PhaniJ's Blog

Almost everyone who reads this post might have a broadband connection at home. This post aims at securing day to day web access. Internet is filled with useful information and equally harmful threats that can involve stealing your personal information to crashing your personal computer. Earlier it was viruses now they disguise in the form of ads and hide in the form of tracker cookie and start sending information about your browsing habbits to the mothership. I am not personally against ads on the web, but I am against tracking. If I go on google/bing and search for information, I don't mind seeing relavent ads, but I do mind when a tracker installed by doubleclick follows my browsing patterns. So after doing my personal research I found a two pronged approach that can make home browsing experience much more safer.

Disclaimer: Before you try these setting at home, do try to understand what this is for and have a backup plan if something goes wrong. Don't blame me if your configs are messed up.

OpenDNS:

OpenDNS is a domain name resoultion system that is a good alternative for an ISP provided one. Apart from DNS, it gives its users content filtering, phishing protection and misspeled url corrections. 

Optional DD-WRT (with adblock):

DD-WRT is an awesome piece of router firmware that can turn even the oldest routers into superrouters. If you have a DD-WRT and hate ads on the internet, they can be blocked by setting it up in one place. The following blogpost has the information about how to do that [Blocking Ads using dd-wrt].

PS: Both these methods when used together can be quiet effective. Make sure you have sufficient information before jumping on the bandwagon. Ads and cookies can be blocked using browser extensions like AdBlock Plus and NoScript etc.

Adios.