Be your own Cyber Nanny

January 19th, 2008

Do you have a list of web sites that you would like to block access to from your Windows PC? Maybe your children are spending way too much time on social network sites like MySpace instead of doing their homework, or one of the males in your house appears to spending a lot of time reading the articles on Playboy.

Well, instead of paying out for software you can block these sites yourself for free by doing nothing more than editing a text file.

In the Windows folder (default is C:\WINDOWS) go to \SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC and select the file called HOSTS. This file is probably write-protected so right-click it and select Properties and un-select â€˜Read-onlyâ€™.

Now open the file in Notepad and for every web site you wish to block access to, enter a line like the following:

127.0.0.1 www.playboy.com
127.0.0.1 www.myspace.com

When you have finished editing the file, select Properties again and re-enable the â€˜Read-onlyâ€™ attribute.

Now when you open a browser and select one of the sites listed in the HOSTS file, your browser will tell you that it was unable to connect.