How to protect your family from bad websites.

Apple have built in website filtering into OS X under the ‘System Preferences’ – ‘Parental Controls’ but Parental Control cannot be enabled for administrator accounts (which is probably the account you are running from) and  Parental Controls also becomes hard to manage if you have multiple users because you need to set it up for each one.  Here’s how to set up internet filtering on your whole home network at once using a free service called OpenDNS. Once it’s set up this can help block unsuitable content from reaching any computer, iphone, ipad etc connected to your internet. This approach can be used at home, school, or the workplace.

DNS Stands for domain name server. A DNS  is like a big phonebook and every time your computer or iPad or iPhone goes to a webpage (e.g. apple.com) it looks up the name you have given it (apple.com)  and converts it to a number  (e.g. 192.124.1.2) which it then uses to find the webpage.

This what you do when you phone someone.  You look up their name in a phone book to get their phone number  and then you ring their phone number.  A simple way  of limiting the people who you could ring would be to not give you their phone number. That’s how web filtering with Open DNS works.

A DNS is like a big internet phonebook where your computer looks up webpage addresses.

When you signed up for Internet access with your local Internet Provider  they gave you a DNS number to put into your computer – something like 192.231.203.132.  This number is the place your computer goes to look up the address of every page you visit.

Open DNS is a free DNS service, but it has settings to restrict what sites you can access. It’s like a phonebook with all the ‘unwanted’ phone numbers missing.  To use open DNS you replace  the DNS numbers on your computer with the  Open DNS numbers.   Your computer will be unable to find  some websites because open DNS  won’t give your computer the address when it asks for it.

I’ve tried to explain the concepts clearly, but getting it running can be tricky, so read on and you may need to get a computer friend to help you out!

Here’s how to set it up.
1. Have a look at this image. It should say “Use Open DNS”. After you switch to Open DNS the image will change and it will say “You’re using Open DNS”!

2. Go to opendns.com and set up a free account.  Go to the open DNS dashboard and select Internet filtering, and the level of filtering you require. Here are what some of the options look like (click to enlarge):

3. Open your Router settings (the Router is the device that plugs into your internet connection and shares it with all your computers). We are setting this up on your router so that  it will affect all your computers. Find the setting that says DNS Servers and put in the Open DNS server numbers.  (Before you do this make a note of the old DNS settings, you will need them later when you are testing.) The Open DNS numbers are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220

Here are the DNS settings on my wireless router.

4. Restart  your computer and your router, and come back to this page and a little button in step one should have changed to show you that you are now using OpenDNS.

5. Go to www.internetbadguys.com (a test site) and you should get a blocked message something like this:

6.  Securing it.

What we had just done is we have made the default DNS  server  the server that your computer goes to.  The problem is that if you manually type in DNS settings in your computer network settings it will bypass the Open DNS settings.  So what we need to do now is to help your router not to allow any other DNS  settings through.  To do this go to the firewall settings on your router (not your computer)  and block all outgoing TCP  and UDP  requests on port 53  that are not going to Open DNS.  This can be a little bit tricky, but here’s how I did it on my router,  which is a Draytek Vigor 2700.

I had to add three rules.

1.  allow DNS lookups that are going to open DNS 208.67.222.222

2.  allow DNS lookups that are going to open DNS 208.67.220.220

3.  block any other  DNS lookups.

Here’s where I added the rules:

Here’s where I added the Rules:

On the Draytek modem the firewall settings are set up under default data filter

Here are the three rules I added:

I added rules two, three, and four.

Rule 1 & 2 (called rule 1 and 2 because there was already a rule in there)

Rule 2 allows any traffic going to the Open DNS server. Rule 3 was the same as rule to accept it used the second DNS number.

Rule 3 (called rule 4).

Rule 4 comes after rule 1 and 2 and it blocks any remaining DNS requests.

Testing.

Type in your old DNS settings into your Macintosh system preferences, ( system preferences –  network settings- DNS Server) and press apply.

Open Safari and type in an address (eg apple.com) – you should not be able to go to any websites at all.

Delete the DNS address  from your Macintosh system preferences, the open DNS settings should reappear, and you should be able to browse the web, but not restricted sites.

The only way I can think of getting round this without the router password is to reset the router to the default factory settings, but then OpenDNS will stop altogether, and you’ll notice someone is playing with things!

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How to make an OS X Lion USB thumb drive

Here are three different ways to put Lion on a USB thumb drive. If you buy and install Lion from the App Store  it downloads all 3Gigabytes from the App Store, installs Lion, then deletes the installer!  So when you go to install it on another machine it needs another 3Gigabyte download! Here’s how to make a re-usable installer.

