By: Web-Guru aka Daniel Pentecost
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Over the past few weeks, several parents and spouses have engaged me in conversation concerning how to protect their family PCs from the dark side of the internet.  Usually these conversations have been precipitated by someone in the family accidentally coming across inappropriate adult content or by children frequenting sites like MySpace that are not age appropriate for them.

When the world was only dial-up using AOL and CompuServe... and of course dial-up made the process a whole lot slower... someone usually had to go out of their way to come across inappropriate content and parents had built-in software to help manage where family users could go.  Problem is, those days ended when broadband connections started to become the norm. Now in 30 seconds or less via Google or any other search engine, members of your family can access content that far exceeds the term "inappropriate".  And that inappropriate content has a super speed highway - called cable modem or DSL - right into your home or office.

Over the next few months, I'll be taking comments and questions from Integrity family about the problems they have run into and providing suggestions about how to keep similar situations from occurring in your own home or office.  If you've encountered trouble with protecting your family, yourself or someone else on the internet, drop me a line ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) and I'll provide ideas for how to tackle that specific issue (anonymously of course) in a future article.

Today, we begin with a basic overview of the issues surrounding parenting kids on the internet.  This is a tough subject for many and a touchy subject for all the rest of us.  I promise to be as tasteful as possible.  Mentally prepare yourself for having to deal with stuff we wish we could ignore and then read more after the jump.