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Into Tomorrow listener William in Danville, Kentucky listening on 1250 AM asked us for help with parental controls on his router:
I was wondering if there was a way to configure an AT&T U-Verse router in order to filter adult content or put parental controls on it.
Some AT&T U-Verse routers do offer parental controls, others don’t, but AT&T offers free parental controls at the account level too, bypassing the need to set anything up on the router at all.
If you go with those, you should be able to create profiles for the different users in your family, allowing you to set limits for the amount of time they can be online, what service they shouldn’t be allowed to use, you can get alerts if anyone tries to make changes to the account, and you can keep a log of each user’s activities.
You could also force your connection to go through a DNS server that blocks access to whatever it is that you don’t want your children exposed to. OpenDNS offers services like that, and after you set up your restrictions online all you’d have left to do is configure your router to use their DNS server to find websites. Having said that, you should keep in mind that it is basically an arms race, and out of the warring sides, you’re the one with the least amount of technical knowledge, so don’t expect miracles, there’s a good chance that a properly motivated kid will run laps around your attempts at censorship.
Also, if they have access to any device that has it’s own connection, you’d have to block access on those devices as well.