It is not always easy to leave your computer turned on with an active internet connection, especially when you have kids or other users in the house. It is not even possible to forbid kids from using the computer as they use it to play video games or grab some knowledge from Google for their science, math projects. Being a parent or senior, you might be worried to death about the online safety and what your children can watch online behind your back.
Internet Mania, Oblivious to Threats
Children out of curiosity can click open anything as they are unaware of the widely spread scams, threats, adult content hidden in several sites that ask them to fill up personal, confidential information such as email address, passwords etc. Even if they are aware of something called as online threats, they might not understand what harms these can do to their parents or guardians. There are mischievous children also who are computer-savvy and can find numerous ways to access the unwanted sites in order to boast about their talent or cast an impression on their friends.
How do I Ensure Online Safety?
When you have a wireless router, it becomes overly difficult to keep an eye on the children or other users who elope to an isolated place in the house or lock up themselves in their room to enjoy whatever they do on the internet. The only way to ensure the online safety is to bock the undesired websites on your Netgear wireless router through their proxy server addresses. These are difficult to bypass and even can be blocked to make sure that a computer-savvy kid can't infiltrate with it.
How to Block Guide:
Open your internet browser (viz. Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer etc.)
Type ‘192.168.0.1' (without quotes) in the address bar at the top of your browser and hit ‘Enter' on the keyboard
This should bring up the Netgear router login window. If the window doesn't come up, try ‘192.168.1.1'
Type the username and password that you entered while initially setting up your Netgear router and click on ‘Login‘ or hit ‘Enter' on the keyboard.
If you didn't make any changes to your original credentials that came with the router, then you can use ‘admin' as the username and ‘password' as the password. However, I would recommend that you check your router credentials before entering any information.
On the left hand side menu, under the 2nd category that says ‘Content Filtering‘, click on the ‘Block Sites‘ option.
Type the website name that you want to block such as “www.Facebook.com” just Facebook.com in the box that says ‘Type Keyword or Domain Name Here‘ and click on the ‘Add Keyword' button.
Instead of the full name, you can also type a keyword such as ‘Facebook' (without quotes) and click on the ‘Add Keyword' button. It will block all the websites or domains that have the keyword ‘Facebook'.
If you want, you can put a checkmark in the box that says ‘Allow Trusted IP Address to Visit Blocked Sites' if you want a networked computer to access the blocked website and then click on ‘Apply‘. If you leave the box unchecked, no one will be able to access the blocked website.
The article is aimed at educating parents, guardians about the possible threats that their children or other users can create unknowingly or knowingly and what steps they can take to stop them from doing so.
