Hopefully Modern Fatherhood: Internet Security – Time to lockdown my nerd apprentice

I am a bit of a data nerd, give me a data set and I will play for hours. I get lost with a good rich data set. I don't always do useful stuff with the data I just enjoy playing with the data making charts and graphs until I find some useful information. With that said I have been running OpenDNS for over a week and have a fairly rich set of data about how my family uses the Internet, and how the Internet uses us.

Because it is Saturday, and I am not a stay-at-home dad, this is going to be a short post. I have to budget my time because I only get to hang with the kid in the evenings and on weekends. Currently he is nerding out working on minecraft permissions for his server, and he wants my help.

The graphic to the left is our Internet usage for almost a week. The horizontal axis is the time of day by hour, while the vertical axis is the number of requests per hour. As you can see, somebody stays up late on the Internet, most likely the wife. Now look closer and you will see activity going on while we are asleep. Gotta see what nefarious activities are going on between 1:00 am and 7:00 am. Since we home school the boy, most of the activity after 8:00 is Thinkwell and other online education sources.

The image on the right is an example of the blocked domains from openDNS. Most of the blocked sites are adware sites you don't intentionally visit. These are the little ads that show up on certain sites. The openDNS community votes on these to determine if they are good or bad. I opened books.google.com to show you how to make an exception for certain sites you deem appropriate, but were blocked.

One last image and I am done for the day.

The image below is an example of an ad that was blocked while I was searching for home school resources for nerds. One ad showed but the other was blocked.