The best defense against the internet

In this post, I'd like to discuss the best method for protecting yourself on the Internet. I mean protecting in the sense of keeping your eyes and ears pure from the junk that the Internet has become. Some of these options also have some interesting moral effects or complications (for lack of a better word) that are worth considering.

Before I get to the specific options, let me first introduce them. The best defense against the junk of the Internet is of course personal accountability with a person that is physically with you and that you can meet for prayer with, and most of all the work of the Holy Spirit giving you self-control. But other than that, there are some excellent programs out there that can greatly assist you in this area! Some of which are not really designed for the purpose of protecting your eyes, but have the same effect :-) (God has used some smart, ungodly people to design some incredible things that can be used to protect you.).

Now with all these options out there, which one is the best one? I say, "Yes!" All of them are useful in their own way. In fact, you should be using multiple levels of protection. It is just like how you protect your computer from viruses and other threats with multiple levels of protection (anti-virus software, anti-rootkit scanners, routers to privatize your network, anti-spyware scanners, etc), so also you should have multiple levels or types of filters. No one filter software will do the job entirely.

Now, with that in mind, lets consider what kind of junk the Internet has in which we would need protection from. Obviously there are those bad websites which we should not be visiting. Those we would definitely want protection from. But what about the good websites that are spoiled with advertisements? Websites like Myspace, Facebook, FoxNews, etc, that would otherwise be fun and safe places to be if it were not for the unfortunate advertisements that they contain. You may end up on a perfectly "good" website either intentionally or by accident that has ads about dating or about undergarments. Do we just block every website that contains advertisements? Obviously, we cannot or we would be visiting only Christian websites, and most of the Internet would be unavailable for our use. The best answer to this is to block and hide the advertisements themselves, but yet still have access to those pages. And this capability is available today! I'll talk about it in a bit.

Some ways to protect yourself:

• General Website Blocking and Internet Usage Monitoring:
  Safe Eyes Software: Safe Eyes is definitely a good product. It allows you to be accountable with another person, you can set limits on how much time you are online each day, you can choose what categories of websites you would like to block, etc. Also, Safe Eyes can now block individual YouTube videos without blocking the entire website, so you can remain safe there as well without all the junk it contains. It is about $50, but well worth the investment. Think of all the other things you invest your money in that you really don't need, and consider this carefully. I bought it and will definitely be renewing my subscription when the time comes; it is well worth it!
  
  There are other programs similar to Safe Eyes that I will not discuss here. I have not really used any other software, so I won't give them reviews.
  
  
• Adblocking Software (for Mozilla Firefox):
  There are many different types of adblock software packages out there. Some come packaged with antivirus software, and others can get very technical to editing certain networking files within the Windows operating system. However, here I would like to present to you what I believe is the best solution that exists, and it will work for any operating system (that means Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, or Linux), since most every operating system that is of any significance can use the browser, Mozilla Firefox.
  
  Adblock Plus: Adblock Plus does exactly what it sounds like it does. It blocks ads! All those animated advertisements, banners, images, and other types of ads will be gone just like that! Not only will you not have to see them, but it will make your internet connection faster. It actually stops the ads from downloading, and thus makes the rest of the webpage download faster! How does Adblock Plus accomplish this? Well, by itself, the software can not do anything, but you must add filters to the software. When you install Adblock Plus for the very first time, it will ask you to choose a filter to install. If you are a technically minded individual, there are simple ways to make your own.
  
  
  
• Adblocking Software (for Internet Explorer):
  If you didn't know that there was anything other than Internet Explorer that could be used to view the Internet, or are a stickler and don't like change, are addicted to Microsoft, or maybe cannot use Mozilla Firefox in a work situation, there is one option I've seen for you :-). But let it be known, that I think Firefox is superior to Internet Explorer, and I know the adblock software will continue to develop on Firefox while the software for Internet Explorer may lag behind.
  
  Adblock Pro: Not much to add to this description that Adblock Plus for Firefox doesn't already say, except that it is indeed free, and it uses the same or very similar filter system that Adblock Plus does, so it protects you in the same way. I don't know if it is the same person/people that developed this one though.
  

Moral Complications in Blocking Advertisements
One of the things that I've been thinking through is the idea that if I block ads on Facebook, for example, because I think they are immoral, etc, can I rightly recommend to my friends to use Facebook if they do not have the same protection that I do? Of course, I can recommend the same protection, but they may or may not take the advice. They may not know how to implement such protection, may be too lazy to do so, or may not have a compatible computer. After a while of having this ad protection, you forget that there are ads on the Internet! And that is a good thing for your own sake, but it makes it difficult to recommend websites to people if you can no longer see how bad or good the ads really are. I might stumble upon this great website (and my ad protection is turned on), but then I send it to my friend who doesn't have that protection and they think there is something wrong with me that I sent it to them, when in fact I didn't see the ads they are seeing!

I'm not quite sure how to handle this, but I know the wrong answer has to be avoiding the blocking of these ads yourself. Perhaps what you could do is disable your adblock while you look at a website's ad content (before you recommend the site), and then turn your protection back on and tell your friend about it.

What do you guys think? :-)