Are porn blockers a good solution for men who are struggling with the temptation to look at pornography? There are lots of products out there, like Cybersitter, Net-Nanny, and OpenDNS. Will they help you stay away from porn?
As some people know, I’m not a fan of porn blockers (alone) for adults. A porn blocker is like a game to someone who is determined to find pornography. People will spend hours trying to get around them, since they are basically “blacklists”. If you can find a site that is not in the list, then you’ve “scored”. In many ways, this is like gambling; you try to hit, and try to hit, and sometimes you succeed. When you do succeed in bypassing it, there is a rush, similar to hitting that one number on a roulette wheel. I can’t get behind reinforcing a gambling addiction along with an addiction to pornography.
Another thing that is not good about porn blockers, when used alone, and not in concert with accountability software, is that no one knows that you just spent an hour trying to find pornography. You’ve maintained your anonymity, even if you never succeeded in going to a single pornographic site. Even if you use a blocker, you should have accountability software and a good accountability partner so that there can be openness about all of your Internet activity.
At the Xenos Summer Institute last month, in my talk on battling pornography in your church, I was discussing accountability software and porn blockers, and someone mentioned OpenDNS as a great solution. I had heard about this before and decided to investigate.
OpenDNS is freely available at www.opendns.com and has several benefits, such as web content filtering, anti-phishing, and better and faster DNS service than most Internet Service Providers. It gives you up to 50 categories of content filtering, and statistics reporting. You can filter on categories like porn, nudity, lingerie, drugs, and even things like sports, auctions, religion, and just about anything else.
I decided to see how it works by signing up for it. Installation is pretty easy (though I am an Internet software developer, so my view of easy might be different than yours). You sign up, configure your Internet DNS (Domain Name System) settings to use their DNS servers, and you’re done. It takes just a few minutes.
Once I had signed up, I configured the settings I wanted, and did an experiment. Could I get to images of naked women? I went to Google, typed in a search term, and there were the links (for those of you who think this is a dangerous experiment: you’re right, but my wife was there, and I was ready to hit Command-W if I actually saw anything). Every attempt to get to a “real” nudity or porn site was blocked with a message. Good – nothing like a tiny slap upside the head to remind you.
However, OpenDNS is domain-based. For those of you who are not Internet-savvy, that means that domains, like something.com or thisandthat.com or whatwhereyouthinking.com are blocked. If you go to a site that normally hosts innocent content, but also has nudity, you can see anything on the site. This includes sites that host photography, like flickr. That’s not good; along with people’s vacation pictures, there’s plenty of suggestive stuff there for the determined. No matter how high you set the level of security, if the domain is not known for adult content, you can see anything on it. Contrarily, if a domain is known to host adult content, you can’t get to innocent pages on it, which could be a downside for some.
This, plus the lack of accountability for your actions on the Internet convinced me that OpenDNS is not a sufficient solution. It will keep you away from the most egregious content, to be sure, and it’s very good for that, but it won’t keep you away from sexually oriented material on the Internet, even at the highest filtering level.
Having said that, I still use it. For one thing, their DNS servers are much faster at finding web pages than my ISP. For another, it keeps me from landing blindly on a page I did not really know, and don’t want to be sucker-punched by. If you have children, something like this is essential to prevent their inadvertent exposure to pornography.
The bottom line is that anyone who is serious about growth in this area should have accountability software installed, like Covenant Eyes, and also have the choice do have content filtering. You can sign up for Covenant Eyes by clicking on their banner on this site.
Great post! Thanks for doing the comparison. By the way, have you read this recent one from Michael Leahy? – http://www.covenanteyes.com/blog/2009/08/10/comparing-x3watch-and-covenant-eyes/
Yes, I did. I think his conclusions are spot-on. I’ve been told X3Watch is so easy to defeat that any 12-year old can do it. I’ve also heard the tales of bad reporting, false positives, etc. I think the guys at XXXChurch have a great ministry, but I don’t expect them to be a software company. Covenant Eyes is the best – period.