Option 1: Put a full bootable Lion installation on the USB Drive with a recovery partition.

What you need: an 8G thumb drive and OS X Lion from the App Store.

What you get: A USB stick you can boot off and repair your Lion installation from.

Download the Lion installer from Apple App Store. DO NOT INSTALL IT ONTO YOUR COMPUTER OR THE INSTALLER WILL DELETE ITSELF. MAKE A COPY OF THE INSTALLER.  If you have already installed it and it has deleted itself,  go back into the App store and click on ‘purchases’ and next to Lion it will say ‘Installed’. Now option-click on ‘purchases’ and ‘installed’ will change to ‘install’ so that you can re-download the installer.

Format your Thumbdrive using a GUID Partition Table, and ‘ Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’, then you can run the Lion installer and install Lion onto the thumb drive.

More info here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

Option 2: Create a Lion Recovery Disk.

You’ll only need a 4G USB Drive for this option.

What you get: A USB stick you can repair your Lion installation from, but not run Lion from.

If your Macintosh has an existing Lion Recovery partition (this will be the case if Lion came pre-installed on your machine when you purchased your computer from Apple), you can use this method. It will not be a fill installer but it will use the internet to install Lion onto another computer. It involves downloading a program from apple called ‘Lion Recovery Disk Assistant’

More info here: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1433

To test if you have a Lion recovery partition, Just hold down Command-R during startup and Lion will give you the option of going into recovery mode if the recovery partition is there.

Option 3: Make a Lion Installation USB Thumb drive like the one you buy from Apple.

What you get: A USB stick you can install Lion from – like the one that comes from Apple.

You’ll need an 8G USB thumbdrive.

1. Purchase and download the Lion Installer via the App store as in Option 1 above.

2. Right-click on the installer and select “Show Package Contents” and find  the file called  ”InstallESD.dmg” in the SharedSupport folder.

3. Use Disk Utility to ‘Restore’ this dmg file to a thumb drive to make a Lion Installation USB drive like you buy from the Apple Store. (the thumb drive must first be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with GUID Partition Table.)

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How to use Amazon Cloudfront to speed up your wordpress site.

I’ve just moved all the images from macintoshhowto.com over to Amazon Cloudfront. The bottom line is that you should notice macintoshhowto.com speed up. If you want to know how to do it, read on.

How to make your wordpress site real fast using Amazon Cloudfront.

Cloudfront is a way to speed up your web content delivery. Amazon has fast servers all round the world and they are letting people (for a price!) use their infastructure to serve up copies of their own files such as pictures, backgrounds etc. These static files are stored on the Amazon Cloudfront servers. When someone visits your website the main part of your page (the bits that need to actually run php code and so on) come from your own server, but all the images and so on come from the Amazon Cloudfront. This speeds up you site in two ways. 1. Amazon delivers your pictures real fast. 2. This reduces the demand on your own server, making it faster as well.

There are two ways for Cloudfront to work.1. You upload all your wordpress static files (you wp-content and wp-includes folders) onto Amazon S3, then tell Cloudfront to get your files from Amazon S3 as it needs them.
OR
2. You tell Cloudfront to get the files directly from your site as it needs them. This second way is called ‘Origin Pull’.

The advantage of 1 is that if you ever change your wordpress host, your entire wp-content folder is stored off-site at Amazon S3, so you don’t need to even copy your wp-content folder to your new wordpress installation. The new S3 wp-content folder becomes your wp-content folder – you can even load images directly to S3 and then insert them into your wordpress posts.
The advantage of 2 is that it’s easier and cheaper, and you don’t need to upload the files to Amazon each time you make a new post.

Here is how to setup your wordpress site to use CloudFront via Origin Pull (the second of the above two options). You need to set up an Amazon Cloudfront account, and install one of two cache plugins, WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache. The Cache plugins will redirect your browser to get the static content from Amazon instead of your site. It’s really quite simple, you just need to put the Cloudfront details into your Cache plugin, and then put your wordpress URL into your Cloudfront account.

STEP 1: SET UP A CLOUDFRONT ACCOUNT
1. Go to Amazon Web Services – http://aws.amazon.com and sign up for Amazon Cloudfront content delivery. If you already have an amazon.com account it can be linked to that account for payment.

2. Go to the Cloudfront Management Console –https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/home

3. Click on ‘Create Distribution’. The following window will appear.

Select Custom Origin not Amazon S3. This means it will automatically pull the content it needs from your website. Enter your website URL under Origin DNS Name: This is where it will pull the content from.

