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Comment by xupybd | Hacker News Reader

There are some of us the would love an ability to opt-out of certain parts of the internet. I understand the problem with censorship. But I would love the option to opt-out. Especially when children are involved.

The internet is an amazing source of information. But currently it is not safe to leave a child alone on the internet. Is there a way to keep every one happy?

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Then, uh, don't leave a child alone on the internet...?

Or install your own filtering software / proxy / whatnot.

(At which point someone normally says "but those don't work" and the sane people go "and you expect a nationwide one to work instead?")

Particularly, filters run by government. If private companies struggle to do this, imagine how poorly a team of bureaucrats will be at this.

OpenDNS.

Either use categories or pick your own domains to block. If you want to block IPs, use a firewall or the hosts file.

Not really practical to manage a list of domains or IPs yourself, but the idea of using an opt-in filter on your DNS could offer a simple filter.

You'd need to make configuring such things a little easier. Under Vista just trying to conjure up the IPv4 control panel requires an act of magic.

Well you can use a filter and manually add sites to that. I did use OpenDNS a long time ago and it was pretty easy to filter the most common stuff.

Move to an ISP that allows this. Talk talk have an opt-in network level filter for example.

> But currently it is not safe to leave a child alone on the internet.

How is it not safe?

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