Youtube is Facilitating the Sexual Exploitation of Children, and it’s Being Monetized

If you have young kids (well, and if you haven’t), I recommend watching this video by Matt Watson where he describes a ring of pedophiles misusing Youtube to share videos of kids in compromising positions (and in some cases even child pornography):

It is long, but worth a watch. It was already picked up by the media and many companies stopped their Ad Spending on Youtube until it is fixed. However, even if when fix this hole, others will come. So as parents, we have to be careful on what our kids are watching and uploading online. Starting with Youtube.

Safe YouTube For Parents

Many of these videos were actually uploaded by parents without malice. Whenever you are uploading videos online, this is what we recommend:

  1. Youtube is an open social platform. Only upload videos that are supposed to be public.
  2. If you plan to share a video with a small audience, mark them as unlisted
  3. Disable comments.
  4. Maybe don’t upload it at all. Find other ways to share them privately (Dropbox, email).
Safe YouTube For Kids

The other aspect is dealing with kids recording and uploading their own videos.

  1. Talk to them. Explain the risks of uploading and sharing their personal lives online. Once it is out there, it can’t go back.
  2. Supervise. Watch what they are watching and uploading. Make sure that their videos have the right settings (unlisted & no comments).
  3. Do not allow your kids to fall for the pedophiles games (the Lolipop and Yoga streches that Matt mentions on the video).
  4. Enforce the Strict or Moderate mode on Youtube, so when your kids are watching videos online, they are only seeing safer videos. We do that automatically on our Free Family filter.

Stay safe!

Prevent Local ByPass of CleanBrowsing DNS

A common question we get from customers is how to prevent a new device on the network from bypassing the CleanBrowsing DNS.

Every device, whether it’s a mobile device, laptop, desktop, server, or gaming platform, gives a user the ability to configure a local network configuration. Part of this configuration includes the ability to reset their DNS settings. Yes, depending on how your router is configured this configuration would allow the user to change the networks default DNS configuration.

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How to disable YouTube on a Nintento Switch: Add a Custom CleanBrowsing DNS

If your kids are into gaming like ours, then you are undoubtedly familiar with Nintendo’s Switch gaming device.  Like all the other gaming devices, this system introduces an unfettered gateway to the web. Kids can easily access all forms of content, including YouTube. Some families prefer to disable YouTube on their kids devices, and with CleanBrowsing you can do that via the paid plans.

Note: You can limit what users can do on YouTube with our Family free filter. By default it sets YouTube to moderate. Moderate mode is the less strict mode, but blocks access to videos with possible violence, sexuality or adult content. It also blocks comments. Learn More

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New Desktop Agent for Mac Supports Custom Profiles

We just released an update to our Mac agent that allows you to quickly configure your local DNS resolver to the CleanBrowsing IPs. It provides the ability to bind your machines IP to your paid account. This is especially important if you want to apply rules that your machines must comply with, even if they are not on your home network.

Accounting for Dynamic IP addresses with Paid Accounts

You want to download the latest installer from here: https://cleanbrowsing.org/download/CleanBrowsing-1.0.1.dmg

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How To Dynamically Update MacOS DNS When Traveling

When using CleanBrowsing DNS resolvers you will experience an issue logging into Free Wifi hotspots that require authentication. This happens because the Wifi Hotspot provider is hijacking the DNS, routing the traffic to an authentication page. This will prevent you from making use of the Wifi, or force you to remove the CleanBrowsing DNS resolvers.

The quickest way to address this is to update your DNS via terminal, it’ll save you countless steps navigating the different GUI’s. To assist, we’ve put together a script to help in the process.

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Phishing Campaign against k12 schools and universities

For the last week or two, a new phishing campaign started to target k-12 schools and universities.

A couple of school IT administrators emailed us asking if we ever saw something like this before, so we think this is a good opportunity to remind everyone to be watchful for those phishing campaigns. Phishing campaigns happen very often and have many variations, but this last one seems to be more mass spread against a large number of schools at the same time.

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