4. Press Continue and on the next page leave everything blank except fill in the comment with something meaningful then press continue.

5. Press Create Distribution.

Check the details and press 'Create Distribution'.

6. The new distribution will appear in the console. Copy the domain name.

6. Copy the domain name. In my case the URL is d3hnrcqh47hd0x.cloudfront.net

STEP 2: PUT THE CLOUDFRONT DETAILS INTO WORDPRESS
Now you will need to go into your wordpress admin and set up the cloudfront server as the place wordpress will go for all your static content files. You do this from the Super Cache or W3 Total Cache plugin.

In WP Super Cache, go to the CDN tab and enter the URL from the cloudfront into the ‘Off-site URL field, and select the ‘Enable CDN Support’ tab. Press ‘Save Changes’

Entering the Cloudfront URL into WP Super Cache

In W3 Total Cache go to the ‘Content Delivery Network’ page, then enter the details under “Replace Site’s hostname with:”

Entering the Cloudfront URL into W3 Total Cache

Unfortunately in W3 Total Cache you will need to fill in the Access key ID and other fields even though these are not needed if you are using Origin Pull. They are only needed if you want to use Amazon S3 as a bucket to load the cloudfront files. We are using Origin Pull so these settings are not needed. Just put in anything like this:

The login details can be anything if you are using Origin Pull because it's Amazon Cloudfront that does the work, not W3 Total Cache.

Also you can ignore any messages like this one below. They don’t apply for Origin Pull. They are telling you that you need to update the files in the S3 bucket, but you’re not using the S3 bucket.

Give it a try!

To test that it’s working, go to your webpage, then from Safari click ‘view source’. You should see the URL of the images in the HTML file are now coming from the cloud server:

img src="http://d3hnrcqh47hd0x.cloudfront.net/wp-content/themes/dpc/images/logo.png" alt="dpc.com"

That’s it. The images and other static files are now coming from the Amazon Cloudserver. It’s all automatic. If you want you can tweak the cache settings to change what files come from the Cloudserver and what come from your site.

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Stay Safe On Facebook

makes a perfect vehicle to network with your friends. You can share personal information with people you trust. However, without the necessary Facebook privacy controls, all private data will be accessible. Someone can simply find your Facebook account by Googling your name. Luckily, Facebook privacy controls has introduced settings to give you more control of what informationis accessible.

You may think simply solely giving your information out to trusted friends will be enough to in sure that private information is safe. However, this is a mistake. Your Facebook profile is logged in search engines thus making it available to millions. Even your updates are public information. Facebook privacy controls are a grand step in the right direction. This article hope to help you keep your Facebook details private.

Privacy

Face book allows you complete control over your information on site and access to material that other users have said they want to share. To protect your privacy and set how private your wantyour profile to be, go to your profile, and click on ‘Privacy’ in the top right of the screen. Here you have different options.

Protect your Album

One of the most sensitive items to share is photos. To protect your photos from public viewing. Follow the instructions below

1. Open your Photo Albums
2. Select the privacy option to control who has access to your photos

Contact Information

Your contact information can be easily found on Facebook as well as search engines. All someone has to do is enter your name in a search engine to find you and your Facebook page. You can stop this by using the public search option.

1. Under Contact Information, select the option for drop down menus to “only me”
2. Go back to Privacy, Click Back to Privacy
3. Click Edit your settings, under Applications and website, un-check pubic search

Friend List

Yes, it will take some time, especially if you’re connected to a couple hundred friends already. But this step, while not the quickest, is fairly simple. And it will be one of the most useful things you can do on Facebook.

Friend lists, like they sound, are lists for categorizing your friends into various groups. The nice thing about this feature is that once you set these lists up, you won’t have to do it again. We suggest that you put your work colleagues and professional acquaintances into a friend list designated “work,” personal friends you’re not very close with into a list called “Acquaintances,” and people you’re related to into a list called “Family.” Those three main categories will separate out the groups of “friends” who you may want to hide some information from.

To create a friend list, click on “Friends” at the top of the Facebook homepage. In the left-hand column, click “Friends” again under the “Lists” section. Now you’ll see a button at the top that says “Create New List”. Click it. In the pop-up that appears, you can name your list and pick members. If you’ve ever shared an application with your friends, the process of doing this will be very familiar.

When you’ve finished making lists, you’ll be able to use them when selecting who can see what (or who can’t!) when configuring the security settings described below.

These videos will help you safer on facebook

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