Internet How To Guide

How To Password Protect Internet

When it comes to password protecting your internet access and your internet connection there are many situations and for each situation there are many solutions. For the purposes of this discussion let us focus on password protecting your internet access to prevent your children from accessing the internet, or portions of the internet, and also on protecting your wireless internet connection from outside intruders.

Any good parent knows that the responsibility for making sure your children do not go to the wrong internet websites lies with the parents and not the hosts or designers of the websites. There are many kinds of websites that you would not want your children to visit and this list can vary depending on the age of the child. For the most part you do not want your children visiting websites that offer adult content and adult images and you do not want your children visiting websites that are known to infect computers with viruses and spyware.

It is easy to understand what kind of websites contain adult content but weeding out the websites that could carry viruses becomes a bit more difficult. As a rule you should consider any website that you find because of a pop up ad to be a dangerous site and any website that offers access to free music or other free offers have more of a potential to give your computer a virus than any other kind of site.

So how do you protect your computer, and your children, from websites that they should not be visiting? The best way to do it is to be sure you are there to surf the internet with them and you can assure that they cannot surf the internet without you by password protecting their internet access.

There are parental control software titles available that allow you to add varying levels of protection to your internet access. Some of these titles are very thorough and can help you keep your children away from websites that are from a particular group or websites that try and use pop up advertising. For example, websites with adult content must use coding that allows parental control software to recognize the websites and block them from being seen. These are wonderful tools in helping you keep control over your child’s internet usage and the only way they can get at any of these websites is with your permission.

Internet Explorer also has some helpful tools that can allow you to restrict internet access for your children as well. If you click on the tools tab in your Internet Explorer you will see an internet options choice at the bottom of the pull down menu. Just click on internet options and then click on the security tab at the top. You can then click on restricted sites and make a list of the sites that your child cannot access without knowing a password that you set. It is an excellent tool to help parents restrict their children’s internet access through passwords.

Your wireless network has the potential to be an open network as well and you can help secure your wireless network by setting your router to need a WEP key to allow anyone access to your wireless network. WEP stands for Wireless Encryption Protocol and every router either already has a WEP key built in to it or has the option for you to set the WEP key. Once the WEP key is set no one can get access to your wireless router without the password. Contact your router manufacturer to learn how to set your WEP key. It is a simple process that can password protect your wireless network.

Using password protection to restrict your children’s internet access and to restrict who can access your wireless network are very helpful tools for parents. Make sure you keep control of your internet access by using passwords.