How to implement selective blocking of mainstream services
I have the issue that the block categories are much too broad and overlapping. If I want to block e.g. Youtube I could block "video sharing" but due to the voting process behind the category there are too many unwanted side effects because all services that may have some video as part of their overall functionality are tagged as well. I miss a category for video streaming as today most apps have some kind of sharing functionality and I do not want to block them all.
Is there a way to add custom categories and explicitly link them to mainstream services by name without having to guess all the required URLs in the "always block" function?
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OpenDNS does not offer such a feature, but YouTube and others may do.
https://support.opendns.com/hc/en-us/articles/227986807-How-to-Enforcing-Google-SafeSearch-YouTube-and-Bing -
Intersting, thanks for the link. But setting up a fake DNS zone for google.com is a bit of an overkill for what I wanted to do. The nice thing about OpenDNS is that you have (almost) nothing to install to use it.
But maybe it's just that I do not like the way the category vetting turns out for technical categories. Services in technical categories (e.g. video, IM) should be defined for their primary use case and not for all potential use cases. If I want to block Instant Messaging then I select the IM category. If I do not want services that primarily offer streaming of uploaded videos then I select video streaming. But the latter is not possible. I can only select a category that involves "sharing" of videos in a general sense and this will block everthing related to any use of videos including Youtube, Vimeo, TickToc, Snapchat and soon probably WhatsApp as well.
So I will revert to building my own block list with the "always block" feature of OpenDNS if there is no option to create a new (custom) category.
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