Blocking sites: getting rid of unwanted content

Most of the users of the World Wide Web daily look through a lot of different Internet sites. However, in addition to all sorts of resources with useful information, they have to deal with pages containing unwanted and even harmful content, access to which must be restricted or prohibited. Especially this applies to cases where a computer may be children or adolescents. The most reliable way to protect them from this is to block websites. There are several options for how to do this. The most effective of them is the use of a firewall, a special application, one of the main functions of which is the blocking of sites with unwanted content. However, if you do not have a similar program (or you do not want to understand its configuration), you can use one of the following methods.

Blocking sites using the hosts file

This option is one of the easiest. However, it requires great care, because it affects the data of your operating system. So, the hosts file is a plain text file containing a database of domain names that it translates to specific network addresses. After you type in the address bar of the browser the required set of characters (for example, mail.ru), it first refers specifically to the hosts. And only in case there is nothing there, the request is sent to the network to DNS-servers. The user must have administrator rights to modify the contents of the hosts file . To completely block unwanted websites, you must write them to the hosts file located in the hidden folder C: \ Windows \ System32 \ Drivers \ etc. Then reboot the computer - the changes will take effect immediately. The main disadvantages of this method is that if you want to re-enable access to forbidden resources, you will have to re-edit the hosts, and you can forget the location of this file or the list of sites that you included in it.

Blocking sites in Firefox

In this popular browser, unfortunately, there is no standard toolbar settings, allowing you to block or allow access to online resources. However, there are also positive moments - for Firefox there is a huge number of add-ons, which you can cope with almost any task. In this case, you can best suit a special extension BlockSite Firefox, the main task of which is just blocking sites. Download and install this application directly from the network. After the installation is complete, you need to select "Tools" - "Extensions" in the browser, find "BlockSite" in the opened list and go to its settings. Next, you need to click "Add" and add the resource that you want to block access to. The advantage of this add-on is that it supports the ability to import an address list from text files. Therefore, if you want to block many sites at once, you just need to download the necessary data from the file, and not to engage in their manual input. Possible and the reverse operation (export list). Also this application allows you to set a password to exclude the possibility of changing the settings by another user.

Google Chrome site blocking

To limit access to certain Internet resources in this browser, we, as in the previous case, will have to refer to an extension specially written for it, namely - to the SiteBlock plugin. To install it, you must first go to the browser settings and select "Extensions" - "More extensions". In the opened online store Chrome find (with the help of a search string) the necessary addition to us and install it. After the installation is complete, restart the browser. Then again go to "Settings" - "Extensions", where we already installed the plugin we need. Entering its parameters, you will see a window. In it, you can enter the addresses of Internet resources that you need to close ("Sites to Block" field). The remaining fields can be left blank. Save your changes. To check if site blocking works, type any of the sites you entered in the address bar. The result is a browser message "Blocked by SiteBlock extension".