I live in a small community of born again Christians in Oxfordshire. I look after the IT side of things – for example, when people come here to visit – whether we might be witnessing to them so they can learn more about God – or whether they are family or friends etc etc. Anyone who connects to the wifi here to get on the internet will find they can’t get on to gambling or pornography sites and all searches done via a search engine are done in safe mode so that graphic images or web results returned from that search are family friendly. All web trackers, security threats and non relevant adverts are stripped out of the returned results too, so web pages load a lot faster. We do this to help ensure that people don’t accidentally find stuff on the internet that they perhaps weren’t expecting to see, and to help increase the speed of the returned web pages. This also helps stop people accidentally going to malicious websites. Most people would never notice that there is any difference, as most people go to good wholesome websites.

People can still connect to a VPN to get the raw results from a web search, so they aren’t totally restricted, but then will get all the ads and trackers loaded in to the back of the web pages. We stop thousands of trackers and ads from loading in to the web pages every day, and as such, have a safer internet. People are still free to access all social media sites obviously – in fact any website you can think of that most people would be willing to go to will also be available here. We’re mainly stopping adverts, trackers and malicious websites.

I have a few servers that we use as DNS servers to resolve our requests for web pages. This is all done in the background, so the person going to their browser on their phone just sees what they usually see when going to a website, but the search query and served web pages go through the DNS servers I’ve created. I’ve made some useful web pages for anyone running a server with Adguard home on it.

Adguard home is free software that enables you to control all web traffic that may be malicious or full of advertisments that load with the web page being served for the person to see, but with hundreds of adverts, trackers, cookies etc etc. We can restrict all the rubbish and just show the web page with software like Adguard, and there is a free version that can be installed on a server or spare computer that will always be on. Here are two pages showing how to set Adguard up on a server etc – 1st Adguard site – 2nd Adguard site.

Not everyone wants to run a server to do this, so there is another way that is also very effective (there is an Adguard app, but I’m not suggesting that). There is a company called NextDNS that allows you to have a fee subscription or the next level of subscription is £1.79 per month for unlimited search results. Sign up and you will see some IP addresses you can put in to your router DNS settings so that anyone who connects to your wifi won’t get trackers etc in the back of the web pages.

Feel free to send me a message to ask any questions you may have about this.