNS or Dynamic Naming System is the method your PC uses to find and return websites hosted on servers located on the internet. It can also be used separately from the internet environment to do other stuff but we’re not interested in that for now…

So – say when you type www.ibm.com into your internet browser and hit return have you ever thought about how that IBM welcome page is returned to your browser? The contents of the internet aren’t stored on your computer are they??

Well when you type that url/link into your browser and hit return – it sends out a request to your DNS server. This servers located in your internet service providers data centre and receives all the browser requests you make. The DNS server holds a database of IP addresses for a bucket load of websites that match up with the urls which we humans like to use.

If the DNS server doesn’t know the IP address of the website we want to access from the url we send it – it will query another server, and another and maybe another until it finds the IP address of the server we want and connects us to it.

So how does OpenDNS help in this situation??

It holds a giant database of DNS records (which map our urls to IP addresses). We get a result first time and this results in our webpage being returned faster than if we use the DNS servers our internet service provider connects us to.

You can change the DNS servers you use to OpenDNS servers and it will not affect your internet connection – it’ll make it better

Click on this button to get started and see what OpenDNS can do: