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No More Unrestricted Internet At Work
Schlemphfer writes: "You can forget about using private email or surfing the web while at work if these bozos have their way. And judging by the Reuters article, it looks like they might. Basically what they're doing is trying to scare senior management into thinking that allowing employees unrestricted use of the net will cripple a company with viruses and lawsuits."
Ahh, 1997.
ITs already like this at our work... "Email virus" is the reasone they give...
Not to mention the unbelievable time-sucking vampire that is ICQ, IRC, AIM, etc.
...Steve
trying to scare senior management into thinking that allowing employees unrestricted use of the net will cripple a company with viruses
It will. Haven't you ever worked in IT before? Christ, what I wouldn't give to go back to the days of dumb terminals and VAXen, so I wouldn't have to deal with all of these Windows infections.
--saint
For goodness sakes' people--your at work. Your not getting paid to check your email or surf for personal pleasure. Your getting paid to work for the company. It is also the companies connection, so they should be able to make those restrictions if they so choose. I don't understand why people get so up in arms about this.
Sorry,but in my opinion, if they don't allow developers access to the extranal web, they will definatly be hurting themselves. Developing a different style of work, I believe a person can not jsut sit down a develop code for eight hours straight w/out a break. Usually it takes time to get away from the code and "take a breather" and going back to the code to figure out what is wrong. Really, a "breather" would most likly reading your favorite new site or something (slashdot?), if you restrict access, you will have a bunch of annoyed developers roaming the building in search of the elusive "full coffee pot" . heh, okay, off my rant/troll/whatever you want to call it =)
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
If you are at work you don't need to be emailing jokes and reading Slashdot, which is why I am posting anonymously
Can't argue with what they're saying - security increases as you restrict access. If they don't have a problem keeping employees happy, who's to care?
(sarcasm)
For that matter, why bring the Internet to an employee's desk at all? Why not go back to a 1980's-era environment with a legacy communications package and a clunky internet email gateway? What good is this whole 'internet thing', anyway?
(end sarcasm)
-Elentar
The wheel it turns, around and around, with an ancient rumbling sound.
How wonderful! It's good to know that USA economic & technological superiority is going downnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn... It's nice to see them sabotage themselves like that. The rest of the world will be happy. THANKS!!! :)
When the current economy is pretty much the employer's market, the big guys can always impose more restrictions and come up with just about any logics behind it, to squeeze out every ounce of 'productivity' and to cut cost.
Sooner or later it will be the employee's market again, and lets see what the turnover rate is for a company that impose this rule. I also doubt that by not allowing employees to have some breaks using emails and web privately, productivity increases.
geek page at KY speaks
At work we have somewhat of an answer to viruses. 20 file extensions including exe, pif, scr, com, bat, vbs, vbe, and others are filtered at the server into a "Quarantine" folder and reports are generated every few hours on it and piped to a line printer for our review. We deal with them from there by either giving them to the employee, or by responding to who sent it with an automagically generated email.
Additionally, all mail is screened against the server's pattern file, which tries to update itself hourly. If sometimes passes through mail, it'll be found if on a server, and the client software, which updates its pattern file upon logon, will find things as they're opened.
All with unnoticable performance difference. We haven't had a virus infection in a LONG time now.
Worms like Nimda are a bit more annoying, but we take things like this seriously, and by doing so, avoided Nimda and others completely.
=====
As for net access, we do run reports on the proxy logs occasionally. Employees understand that they have little privacy in the workplace and that if we see them goofing off (except for after hours or at lunch), they do get an email regarding it. But we haven't had to do that in years. They more or less behave, because we trust them and they trust us.
-----
The studies show people with internet access at work waste 2 hours per day on it.
So the internet lowers productivity by 25% just by connecting to it. Anyone with any brains at all would pull the plug.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Instead of disabling all email why don't they just uninstall f*ckin Microsoft Outlook; the cause of ALL of the email viruses.
I'm the guy with the passwords to the routers
;)
connected to the T1 lines.
There are already a few hundred routes in the
tables... who's going to notice everything from
my workstation misses the filtering appliance?
Oh that's right, it's my job to make sure no one
*else* does this, too.
what's wrong with these guys...my computer at home is way too slow to download all that porn...
seriously though, i'd go crazy if i had to work 8 hours straight without any distractions...so, what if i shoot over to Hotmail to check my personal e-mail, or over to ESPN to check out the latest sports news, or even here to post my thoughts on the latest tech news topics...and that doesn't even count the numerous times i use the internet to look up java related things on Sun's website or trouble shoot my Websphere problems over at IBM...
what's the point of having all that information available at our finger tips if we can't use it...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Lemme see.... ya' didn't pay for the connection.... You aren't doing something work related... you might (and "might" is enough) introduce threats to the corporate network... you might (and "might" is definitely enough) open your company to drastic legal liabilities....
WHY should you get free use of the net at work? Remember, if you're "at work" you're getting paid for your time... so it ain't yours to do with as you please - it's the company's. Wanna surf porn / icq with someone pretending to be an 18yo cheerleader / look up your drug's interaction information / trade stocks / buy pez dispensers / etc? Get a computer at home, get a web connection and do it there!
(Unless, of course, your company is in the porn / 18yo masquerading / drug research / stock trading / pez buying business, that is. : ))
How much does your company benefit from researching a problem on the net? I can't even count the number of times I've hit google and found an answer while on hold with a vendor, or asked a friend on jabber and gotten a response and had a problem fixed before getting a callback "within your service contract"
I don't know what the cost is for random secretaries emailing goatse.cx urls around, but my use of the net has always helped a company far in excess of any time wasted checking my personal email.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Crippling access to anything often denies legitimate uses of things and forces the employees to come up with outrageous work-arounds if they're smart enough. If they're not, then they just bother the IT staff to death with a million questions as to why they can't do the research needed, or recieve the .exe file that they need to complete their work.
I remember being in a school that had open internet access, then going to another school that had limited internet access and constantly being frustrated by the limitations imposed. I couldn't download the application I was working on and test it on a new machine, I couldn't go to a website talking about Middlesex county. There were a lot of legitimate things that I wished to do that I was blocked from, yet I could go to satanic websites, pro-life websites with all sorts of horrid imagery, and more.
Most attempts at controlling content end up being failures. Bring this to the attention of those seeking to control the information you recieve and you'll get a confused look, they'll pause and say "I don't know why you couldn't access that site. You should be able to."
I think it would be better to leave things open and dock the pay of any employee who violates "Guidelines". Let 'em hang themselves. Set up the "filters" not as filters that block the person but as flags that flag the IT staff regarding potential illegal use. The IT staff could then investiage and initiate a "three strikes" scenario. Strike one- warning, strike 2- docked pay, strike 3- no more internet access no way no how.
-Sara
People seem to think they have a right to surf the net and send anything they want from work. Well, that's not the way it is. The computers and Internet connections are owned by the company. They don't pay people to do that stuff.
Due to viruses and other problems I've blocked any attachment capable of carrying a virus. Yes, it's sometimes a hassle but that's the way it is now. Management has requested we monitor the type of sites people visit just to make sure there isn't a big problem. So far they haven't requested user lists or specific sites. They won't until XXX sites start getting out of hand.
Viruses, security holes, and loss of productivity have caused these limits to be placed. Want to surf for fun, do it at home.
I just can't have a problem with this. As somebody who has been both employer and employee at tech firms, I can say from both experience and idealism that there ain't nothing wrong with employers filtering Internet access. When you're at work, your time is your employers'. Inherently.
If you are unhappy with the fact that your evil corporate money-grubbing employer doesn't want you dicking around on company time...well, good luck in getting a new job.
-Waldo Jaquith
This won't work for people who do more than automaton work. If you restrict net access or filter sites in any way, you risk employee burnout, employee morale, and employees' ability to research job-related stuff. If my company used filtering or blocked my internet access, I might not be able to get the information I need to do my job. What happens when I need to look for API documentation?
This is kind of like curing athlete's foot by amputating the patient's leg.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
Frankly, I'm surprised that this hasn't become more widespread, and long before this. My present employer's internal network was crippled for days by the nimda worm, all because some idiot salesdroid double-clicked on an attachment in her Hotmail account.
As the sole unix admin there, I mostly got to sit back and chuckle evilly, but half a week's lost productivity is no laughing matter when you're tallying up the balance sheets at the end of the month.
The bottom line here is that you are being paid to work, not to check your personal email, IM your friends, or post to Slashdot. If that seems unreasonable, start your own damn company.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
In the 19th and early 20th century, at the heart of the industrial revolution, working conditions were appalling. There were no government restrictions on what employers could require from employees.
As a result of the socialist labour movements, both through their political arms and through strikes and other actions, work place reforms were put in place.
Age limits were raised, limitations on salary cutting was introduced and dangerous machinery was forced to be made safer.
Now, at the beginning of the 21C, we have forgotten those gains and how they were made. We have forgotten that employers must be kept in check by organized employees.
If you stand alone, they will monitor every aspect of your lives, from email to web surfing, to drug use. The actions in this article are only the beginning.
Remember that old saying, which is now so relevant - in Union is Strength.
These e-mail filters from outside companies might make it harder to be sued for sexual harrasment because you are showing an active pursuit of purity but it does not prevent the porno from making its way into your system 100%. You can protect the inside of your company so it doesn't go out but its hard to protect it from those people outside of your network that want to pass on the "funny, dirty picture" with one of their friends that happens to be your employees.
Web filtering is a lot easier to do and doesn't require and expensive commercial package. Squid + SquidGuard have been a perfect match for my purposes.
My solution when C-level management calls for these sort of filters is by giving them what they ask for -- all the way. After a few days, they will always want them relaxed. I always find it funny its never the grunts that are the ones abusing e-mail, its always the suits! :)
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Whilst it may be a bit extreme to say "criple" ther is some justification there...
I am the system administrator at a college here in Australia and if we did not filter/limit the kids access to the internet then all the bandwidth on our (meager) internet connection would be soaked up by kids wasting time on MUDs, IRC, HotMail, Chat, Online games, Warez sites, and other such activities, and the staff and students who actually try to do some work (research/E-mail etc) would have a hell of a time trying to get anything done.
So whilst I agree that private use of the 'net should be allowed, there is limits that need to be put on WHAT private use is allowed. Not only to free up the bandwidth for legitimate uses, but also free up computers for thos that wish to work rather than just waste their time...
What you gave you the idea that you HAVE the right to deal with your own shit on somebody else's time??? I actually thought this was one of the prime arguments to using Linux on the desktop: It gives the manager top level control over the applications that can be used while employees are on the clock, so that the employer can define the workflow on the computer, rather than having people you are paying by the hour checking their email surfing etc. That just doesn't make sense...
Of course their are exceptions...Not allowing developers access to the internet for research and such is suicide...But for many jobs this is perfectly valid.
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
Jesus christ! Has anyone on slashdot EVER worked in a corporate IT environment?
Let's take this quote right here which sums it up:
"The message is: 'I'm afraid you'll have to do it after hours at home, which is where you should be doing it in the first place,"' said Mikko Hypponen, manager of anti-virus research for Finish-based F-Secure Corp.
Where does ANYONE get off thinking company resources are PERSONAL resources? How is this a limitation of ANYONE'S rights? Do you think you have the right to drive the company car across the country for a personal vacation? Do you think you have the right to use the company FedEx account to send Christmas presents to your sister in New York? Then how in the hell do you think you have the right to use company network resources to send personal email and use ICQ? Would your boss let you sit there and read the newest John Grisham novel when you should be working? Then why do you think you are allowed to read slashdot all day?
People need to grow up. When you are at work, you should work. If your company is NICE enough to let you use resources for personal use then fine but you do NOT have a right to do anything with something that isn't yours.
Christ I need a beer.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Granted, I would be pretty upset if my external e-mail and internet access were taken away, but my employer would be well within their rights to do so.
I use the internet quite a bit while at work; it's an invaluable programming reference. Any surfing beyond that, though, is technically an abuse of company resources. I'm pretty good about sneaking over here to Slashdot only on short breaks, but there are times when I let the mouse wander a little more than I should.
In a big company, lots of employees surfing around and forwarding stupid jokes and viruses to one another can cost a company in terms of both bandwidth and lost productivity.
Having internet access at work is nice and all, but a God-given right it ain't.
I have to agree with the above posters that companies have a legitimate point here. Flash animations, greeting cards, personal email, pr0n...all this stuff takes bandwith folks. Moreover, all this stuff will travel over the COMPANY's network on COMPANY time.
Worse, let's say Dumb Secretary #1 opens up an ILOVEYOU-type virus (I saw such a case on the evening news at the time.) Boom-infected machines that will have to be cleaned up. This is most certainly a BAD THING.
Now, before I'm flamed by the personal freedoms crowd, let me point out that work is a privilege. You have been hired by said company to perform said tasks. You have not been hired to bid on eBay, manage your stocks, or visit the Hamsterdance. Those people who need access, like developers, will likely be granted it. The article means companies in general, some tech firms probably won't mess with it.
We'll have to see where this goes, but I say let's wait and see.
~chazzf
No statement is true, not even this one.
When it comes to security issues, why is it so hard for companies to demand that the software they buy is fit for purpose? The software is designed for the internet, surely they know by now, that the internet is bad place, so they should create it with this in mind.
It all comes back to crappy software.
I think corporations biggest threat is lost productivity time from programmers reading slashdot. (I bet I'm about the 75th person making this comment).
Without personal email, how would I do my job the one day each week our Exchange server decides to stop routing Internet email? Err, well...maybe that's what our exchange network's real goal is, and they are just randomly phasing it in a little at a time.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Revolution OS is on the sundance channel if anyone cares. Off-topic but I'll post it at +1 so it takes a few minutes to get modded down.
You can put as many rules into place as you like, but an employee that just doesn't feel like working at the moment simply won't work.
Right now he might be checking the news and sport scores on the internet, and if you remove that, he'll go to his buddy in sales and talk about the game last night instead for a few minutes. Then you can put in rules to prohibit conversation off of break times, and then he'll just space out at his desk. Most people slack at their job for some part of their day. It's human nature, but unfortunately, these spin doctors make it sound like 7.5 hours a day employees are browsing monster.com looking for a new job and downloading virii.
You don't need to have some sort of special outlet to slack off, you simply have to not want to work.
Eliminate Outlook and 99% of your virus threats disappear immediately, and at little to no cost.
Here is the CLOSEST quote to identifying a firm that is contemplating cutoff of access:
"As a result, companies are considering dramatically curtailing, or even abolishing completely the freedoms, on which employees have grown increasingly reliant over the past few years. "
Companies? What "companies"? The only firms named in the article are firewall and security companies that are spewing the fear used in this marketing spewing article.
No real management is going to take this seriously.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
The more freedoms that are taken away from me at work, the less time I spend at work. My terms of employment state that I must work 35-40 hours per week. I usually work 60, but I feel it's fair considering I do conduct personal business (phone calls, online shopping) during daytime hours. The company gets the better part of my exess hours, I feel that we're both getting what we need. My managers have someone who's there when they need him, and who is flexible.
Take away my abilities to do those things, and I will become more "letter of the law". I only HAVE to work 35-40 hours.
What is more productive?
/. to participate in brain-stimulating discussion regarding a variety of issues from copyright law to hardware to GPL issues. Returns to work refreshed and ready for a challenge.
Scenario A: Employee needs break desperately, has net access and goes to
Scenario B: Employee needs break desperately, does not have net access, wanders outside to smoke and oggle female co-workers. Returns to work with a hardon and a brain that is more fuzzed than before.
Proposed rule: Limit all NON-GEEK employees from accessing the internet. They mess with the bandwidth that could be better spend downloading the latest Slackware distro.
-Sara
These things are often presented as if the "conservative" action is to restrict usage. But, for example, restricting access to the web means restricting instant access to the whole of the world's static knowledge store. Operating with no access to information seems a risk, too. So it isn't a choice between "risk" and "no risk", it's a choice between "one risk" and "another risk". I never seem to see it presented that way, though.
I also don't understand the focus on racy and inflammatory stuff as the biggest risk to a company. The biggest risk to the company is not the Internet but the Intranet. It's often the case that in a single button click, one can get to the corporate secrets and with little more than a few more keystrokes one can output that info to a file and mail it to a party outside the company's walls. That risk outshines the risk of pornography in many cases.
And, finally, a lot of this seems a scapegoat for lazy/bad management. If your employees are productively yielding what they should, what difference does it make where they are surfing. And if they are not yielding what they should, why not address that issue?
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
I can partially understand their view... but that's a tad extreme..
At the college IT dept were I was working at I did not allow OutLook to be used.. or if the staff or teacher wanted to use it.. I didn't support it.. (they tended to not like that when things blew up in their face. aka missing e-mail/address books, or NASTY viruses).. I also had Norton Corporate Edition installed on all the systems.. which has a central point of command.. I can automatically update the virus defs on all systems in a flash.. and all the quarenteens get dumped to one location.. I can also install NAV-CE on any new system from the server.. (as long as they were NT4.0 or Win2K)
However, the issue did arise were some employees abused their access to the internet and didn't work and just played.. mainly the guy whow was supposed to be the SysAdmin at the place, which actually I was doing all of his work as he slacked off playing EverCrack and reading pages of EverCrack forums.. And would you believe that they didn't want to fire him.. and he was doing this for about 4 months before they finally canned him.. and Then they refused to hire me for that position (which I was already doing that AND the programming).. well.. the're screwed now as I left and they haven't a clue how to run things... OH Well...
Im at a pretty nice sized company, and they already block the email port completely. I can not use email no matter what except the corporate mail.
:D BTW, there are no provisions on company mail far as I know to block virused attachments.
;)
Most people smart enough to set up their own email in outlook express believe it or not, are quite concious of viruses.
Yes, we get them ALL the time. its amazing what people do. But lots of people don't care, they feel its better to open it at work than at home
I delete attachments.
So there is still company email, and webmail (yahoo, hotmail, etc.).
Personally, I just use pine...
Out web goes through the corporate proxy. I disabled that on my computer. what do I need that for?
They load all kind, ok ok ok, I'll stop here. Out IT department is the most horrible money wasting department in the company with all their "security" related crap they stuff on the computer, etc...I rolled my own install
So why is the article under the "Your Rights Online" section?
Face it, he who owns the property gets to set the rules for it. If I refuse to let Timothy redecorate my bathroom for proper feng shui alignments, I am hardly infringing on his freedom of religion. Yet somehow if I don't allow him to use my computer to cruise for pr0n I am somehow infringing on his rights.
If you own that workstation in your cubicle, go do whatever you want with it. But if you boss owns it instead, then you had better follow his rules regarding it.
This isn't about "Your Rights Online", but rather "Your Employer's Rights Regarding Your Employer's Property".
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
You completely overlooked the amount of TIME people spend surfing, thinking about surfing, etc. and what it costs their employers. It's the biggest reason (aside from viruses) companies regret giving access to their employees - it's supposed to be productivity tool.
But seriously, I couldn't do my job if I didn't have the net. Sure I browse /. for about an hour a day, but I'm there 9 or 10 hours somedays, so what's the big deal? Also, every bigwig in my company has AIM or YahooIM installed, so do you really think they will block all that stuff? When the big guys visited our location last time, I got pulled out of a very important meeting to help one of them get connected to YahooIM.
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
Let's understand something. You go to work to do work. That is what the company pays you for.
You want to check your personal e-mail do it at home. You want to shop do it on your own time without
company resources. Most businesses have a huge financial investment in the computer system in the office
plus the people needed to maintain and service it.
The system does not need extra expenses because you decided to check your e-mail and let some Trojan on
the system. The system does not need to be brought to a halt because you are using Bear Share to
download you latest soap opera or all the ping hits that come with using something like Bear Share.
The people employed to maintain the system are there to maintain the files keep good back up copies and
help you when the computer you are working on decides to have a hard drive die. There is enough
for the support staff to do normally without you making their job harder. Especially when they are
going into overtime because of somebody's stupid screw up.
And yes the company can put in all the things to help prevent a lot of this . They would be idiots not
to. But usually it is so unwanted outside issues can't come in. They don't need someone on the
inside helping them. Do your ebay shopping at home.
Think this is a rant from management, wrong. I am the guy who gets stuck having to work through the
weekend because somebody went on the IRC and decided yeah I will download this file of Hot Naked Young
Babes. You know the overtime is nice but I haven't mowed my lawn in two months because of it.
You're surfing the Internet on your employer's time
Your employer is paying the bill for the T3 (or whatever)
And you think you have the right to surf the Internet while at work? When you're on the company's time, you're supposed to be working...not bidding on crap on eBay.
Would someone please tell timothy what censorship is? This story doesn't even come close to the definition.
--
The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
...but please, please, please leave me a hole for Google's Usenet archive. Almost every programming question I've ever had has been answered 100 times on Usenet.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Where I work, we completely cut off access to the Internet from nine to noon, and one to five. In other words, if you want to do anything on the Internet, you can't do it during regular business hours (except during lunch). In our case the purpose was not security or reducing liability, but to increase the productivity of our coders. Management wasn't too happy with the amount of time programmers spent web surfing and IRCing.
Some coders complained they needed to use the Web for reference and research purposes, so we set up a single computer with 24 hour Internet access in a very public area where everyone could see whether or not you doing something work related. Surprisingly, it doesn't see much use.
This whole policy was none too popular (as you might imagine) when it was first implemented a few months ago. But by every objective measure, productivity is very markedly improved, bugs are fewer, we're getting things done within a reasonable time frame for a change. It still isn't a popular policy, but even the programmers who most resent the policy have had to admit (grudgingly) that it works.
I've read quite a few comments on here saying "the internet is not a right, you should be working". Well, that isn't the issue really. It's not like we are talking about a law, but a company choice. Now granted, it is within a companies right to restrict internet access, but a company has to factor in all the results of the restriction, not just the lost time and virus threats.
The fact of the matter is right now Americans are required to work way too much as is. Many jobs onyl allow you two weeks of vaction for several years after you start, and even then you might not get that "benefit" for a year after your start date. People getting burnt out at work happens all the time, and that hurts business in terms of productivity. Sure they enact short term solutions like fire the employees and hire new ones, but the new ones get burnt out faster trying to catch up. Allowing someone some time to spend checking up on their personal email and sending an ICQ to their wife is not to much to give up when it means your employees will be happier, and therefor more productive.
But I imagine the suits along with all the "you are paid to work" zealots on this site will only see the one dimension picture of lost email due to "personal" activities. At what point did we become slaves anyway?
My company _is_ in the porn business. ;) We're not allowed to browse any sites displaying images with clothing.
--Elentar
The wheel it turns, around and around, with an ancient rumbling sound.
All of this just makes me glad I work the tech support lines of a university. Totally open net access, with monitoring only for excessive bandwitdth uses.
:)
If one of our users wants to surf to teenieslutsondrugs.com, they're perfectly able to without consequence. We even maintain URL logs connected to signons and IPs, do we use them? VERY rarely. But, if the bozo doesn't clear their cache when they're done, or accidentally right-clicks and Sets as wallpaper, and someone complains, they've hung themselves.
Put the responsibility on the user. Monitor the things that are important. If Joe user is burning 10GB of bandwidth with his Kazaa supernode every day, then it's time to lay some smack down (also, make sure it's in the company's handbook about proper usage standards), otherwise, leave them alone unless someone with a legitimate complaint comes forth.
Also, never cut off the open net access of the Tech Support people... That is, if you still want to have tech support people...
Randal Graves says: I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class... Especially since I rule.
Instead of restricting users' email privileges, how about stopping IT administrators from installing M$ Outlook?
---
Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
Do you realize how much time people waste talking on the phone? One guy next to me used to spend at least an hour a week chattering about bridge. It was very annoying. But he did good work so there.
Do businesses realize that people might call up phone sex lines? They can also contact prostitutes, drug dealers, hit men, or even rat out the company to the SEC/FBI. The list of bad contacts goes on and on. I say, "Let's rip those phones out of the wall."
And what about the friggin door. Many good companies like to say that their most important assets walk out of the door every evening. Hah. Do you realize the trouble they can find when they leave the protective womb? There are drugs, criminals, blackmailers and spousal distraction units. Heck, there are even video games. I say, "Just lock them up for good." To heck with the door.
If email viruses are causing all these untold millions of damages, how bout just banishing outlook and make everyone read plain old email. Problem solved, doesn't really cost a dime. Oh wait, I can't sell a new crappy firewall / email screener with that plan now can I?
Never mind...
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
The dam users where I works spend way too much time surfing and downloading. That isn't so much the issue other than they are paid to work not play. The problem is storage, they save all these mp3's, movies, and graphics. We are having to spend way too much time doing blanket deletes of the files so the storage doesn't fill up.
As usual stupid users have taken a cool privilege, and abused it. So now everyone will have to pay the penalty.
Where I work (5000+ people company), this is what we do:
Honestly, I think that is about the best you can do. IT needs the internet extensively; other departments not so much. Hell, my boss has said to me on more than one occasion that if
I must say that I don't think its a good idea to totally remove internet access though for entire departments. I mean, if you work 8-5, that's the largest portion of your day spent at the office. You do have a life outside of work, and sometimes you have to do something online during those hours. Same goes for the phone, you are going to need it for a personal call every now & again. Of course, if you abuse the privileges, then you should have them revoked, plain & simple. But basic access should be allowed, after proper training, etc. However, giving everyone in the company unrestricted access is just flat-out stupid.
Having said that, there is indeed a need for increased security awareness in many companies. Buying more gear isn't really that cost effective though. Educating your people and letting them know the expected behaviour is better. This includes increasing the Cluedness of manglement so that they are aware of what their people are doing. If someone feels a need to surf pr0n all day instead of doing their job, your problem is not giving them access to pr0n. Why not find out why people are doing it instead of working?
If you've got people using decent passwords that they don't put on PostIt notes on their monitor; if your network techs are using ssh instead of telnet to configure routers; if every two bit middle manager stops demanding to be an exception to all the rules; and if you still have security issues, then maybe you can start looking at more drastic solutions. Security must be holistic, and more often than not it's more a business process issue, not a purely technical one.
Lastly, I've been at sites with really tight access policies that were easy enough to bypass for someone in the know. If there's any outbound access permitted, there's a way to bypass the security. So go ahead and implement this stuff. If I really want to get past it, I probably can.
But then, I've got better things to do with my time than surf pr0n at work, so when I say I need ssh access outbound, I actually do. Don't stop me doing my job by implementing some half-assed pseudo-security solution. Better yet, hire me to do it right! ;-)
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT after you.
Gads, a tad bit reactionary, aren't we???
First, any company that doesn't take, at least, modest precautions in blocking certain types of e-mail attachments, or abusive downloadable web content is foolish, and, IMHO, acting negligently towards their own fiduciary responsibility, or toward their Internet neighbors.
I've been long sickened by the number of automated attacks that my IDS picks up. How long has CodeRed and Nimda been around??? Too many of these are comprimised hosts supported by corporate networks of some sort.
Second, there's little "right" involved in your use of corporate assets such as personal computers and networks. It's a kindergarten mentality to expect a company to be required to provide you with resources to order the latest teen-pop drivel, or whatever it is you just _have_ to buy during work hours.
That said, I (and many of those within my company) couldn't do our jobs as developers without net access. Any company which starts arbitrarily blocking access to the Internet without properly judging the necessary impact to their workers is also foolish.
If your company manufactures pencils, then OK, they can probably get away without providing unrestricted access to the Internet without any negative impact on their workforce. On the other hand, if your company develops software, etc... the impact would be substantial.
It's all a matter of degree, and like most things on this planet, the right solution lies in moderation.
Was this REALLY worth a Slashdot news item? I do not see how this is news in that a) it's not anything new, or hasn't been bandied about ad nausem; and b) common sense tells me that the submission itself is borderline troll. Seriously, timothy, did you think this was news???
It'd be nice to be able to moderate story submissions in addition to comments.
Okay, point well taken, but I qualified my statement to exclude the goofballs you work with.
Where I work they only filter some porn and throttle streaming media. We are mostly analysts, providing professional services and are supported by legions of coders.
We, the analysts, make our own data mining tools and use the net addictively. Management is alert and polices improper internet use by productivity and obseerving the actual workstations as they walk by.
The biggest developments are around email prevention, experts say. Elaborate content filtering software, which can run upwards of $30,000 to install, can block all but the tamest incoming emails, and most attachments, said Trend Micro's Genes.
Corporations, particularly those that were stung hard by the wave of virus and worm attacks during the past two years, are considering it a top priority.
Here's a free clue: QUIT USING MICROSOFT SOFTWARE.
Sheesh, how stupid can you be? And what a stupid solution to the problem, cutting your nose off to spite your face.
Seriously, damned near all the email viruses are targeted directly at Outlook. So the solution is to ban email? Why not just, ya know, not use Outlook?
Myopic. Utterly myopic.
If you are root...
Here at my company, as a sysadmin, I've been suggesting a policy of completely unfiltered web access *and* completely unfiltered proxy log access.
From the CEO all the way down to the temps.
(Except for *me* of course...)
We already filter out dangerous attachments from email and have good virus software. We really don't have a problem in that respect.
The thing is, once you take something like this away from your staff, you are saying "We don't trust you. We think you're slacking."
In my office, people work damn hard and are pretty happy in their work. We have a good atmosphere and no real division between workers and management. Once a company starts doing this kind of thing, the mood changes and people get resentful.
How many people in how many companies have said "This place really started to go downhill when they took away the free soft drinks..."?
Just my 2 yen,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
In my office complex, there are no less than 3 unrestricted 802.11b access points. I actually *use* these for casual surfing.
If that doesn't work, my cable modem seems to work fine at work (same subnet).
Dobedoobie doo....
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Not because I spend my time surfing and downloading when I'm at work (though on slowdays, there isn't much else to do). It's because my job is to clean up after people who break their computer because they were downloading the latest and greatist virus. What would I do without unrestricted acess, I wouldn't have any viruses to purge.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Gee,
At the company I work at we werent hit all that bad last year, but then again, our corporate email standards do not include outlook or exchange.....
can you say iplanet and Eudora?
can you say not too many worms?
Nah. just a karma whore and occasionally a mac-hater. But me? A troll? Never.
I am "real management". MIS for a fairly large shop, a couple thousand PC's. We are basically an AS/400 outfit, but before I started, my predessessor had no concept of internet security. Mostly because it didn't affect out bread and butter AS/400's.
All PC's were basically on the 'Net. Full, unmonitored, unmetered access. My guys has so many "My PC is slow" calls, within the first week of my tenure, we had over 300 individual viruses identified. When you are dealing with an AS/400, it is basically text. When there are 10 people using a 4M DSL line and it is saturated with data, there is a problem. Especially when you pay per MB.
So the first thing I did was turn off the firewall to get things under control. Then once monitoring began, we found many people visiting a myriad of porn sites. Plenty of desktop wallpaper that would make a $5 whore blush. Can you say 'Sexual harassment in the workplace lawsuit'?
Once my staff had eradicated all viruses (minus 100 or so PC's that got chernoybl'ed) the damage came out to several hundred thousand dollars of company money that could have gone to my salary....er...^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H back into next years budget.
If you want to make a buck, TAANSTAFL. The company is there to make money, not give out free high speed internet access. The hardware is there to help the employee make money for the company, not cost the company money.
Then everyone had to sign a new company policy regarding internet usage. Basically, obey company policy, or you're gone. You don't like it, don't sign it. Internet usage is a tool, not a right. If the employee doesn't want to use that tool for the benefit of the company, it won't be provided for them.
And before everyone gets bent out of shape, the policy does say it can be used for personal use on breaks, lunch and after hours, if the employee stays away from porn and viruses.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
and why would anybody need Win32 API's. I write real programs at work, not games.
1. Work is Work. You can chat with your buddies on your own time. Would you yak on the phone to your significant other all day? I hope not, otherwise I'm gonna slap you.
/., or Salon, or hardware prices, or rfc's or wireless stuff. But we don't have admin priv on our boxes, so no icq, kazaa, or any silly crap that is distracting. Personally, if you're chatting, or dl'ing mp3s you're wasting time. OTOH, if you're engaging in something at least related to your job in some way, fine.
2.If I have downtime, I like to browse
3. Mail and web access/files should be filtered, if only because people *still* open attachements. If you act like an ass, expect to be treated like one. I do like having ssh access to my home box, it allows me to test our network from an external site, in cases of dns, ftp, smtp, etc.
4. Shopping online at work is silly, that's wasting company time (who the hell does that?). At least try to utilise their bandwidth and time by doing something that is somewhat job-related.
If you don't like those types of policies, don't work there. Or get your management to except you. As a sysadmin I use the 'net all the time to find answers to problems, get the latest software for my AIX boxes, etc. If they took that away I would be a lot less productive.
I wonder if anyone has tried negotiating exceptions to these corporate 'net blockages as part of the hiring process...
I guess I'll have to do all my personal surfing on a web-enabled PDA. By the time they roll out something this tight to the general corporations, we'll use personal wireless access to bypass the corporate network. I'll be content anyway, since I just need my stock quotes and the odd personal email. :)
Hello, this is a helpless citizen of Planet Earth watching the system fall into a mess.
/., reading / writing email, etc.
::hopes that some day all will be well and the world will be corporate-idiocy free::
For starters, these "productivity" measures never really make anybody more productive - they just dash morale and send people into ruts of drudgery and just going through the motions of work. Our bodies and brains are just not ABLE to do one thing for hours upon hours on end - we find several ways around that, be it day-dreaming, checking
Secondly, cowering behind "Email viruses" is just FUCKING DUMB. If a car manufacturer (here goes the analogy, sorry) were selling cars that had easily broken engines (such that a bump in the road would cause them to break - think any one of the bugs in Outlook. "begin" jumps to mind, along with all the virus-carrying security holes), no company that depended on cars would order their workers not to drive! But since it's The Microsoft Way, it can't be Microsoft's or Outlook's fault, no.... it must be.... uh.... those NAUGHTY JOKES employess FREELY CIRCULATE for the boring purpose of TAKING THEIR MIND OFF WORK FOR TEN SECONDS and relaxing. JEEZUS. (Sorry for shouting. I get angry.)
And "content filtering systems" - uh... how many times are we going to be shown that these are TOTALLY ineffective in any meaninful sense of the word "Effective." (Other than to make their parent companies $$.) They ban more than they let through, even of innocuous stuff.
Grrrrrrrrr. Grunk. Groo.
_knots
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
no more surfing at work? I guess slashdot will be going down the john real soon...
Schlemphfer, you moron, you sound like you have the RIGHT to surf the net at your leisure on THEIR NICKEL. If you are on their time, at their company, using their resources, if they say stay off the net, YOU STAY OFF THE NET! Boob. Wah, wah, I have the RIGHT to waste your time and money on my porn addiction... All you idiots should be should be REQUIRED to own a business before you work for someone else.
I work for IBM, and we're encouraged to use the Internet. As long as we don't abuse the privilege, management thinks Internet access is perfectly OK. It gives us a breather from the typical coding, and allows us to keep in touch with the outside world. If IBM (typically very conservative) feels this way, I doubt many companies will ban access.
Well this is nothing new. When I was working with one of the India's top 5 ( which happens to have an subsidiary ISP company ), net access was only 2 hours before and after hours. The worst part was they even didn't allow smtp email address. [ Offcourse we had a hack around to send/receive :) ]
That was the most disgusting and shameful experience you can ever be subjected to - I just hope the companies here in US don't subscribe to this idea.!!
The solution to people wasting company time on this BS is not to ratchet down the firewall and install the latest version of MS-Censor on the proxy. The solution is to open up the proxy and make the logs readable by anyone in the company. Preferably sorted by person.
This has the following useful side effects:
* People will know EXACTLY to what degree their web activities are logged
* Abusers can be persuaded by public consensus to clean up their habits
* Everyone is equally accountable
The solution to the virus problem is harder. Our good buddies in Redmond have left so many possible ways for a virus to propagate that plugging all the holes is practically impossible.
In order to help prevent viruses, the "standard desktop" environment used inside the company would be darn near unworkable (i.e. no file associations, executables/docs stripped from E-mail, macros/scripting disabled, "high" javascript security on browsers, etc. etc.)
The best compromise is to keep one's resident antivirus software up to date and accept that the standard Microsoft office environment is going to be vulnerable to fast spreading viruses. Budget for IT staff appropriately.
I work for one of the big six consulting firms (currently #2), and while we do have official policies regarding web and email use (standard porn, etc.), they are not enforced. Why, you ask? One, we hire good, productive people, and we get rid of those who are not. Two, our corporate IT department is smart enough to know that once you start censoring some sites/email then it goes downhill really quick. And considering that 3/4 or more of our business is IT, corp IT would get bitchslapped quick if they tried any of this. I do monster research on the 'net, and send and get all kinds of various email attachments; curtailing my usage (and most of my co-workers) would be a massive fuxor.
In the 4 years I've been here, we got hit with 1 virus (nimba maybe?). Rather than do all this draconian shit, how about you just hire better employees? Yeah, it's a real pain in the ass (I went through 6 different interviews for a level 1 position), and we outsource our trivial tasks (computer help desk, travel department), and you have to pay them more, but you bypass all this stupid shit.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Ever worked in IT? At a salaried position? You can be there for twelve, fourteen hours, or even more, especially right before a release. "If a developer is at his desk at 9:00 am, it's because he never left the night before."
The best thing the companies can do is give their developers outlets for the stress, and not add to it with requests that show total ignorance of the pertinent technology. My uncle used to keep a Super Soaker full of stale beer at his desk, so that when a management type came by with a really stupid request, he could show him just what he thought of it.
Have you notice that all the wonderful freedoms that people rioted and fought and argued for during the 60's are now eradicated by the same people who fought and rioted for them?
Each day it make me more hopeful that one day these hypocritical will just up and go away.
If at first you don't feel good.... suffer like the rest of us.
When Wired covered this, they noted that "companies typically start out blocking what filtering firms call the "sinful six" categories: pornography, gambling, illegal activities, hate sites, tasteless material and violent content."
Hell, I understand porn and gambling, but tastelessness and violence pretty much runs out the whole damn Internet. Guess I'll have to get my news about Mid-East turmoil from Zoog Disney...
It may be cold, but at least it's clear.
I work as a consultant, and one of my clients was a LARGE corporation. (I mean, REALLY large. One of the largest...big...)
Anyhow, around the time when Code Red was in full swing, they decided to start blocking employee access to "free" email sites such as Hotmail and Yahoo!, due to the fact that "viruses can propogate via these services".
Hmmm.
I'll be a good consultant, and go along with the flow. I won't bring up the facts that Code Red was designed to be propogated via MS Outlook/Express, most "free" mail sites already do virus scanning, and there wasn't (and still isn't) ANY virus scanning software on the PC's at this company.
But, then again, this is the client who also Sent in the clowns....
Two hours? It's quickly cancelled out by the ten hours or more that developers regularly put in.
I think this is fine, at work one should be WORKING. I really don't care if I can't shop online at work, and I really wouldn't mind not getting the spam, its annoying as hell.
.exes or zips through email for legitimate business purposes. (Our email server currently stops jpgs and mpegs and any attachment over 1mb).
However, as far as screening out everything, that seems ridiculous. We already have problems where I work (I am network admin, but I don't control the policies of the email that gets screened), anyway, we have problems all the time where people need to get jpgs, or mpegs or
This certainly negatively effects productivity, as we have to wait for 2 days for them to FedEx us stuff on CD that we could have had 2 days ago.
I don't see how you can stop "private" use without curtailing legitimate business use as well... in some environments yes its possible, but not in mine.
When I was doing tech support for a fairly large company we had all kinds of rules about no outside software, no downloading files onto the work machines, etc... I was the one who wrote the policies, and I tried to only prohibit things that would directly cause problems. And for the most part all of the employees followed the rules. Except for upper management. I would get called into the office of the Pres or Vice Pres a couple of times a month to fix some problem that 'just happened'. Most of the time the problem was either caused by them installing 200 random widgets from the web, or getting some e-mail virus. And if it wasn't that then the problem they were having wasn't with any of our business apps, but with some game or entertainment software that wasn't working correctly for them. It was insane. And the VP would bring screensavers to work and pass them out to the employees! Which seriously undermined my authority when I told them not to bring in random screensavers. More than half a dozen times he brought in virus laden disks and spread them to the entire company before I could catch him, it drove me CRAZY. And always the problems would get blamed on ME not policing the users! ARGGH!! Just thinking about it stresses me out.
Kintanon
Really. Because there's times I'm very, very, happy not to be using Windows, such as when the latest Outlook or Word infection is going around.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
External regulation should not be needed. If the employees are spending all their time on the web, then clearly their work is unrewarding. If I am enjoying the code I am working on, than I can go for hours with no breaks. Employees should also be smart enough to realize that if they squander these perks, they are going to get the boot. blocking porn sites at work is acceptable. but not blocking IM ports, especially as most of my team communicated with IM. it saved a ton of time, and provided checksums on file transmissions that windows file sharing does not always do.
A draconian attitude regarding squeezing every last second of work out of an employee is pointless! all it does is breed resentment in the employees. when I was working in an environment where 5pm counterstrike matches were commonplace, we tended to do more work after the match. however, the work was interesting enough we did not mind.
the moment the management is against the workers is the moment production starts to fall. everyone should be working toward the goal.
also I highly doubt that ANYONE here could go 8 hours without a slashdot fix. dream on.
Employees who sit around reading slashdot all day should be canned.
:P
Normal programmers who are ripping their hair out and go to browse slashdot for 15 minutes should remain employed.
Simple.
Using your own words:
"this is obviously a troll account. moderators, please mod down accordingly. "
Moderators, please act up.
- what a moron!
I can't see this working properly for Internet or computer companies. I do support mail for many customers at an ISP, and a large part of my communication with our customers is the transfer of driver files contained in self extracting executables, along with finding online postings and fixes for recent viruses and other things. If this kind of thing is put in place where I work, my job will be entirely pointless, and our customers will not have support. I can see how it would also hamper the folks at Dell, or Gateway, or AOL/Time Warner for many of the same reasons. Though they may not have as much personal contact with their customers as I do, certain things can't be blocked. Additionally, as work stations are often moved here, there isn't really a way to limit access for certain segments of the network, or a certain range of IPs.
"You think that's air you're breathing now?"
At my place of work they are beginning to crack down on internet access. There are just too many web based worms to allow users to surf. We can't keep up with the patches to our NT servers and Windows 2000 desktops.
Luckily we run virus protection on our exchange server. It catches an infected email every few days!
The short of it is that network security is a full time job and we can't afford to hire a dedicated network security person. So what are we going to do?
(Sigh) If only we ran Linux.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
ISP's can't be liable for things like piracy because they make no attempt to control the customer's internet access, but only provide a conduit for that access. Couldn't this apply to other companies that provide access? As an employer, why on earth would I want to get into the whole filtering game when it could conceivably bite me in the ass?
Besides that, can you imagine sitting at your desk for ten hours a day with no decent distractions? It seems like a great way to kill morale without providing any sort of advantage to the employer.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Where I work, all the viruses are spread by the bozos in management. We just sit there and watch 'em come in laugh!
We use websense at work, and even it blocks stuff that occasionally I need to get into. Luckily I can either find the info somewhere else or use Googles cached feature, but if I had *no* internet access it would make things rather difficult.
Random Musings
Hello I am a developer and when I am online I _am_ doing something work related. Whether its searching online documentation or getting some help with a problem on IRC.
The people posting in support of removing net access should stop assuming that everyone works in a meat packing factory or in a sweatshop stitching pants for $1.25 an hour.
If you want to decrease my productivity then remove my net access, but don't act surprised when I eventually quit to work for an employer with a more friendly internet policy.
I usually have an IRC client or two sitting in the background while I work and do other things; not only does it give me something to do when I need to walk away from the problem for a few minutes, but it also gives me somewhere I can ask questions and shoot ideas at.
So while it's pretty bad if all the user is doing is IRCing/reading SlashDot/checking Hotmail, most people can multitask and have these things go on in the background for use in idle periods (let's recompile and check slashdot while it chungs along; that query's taking a while, wonder if anyone's on IRC; hm, I don't get it, might as well check my email while I work it out)
I used to use company time to browse the web. But not to use email. But I always exceeded my quotas and got my work done right, too.
Now that I have a DSL connection, I feel like a hypocrite saying I agree with the sovereign right of an employer to rule their property as they see fit (unless they are discriminating). But I never ever did complain when restrictions were handed down; I always knew whose rights were whose.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Actually, they do, both ways. Try mudding on a 14.4k and doing something else. Try mudding on a 28.8, or a 56k, and doing something else.
;)
;) Muds can hurt a pipe just as much as anything else out there.)
Unless you mean the muds with no one on them
You might be taking up a 'small' amount of bandwith by mudding, and it may seem insignificant, but multiply that amount by a few hundred, or in the case of a large university, a few thousand. It adds up, and it kills pipes dead.
(Oh, and as a fun task, go to any decently popular mud like Aardwolf, and ask how much output they send per month.
They mention a lot of European (especially German) companies doing stuff like this in the article. Maybe their employees don't care quite as much as American ones would because we work many fewer hours per year and per day (this is on average of course) that Americans do. Just a thought from a German who _hasn't_ had his internet and email use limited.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
Why would a company try blocking posts to slashdot, but not CNN? I don't know but one that does is Morgan Stanley. Once they tried blocking the entire slashdot site, however after many complaints, they unblocked it, except for any URL's containing comments.pl. So now you can't post, or sort or thread articles before you read them.
:)
.exe file before they send it.
Unfortunately there's too many proxy servers out on the web for them to block, and any anyone using slashdot knows how to find them
They also try blocking the usual porn sites via Websense, but don't block google cache. Also they try block file extensions from email, so you have to ask people to rename that
Just don't ask how much money they've spent trying to half-heartedly implement all this blocking, it would run a small country. However I guess it keeps a skyscraper of IT people in work, and that can't be bad.
They won't stop me-
I'm a BOFH!
Besides, I'd rather have the users porn surfing than asking me about excel and access anyway.
I know your name is Kevin Ealy and you live in Charleston North Carolina. Can't deny that bitch!
I recently did an experiment. Like many things, I did it because I had two choices:
1) Wait for the family computer's dead harddrive to come back from RMA and listen to whining and complaining about not being able to download MP3s and pr0n and high speed
2) Try out the cd image of DemoLinux a while back and see how it works.
Having been born without a patience gland, I chose the latter. After all, what could go wrong? I booted it up, hit enter a few times on simple and intuitive menus, and was looking at a X11 GUI login. A few minutes later KDE1 and Netscape 4.7 were up and running with a Java version of AIM running as well.
Next, I rebooted it, wrote down step by step instructions to start it up and setup the network. Only seven steps were needed and three could be done by most anyone.
"Pick your language:", etc.
Even my ancient new technology hating parents were able to start it up and surf away.
The point is, that an old version of KDE+Netscape was user friendly enough for dumb people to use it. KDE3 and newer software associated with recent Linux distro releases like Mandrake 8.2 are even easier. If it was preinstalled on corporate desktops, it couldn't get much easier for people to pick up.
Why don't companies load up Linux on some of their desktops that don't require specific proprietary software? I've seen people doing office work, there isn't much to it Linux can't handle.
Executive-types will never allow this since they are generally the folks browsing www.shavednakedlemurs.com, for lack of any real work to do during the workday.
excellent approach for a many companies. (other than the productivity comes first approach)
They are strict regarding work time, but lenient outside of that
with all these companies worried about losing money and productivity, i find it humorous that they spend $30k for a firewall that cant even do what a simple ipcop install can do.
yeah, they are REALLY trying to save money....
I had a dream today. I dreamed that all our social problems are caused by a simple idea: that we should seperate into groups determined by shared differences, and hate/fear some other group or group(s). I see this idea in EVERYTHING. The government and older generations hate and fear drug users. Drug users hate cops and the people who make laws against their harmless activity. Employees hate/fear employers and work to get more and more from their employers, and their employers hate/fear employees. Middle easterners hate/fear Americans and capitalism and we hate/fear them. We seperate into our groups (AND) we hate/fear some other group. I know I've been talking really simplistically, but I'm tired, and you can play with it as a thought game on any place in our society, its the foundation of it.
I think we need to give it all up. Imagine if each of us was working together. Doesn't matter really specifically what we all decided to work together for, just that we all chose to have one common goal. Our goal could be anything, and we'd be able to acheive it. There wouldn't be silly power structures. It'd be like the open source movement. No single person can say what we are all working for as a goal. It still feels like every programmer is working together somehow in OSS. We aren't exclusive. We don't tell some people that they CAN'T also release oss software, even if they are some big company. We don't prohibit anyone from using our software, they just have to follow the laws of our society(GPL, and other open source licenses). Are there conflicts in our soceity? Sure.. like there once was with KDE and GNOME. Did people kill each other over it, or hate each other. No. We are an example of a big group of people with differences. We share some similarities, but our differences are what make us all important. We all have ideas, and no ones idea imprisons another nor conveys harm to another. Why is this group polarized in the same direction, and why isn't the rest of the world like this? Ask yourselves why that silly idea about hating/fearing different groups is the way things are.
rofgile
Why the hell should anyone assume they have a right to send email or surf the web from work to begin with?
I can see both sides of this too, and like many others I'm a programmer who *NEEDS* access to the web . Reasons:
(1) I'm relatively new to the area, and without MapQuest I'd spend fucking days getting lost in the grand concrete carpark which is Silicon Valley, when I pop out on my lunch break to run some urgent errand - lesson, some web sites make you more productive to your employers, and to yourself
(2) Instance access to Google and Newsgroups etc. is vital to me not becoming blocked while developing in Java. I have a reputation for getting things done yesterday, which doesn't come from signing requisition orders for delivery of new versions of Java/Apache software (and how the hell would I *know* that new versions existed without the web!).
(3) My general access to IT websites is educational: JavaWorld, IBM Developer Workds, etc. etc. Helps me keep my knowledge abreast of current events, which is what my employers want!
(4) Believe it or not I have reason to forward 1 or 2 relevent websites which were linked off slashdot stories to my manager every week!
(5) Many people have also commented that it is an important escape valve. I'd agree, since I'm shut up in a office expected to work magic, when I hit a roadblock, I need to escape and browse for a while until my subconcious offers up a solution.
My 2c.
Lastly, speaking in general. If you cut off employees access to email, won't you just have them contacting their friends by company phone instead. I'd think that communication via email is normally more succinct, less urge to chat, so if you get people off email and onto the phone, your going to lose more productivity over all.
And as for limiting access to phones - give it a rest - what about my mobile! I might actually get around to using all the millions of free minutes I waste per month!
Effectively, I'm my own boss. I "slack off"
as much as I want to.
I just don't want to. Every hour that I'm not
being productive is an hour that I'm not making
any money.
It's amazing how this changes your perspective.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
I used to work for Bellsouth DSL's tech support. Well, a day after signing up for their DSL, I had like 5 or 10 spam messages. Now, the address I used wasn't at all common. I've not given it out to anyone, nor have I signed up for anything under it. I post to DSL Reports from home that it does seem like Bellsouth is selling email addresses (under a topic that was already posted). I got fired from Bellsouth for posting that message. Apparently they traced down the sender and crossreferenced the IP with my address, and then found out I was employed by them. I was promptly fired.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
And windows too. The glass kind. Do they really need to see the weather? Dang employees. Friggin rights.
As so many others have pointed out, this is not a case of rights -- it's a case of privilege. And, as usual, there seems to be a conflation of two different issues in the same discussion.
From the standpoint of security and/or legal responsibility, of course a company needs to restrict Internet access. No filter is perfect, but as long as it blocks out most of the obvious porn, gambling, "hacker" (speaking colloquially), racist, etc. sites it should at least make it abundantly clear that an employee is trying very hard to circumvent the rules. But then again, there should already be policies on the books dealing with those things, Internet or no Internet.
On the other hand, from a standpoint of productivity, a company should be very wary of restricting Internet access. I don't buy the argument that if an employee isn't surfing the Internet for X hours per day that all of a sudden, he will be productive for X more hours per day. There is a limit to how productive someone is going to be -- if you take away the Internet, some other "time waster" will rise in its place. Do you really think everyone who has a Palm just uses it for phone numbers and schedules? Do you think that just because someone is at their desk concentrating intently that they aren't working on a crossword puzzle? Do you think that every phone call made is for business? How about good old-fashioned staring into space?
An employee is productive if he or she performs to expectations, period. Companies should have an interest in getting rid of (or better yet, finding a way to motivate) unproductive employees anyway -- but it shouldn't involve cutting off the Internet from employees who are already pulling at least their own share of the weight, if not more. If my company wants to call me on the carpet for reading Slashdot or sending an e-mail to my girlfriend to see how her Monday is going after being sick with the flu all weekend, fine. I will be more than glad to show them the half-dozen individual and team achievement awards that senior management has given to me in the last three years, agree sarcastically that the Internet has indeed made me a lousy employee, and otherwise be as amicable as Galileo before the Inquisition. I will also be sure never to work more than 40 hours per week, observe Internet usage policies religiously, and perform utterly mediocre work for the length of time it takes to find a job for a competitor who understands that achievement is the bottom line.
"she says i'm lousy conversation. as if that's supposed to help."
I believe that this is the Anti-Virus/Security lobby that really are talking about this. As noted, there are no names mentioned. Why would someone want to even apply if they were that draconian.
If they think that doing this will increase productivity, they have another thing coming. I personally spend MORE time at the computer and within reach of my phone because of the internet. Sure, I always have a web page open but I usually stick to computer related sites or am using it to plan my business trips.
If one thing that really surprises me about people and porn at work is that they have not learned from example after example on the news. In my town, we have had firefighters dismissed, teachers arrested (kiddie porn) and other things that continually prove, to me, that you have to be stupid as hell to view that stuff at work.
Viruses can be virtually eliminated by adding a network scanner (which you should have anyway since you probably use windows and maybe outlook), and using a client and server other then outlook and exchange. There's just TOO many holes to be patched and you can use Notes or Groupwise for e-mail. Plus, other then maybe the online calendaring features that maybe 10-20 percent of the users actually use (Groupwise has some pretty amazing stuff, but we never use it), most users would be served well by a plan old POP server and SMTP. Just cuz you use Office doesn't mean you need to use Outlook. At work we never install it. This doesn't totally solve the virii problem, but all you have to do is filter the extensions and scan those you do let thru.
That cures probably the biggest thing that causes wasted time. This and user education. All you have to do is threaten the users that they may have to take such a measure and most will curtail their web use. The policy at work is that if you use too much and it starts to affect the company's mission (education since we are a college), then it will be cut off. So far, we've done well. We didn't upgrade because of our users using it for warez and other things. We use it because of the teleconfrences we do and things like that. Things that DO eat badwidth for our mission. One other way they also hvae cut down is by using small hard drives too. I am not sure what drive they are ordering as the standard disk, but when we ordered my computer, 12-20 gig was the norm and they ordered a 6 gig drive. I don't have ROOM to do work and download crap at work. Anyway, any company who does this is just doing it because that's the only way they know how to deal with it. Users who are educated about it will curtail their use voluntarily. It works well for us. YMMV.
Gorkman
Basically the line we have been hearing is people in the IT career fold should be allowed access to the net, but no-one else.
What about lawyers, most legal research is done online nowadays - they have just as good reasons as IT staff to want unlimited access to information!
Also journalists, scientists, etc. We should remember that it wasn't some poxy pr0n collecting nerd who invented the WWW, it was a physicist trying to improve communication with his fellow peers!
People are not machines and looking busy is not the same as being productive. I had spent days at work just staring out the window trying to come up with a good solution to a problem, rather than looking busy doing something stupid. Ultimately the smart way will win.
BTW, I'm writing this from home, while on my other computer I'm logged into work running bunch of tests on a system that's dueto go to Q/A tomorrow.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
We all know no one from SlashDot hardly ever (like 0.01% of the time) writes their own stories. Why must EVER story be in italics? IT'S LIKE TRYING TO READ USENET WHEN EVERYONE POSTS IN CAPS AND IS TO LAZY TO TURN THE CAP LOCKS OFF BECAUSE THEY DON'T KNOW ANY BETTER.
When quoting someone, italics is nice, but when you _know_ everything will be a quote, does EVERYTHING have to be in italics?
You know, just because the secrataries are getting e-mail viruses is no excuse for having a system that can easily ACCEPT e-mail viruses.
Maybe if they'd actually use an e-mail client that isn't Outlook they'd have to find something legitimate to bitch about... but they've got no sympathy from me if they continue using that POS.
It's a freaking management issue ok. If employees are jerking off in the bathrooms, taking too much time on smoke breaks, running their own consulting business out of their cubicle or chatting all day long with lonely housewives in Australia, its a MANAGEMENT issue.
Get it? Technology cannot cure the ills of your torpid, sclerotic 1960s era management structure. If you don't know what you employees are doing, or even if they have enough work to do, no amount Internet logging/blocking is going to stop them from wasting your money and their time at work.
-josh
Asside. If your company "firewall" is anything like mine, your users, aka peers, can send anything they want at a ".zip" or anything that is not one of the banned names so frightening to M$ Admins.
Incompetence breeding inconvenience for the rest of us. Nice work, meat heads. It's not going to bother me too much because my job gives me enough time at home to have a life. Some people will not be so lucky and your efforts, or lack thereof, will really burn them. Get your freaking act togeter or go away or expect your best people to pack up and leave.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Hey now, smoking does not fuzz your brain as you imply, the smoke break is a high probability method of solving a problem. Not only is it a stimulant, an addict can't think clearly during withdrawl. Of course we could stop smoking and in time wouldn't have these problems, but if it were that easy I'd have quit a long time ago.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Be honest; what you meant to say is that it would make you blush. A $5 whore would have already been around-the-world (hey, a pun!) and seen & done it all. :)
Can you say 'Sexual harassment in the workplace lawsuit'?
Can you say, "Can you say 'Sexual embarassment != Sexual harassment'?" There's a difference.
Ugly Bitter Bitch says: "Boss! I happened to watch Bob's computer booting up, and I was subjected to the most offensive double-penentration wallpaper imaginable! I'm going to sue you for... for 5 million dollars for failing to prevent me from being embarrased by Bob's human nature!"
Boss says: "Grow up - get back to work - quit yer bitch'n - you weren't assaulted - no free lawsuit money for you, you litigious wench! Haven't you heard lady? The politically correct backlash has finally begun, and we've imported the only good part of French culture."
Okay... I can dream can't I? :)
--
Power to the Peaceful
E-mail went out to all Lucent today -- starting ASAP all access to webmail accounts (HotMail, Netscape, Yahoo, etc.) will be blocked and is against policy. It seems they don't like the threat of viruses getting thru around the normal e-mail checks.
However, they have expressly allowed limited personal use of company e-mail.
VPN sucks.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Use UNIX. None of this windows crap. There are no UNIX e-mail viruses. If you have a UNIX mail reader, it isn't going to execute.exe files or macros. You can open almost any attachment (other than exes) in some UNIX/Linux program. What do we need Windows for?
Because if they believe this garbage, it must be pretty low. It's their own damn fault that, as another Slashdot poster pointed out, they installed Outlook as the default email client, which is pretty much a virus magnet. All these bozos would have to do would be to ban Outlook and Outlook Express instead of making their employees pay for upper management's stupidity.
.NET or another competitor.
As a web developper, I must have constant and unrestricted access to the Web in order to do research, download new development tools and API's. I must be able to post questions to bulletin boards if I run into a problem or have a question that must urgently be answered. I need to subscribe to industry mailing lists. Most importantly, I must do the research I need to upgrade my skills and stay current with the goings-on in the industry and trends that are relevant to the methodologies or tools we will be using at work, or even to keep up with the relevance of Java as a development platform vis-a-vis
Also, it's important to give one's employees a chance to take a breather once in a while. It's impossible to work 8 straight hours a day. Anyone will tell you that the average human being is only capable of performing a maximum of four straight hours of work a day of concentrated labour. The rest of the time must be allowed for pseudo-work such as meetings, talking shop with coworkers, and even casual surfing, which I tend to do sometimes.
However, leave it up to upper management to feel the need to stick their nozes in what is clearly none of their business: micromanagement. Instead of relying upon deadlines, assignments, milestones and other project-related objectives to motivate their employees to do their jobs, employers feel they must constantly be in our faces as the only way to get us to do anything, which to be polite, is excessive. This is highly unproductive and will only serve to lower productivity, not increase it.
This space left intentionally blank.
This is the latest incarnation of the dot-commers, guys who do anything to grab the corporate IT dollars. While the business and IT departments in most companies, the 'consultants' still find ways to swoop in and woo senior management with scare tactics and buzzwords.
It's all about a slick presentation and hype, packaged to feed off the 'latest thing' -- in this case, corporate security.
My position as a software engineer has been to work on my own 'counter presentations' -- I always have to be ready to jump into the fray and try and take some of the 'gleam' off of the sales pitch without sounding like I'm simply resistant to change.
I would have to ask how a company can move into a digital era, or take advantage of new technologcal efficiency if those companies cut themselves and their employees off from that technology.
I would ask how curtailing email or web browsing will stop viruses and hacking when the most dangerous and malicious attacks do not need anyone to download or email anything (code red, anyone? Nimda, anyone?)
It's important for IT professionals to understand the attack these 'consultants' represent to solid technoly solutions, and prepare to deal with them accordingly.
It's also important to understand that for every real security consultant, there are a hundred sales persons claiming to be one.
My company doesnt have lawyers or journalists or scientists! For the people it DOES have, only IT should be allowed access. That's all!
This is a problem I have at school. I have set up a CGI Proxy on my home server (on a broadband connection) and viola, no more blocked sites.
If you want to set your own up on your *nix or windows + apache box, download CGI Proxy from http://www.jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/
The solution is simple. When my current employer cuts email & web access, I'll find a different one.
On the other end, the cable companies are now expressly forbiding "VPN". While you may think they are only after the retarded M$ full desktop bandwith hogger, what they really want is your money. The asses that block ports 25 and 80 will get around to 22 sooner or later, regardless of your actual badwith use. My cable company, Cox, just started to block port 21 on incoming ftp request. I'm not sure how they can distinguish that from the AOL client, but they did tonight and my mother got a "blocked by administrator" sign instead of pictures of my baby girl. So clever, they will soon be out of my $65/month I'm paying for a static IP. No the asses are not going to get the $50/month DHCP fee from me either. Snip, bye bye.
The internet is almost the coporate lap dog the entertainment companies, publishers and telcos wanted. If the feds kill wireless there will be no useful net left. I'm fed up with the spam, the adverts, the unilateral contracts, the credit card demands and the whole fuck you.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I've worked for several Fortune 500 firms, in their IT departments and seen the folly of over restrictive practices.
Three of the companies restricted access alot. Ports would not even be opened on the firewalls if there was a business case, leading to quite senior people in IT and other departments using dialup accounts from their desktops. One company had such restrictive worldwide security guidelines that individual business units were getting T1 lines and not disclosing their existence when we did security audits (I worked for central IT)
The company I work for now and one other are very relaxed - the firewalls don't let much in but let pretty much anything out. Result, no one routes around the company firewalls/virus scanners/IDS sensors/caches we're not allowed to pass MP3's but that's about it.
Yes dialup can be prevented if the desktops are locked down, and the phones on users desks are digital, but 3G phones are coming, many with Bluetooth/IRDA, companies are better off being resonable now rather than losing visibity of what their employees are doing.
Employee access to external POP3 services is prohibited, both by policy and firewall rules.
Where viruses and worms (Nimda, Code Red, etc) have made it into the company, we've almost universally tracked the vector down to a 'Free Email' service, primarily Hotmail and Yahoo! mail.
We are considering blocking all such services, or at least forcing all traffic to and from these services through the antivirus system, and suffer the latency and associated user complaints.
Again, we cannot force all web traffic through a scanner, as there is strong opposition from various divisions to any change that would slow down web access.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
I'm working on something similar; no sense in re-inventing the wheel, better to improve upon it.
What the hell? Shouldn't this be Microsofts problem? Isn't it their software that lets these self propogating worms survive in the first place? It's like wanting to put a 3 million percent tax on gasoline because the car companies would rather put out 7 mile to the gallon SUV's instead of fuel efficient vehicles. It's not the companies fault for being irresponsible, it's the consumer. I'm an engineer and I need my internet access and email privileges to do my job. Have you ever had to do a freakin' parts search in those stupid catalogs? Not to mention that email is how I communicate with a lot of people on the outside world: vendors, customers, etc.. Wasn't there just a story about the 101 dumbest business moves of the last year? Was this crap on it?
These policies wouldn't have stopped Nimda getting on to our corporate network. That was tracked down to a couple of notebooks belonging to sales and marketing guys. They'd connected those machines to the internet at home, and when they were on the road. That's when they got infected. Then they infected and re-infected the corporate network several times when they plugged in at the office.
With increasing numbers of portable devices, and wireless networking, including 3G phones, it's going to be harder and harder to plug all the gaps. Instead of listening to the sales pitch of the anti-virus and firewall manufacturers, we should use some commonsense: ditch products like Outlook.
Back in the late '80s the Christmas Tree E-Mail trojan gave my university's mainframes a serious case of constipation. Damn profs and its damn ability to recieve script files!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Employees excessively surfing the web is a *symptom* of, not the *reason*, too much free time at work. If they're goofing off, it's not because they have unrestricted internet access; it's because they either don't have enough work to do or they're not doing the work they've been given.
That means it's a problem their managers need to address; not something for the IT department. If someone is surfing six hours a day, then it's the manager's fault that they're not properly supervising them and giving them tasks or disciplining them for not getting their work done.
That said, a company would have to be foolish not to employ some basic filtering measures(porno, gambling, gaming sites, file sharing services, e-mail attachments) to keep network traffic and the more obvious time wasters in check.
However, if an employee is doing all their work and checking Yahoo Mail or ESPN.com, what is the harm? It keeps them happy and the company's work is getting done.
"Can you say, "Can you say 'Sexual embarassment != Sexual harassment'?" There's a difference."
I think you've been watching too much of "The Man Show." Flipping through my employee handbook reveals that the law defines harassment (sexual or otherwise) as creating an uncomfortable or hostile environment. It has nothing to do with physical assault.
And the fact is, that in any business environment, your "human nature" argument is shit. When you're at work, everyone has to draw a line and have some consideration for the tastes of others...the fact that you may have no taste or sensibility does not preclude others from having it.
Heck, even as a male, I would be very unsettled dealing with any idiot that put pr0n wallpaper on their screen.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Could it be...the Business Software Alliance? In their Guide to Software Management, they say business owners should
"Ensure that software can not be downloaded from the Internet by employees without special approval."
They further suggest automated tools to help enforce this rule and say employees should sign an agreement to abide by it.
It also suggests, BTW, that software that is "free" or available for unrestricted downloading from the Internet is probably "too good to be true" and should be avoided.
wow, the average age of the /. user must be much greater than i expected ... so many people who have resigned themselves to working the standard 8 hours a day tedium with no outlet for any sort of relief ... "work is for WORKING", "its not your time its the COMPANIES TIMES" etc etc etc ...
... but even having said that i would go crazy without the ability to access the internet or play small games at work ... to be anything else is to surely be some sort of mindless machine ... and my boss realises that that is not what i am ... we have a ADSL line that can access the net, and unless ppl were to spend all day on it or have dodgy stuff obviously displayed on their computers, they are free to do as they please, so long as in the end the work gets done, its that easy ...
.exe attachment not once BUT TWICE i am one of the ppl that has to clean up the mess, but there is no way known that i would want to restrict them to sitting in their cubes staring at the walls when there are no support calls coming in ... it would get to the point that i would worry each day that they are going to come in with an automatic weapon and wipe half of us out screaming "I JUST WANTED TO CHECK MY HOTMAIL!!!" ... we solve these types of problems by TEACHING our people that .exe and .com files shouldnt be touched unless they are obviously from something they are expecting, and as a result anyone that notices one of these will now run it by me to make sure that its a virus or something obviously bad ...
... all you ppl who let work rule your lives scare the hell out of me, your life isnt meant to be spent working, and i think that some of you need to take a load off for a while ... go jerk off somewhere or something ...
... anyway, id better get back to work :)
... what it is like to have your spririt broken like that??? to have resigned that 8 hours of your life a day - AN ENTIRE THIRD - of it is surrendered so completely to someone else just because they give you some money for it. has your life become so shallow and money obsessed that you are prepared to resign the greater part of your waking day to someone else just for money?
i am working in a job i like (computer programmer), and its something that i will even do at home after hours on a different level (i write commercial apps at work, and i fiddle with games/graphics programming at home)
... sure, when one of the plebs in support double clicks on a
... and on the flipside, if i think of something outside of work - when im not *GASP* actually getting paid for it - that is useful or may relate to my work, i may still actually spend a bit or a lot of time (whatever may be required) working it over or writing it down or something AND I DONT ASK FOR MONEY THE NEXT MORNING
... i just hope to that i never EVER become as depressing and inert as half the ppl who have replied to this posting
I have a lot of experience with internet access :) in mail - it's completely in his own virtual machine. If he/she spoiled anything there - that's their troubles only...
from employee.
I saw a lot of wonderuful and horrible uses of internet at workplace.
On my opinion the best solution is to create
_two_ virtual machines for each person which need
or want internet. On the same screen one virtual machine is connected to internet fully and without any restriction, second is following strict corporate policy.
The cut and paste between machines is carefully monitored (by software or special policies).
So if an employee surf web, or chat, or use viruses (
Moreover, it's easy then to monitor private time
versus company time by monitoring activity times of that virtual machines. Even if that times will not be reported to managers, seeing that ratio of own/work can be very disciplining.
Just my 2 cents...
* Ports for P2P apps, AIM, ICQ, etc., are blocked for everyone but IT.
You can save hundreds of dollars a month by switching from long distance to AOL Instant Messenger, especially if you have numerous contacts in faraway lands.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Also, over here we may have softcore porn everywhere, but we certainly do not allow harddcore in the workplace.
However, the solution to that problem is much simpler: just switch to a better mail client and browser. Even better, switch to a different operating system. That also saves on support costs, and it keeps the employees happier.
Most of the article deals with filtering attachments in email:
I cannot think of any legitimate reason to email somebody a screen saver at work, but unfortunately there is a lot of legitimate exe files been sent as attachments, and a lot of viruses and worms that propagate via formats other than those listed above...I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Okay, a few people have said it already, but it's my turn. For most people reading this site, technology isn't the answer; Leadership is.
I'm very opposed to the Katzian idea that we're somehow different than everyone else that ever existed just because we understand computers, but let's just say that most of us are considered professionals. In CA at least, that means that we're salaried, which means we get paid not for the hours that we work, but for getting the job done.
Now, if someone is wasting time on the web, ICQ, personal phone calls, reading magazines, whatever, then their boss needs to evaluate whether they're being productive or not, talk to them, and let them know in their review/salary/pink slip. It's that easy.
This is a bit of a rant, but I'm sick of working at a company that's over 1/3 management, with not one good leader to be found.
Uhh... no comment on the viruses part. The harassment parts (or people complaining about pr0n spam) just comes down to people needing to grow up these days. The world is a harsh place.
A lot of /.ers complain well if they wouldn't use Outlook.... if they wouldn't use IIS.... if they wouldn't use Microsoft...
/. can all piss an moan about how Ximian is almost this and Sendmail and PINE rule the Earth with an iron fist of security but 60-75% of the computing public is getting their mail with Outlook.
/. community w/o your archnemsis MS the IT industry would not exist as we know it (yeah there's a lot of shit MCSEs but don't kid yourself there's a lot of shit Solaris guys too) and I am loathe to admit it /. probably wouldn't even exist.
Well they do.
On a recent interview, I decided I did NOT want to work for the company I was speaking to. (They had mentioned that TCP/IP was owned by MS b/c (I swear this is true) to implement it you had to "Right click on Network Neighborhood, choose Protocols, choose Microsoft....") I asked them why they were switching from CC Mail to Outlook and not to Lotus Notes which is a more "natural" move.
The IT Manager (not the TCP/IP lady) said basically this:
"Our users want Outlook. They used it elsewhere. It works really well with Office. It does a lot of things right. Yeah Lotus is more secure but it is ugly and it is harder to administer [I disagree]. Plus you need a developer to take advantage of the program. Outlook does everything Notes does before you get a developer involved anf it does it a lot easier."
So what the IT Manager was saying was; Everyone uses it, it's easy.
He's pretty much right.
All the folks that yell and scream: BUT *NIX IS BETTER, you're all correct. In the late 70s early 80s all the people that yelled BUT BETA IS BETTER were right too.
So if the same people who shrug their shoulders at insecurity and poor design are certainly going to belive that cutting down USENET, surfing and private email will "protect" them.
I personally blocked Hotmail, Yahoo!, & MSNMail for about 2 months at a site. To tell you the truth I couldn't take all the effing viruses either. And you know what? It stopped the viruses. I mean dead. 25/week --> 0/week
We here at
Are *NIXes better? Duh. Is PINE safer? Duh. Now tell Jane Secretary that she has to jump through hoops to send email from her bosses account...
The IT Manager just wanted happy users and was willing to hire a few more Admins to take care of the mess. He knew the score.
And
And why precisely on your company's computer, on your company's network, over your company's T do you feel you have any right to do anything they don't want you to? (Hey if you own stock raise Hell, I'm with you there!)
This
Virii and lawsuits aside.
Shouldn't people who are getting paid to work,
well... work? The North American idea that
I give 9-5 and you give me a pay-cheque is really
not healthy. Your company would give you more
benefits if you made it clear that when you're
at work, you're at your desk being productive.
I'm currently residing in Japan where this kind
of silly matter would never come up.
I'm working at a construction company that's getting ready to go ahead and allow internet access on everyone's desktop. But the guy in charge wants to have some kind of filtering set up before it happens. He doesn't want people goofing off instead of being productive. His way of looking at it is if you come back and catch them after the fact then you've already lost all that money.
I personally don't want to put the filtering on the user's computers. Partly because it leaves it where they can possibly tamper with it, but mostly because it adds some nasty hack to the OS that will no doubt make the computer more crash prone. I'd like to set up all the computers to go through a Linux router with Squid as a transparent proxy, but unfortunately I don't see that being a real option. There's no lists I can subscribe to that I can tie into Squid to keep the filtering up to date.
I'm still searching for something that can do the filtering on a server and off the end user's computer, but so far I haven't found anything. I'd love to find something free, or at least something that runs on Linux, but I just don't see it happening.
The Internet, for the vast majority of clerical workers, is a distraction that has not improved productivity a jot. Looking at client sites with Internet access to the desktop, 40-60% of web-surfing and 20-30% of emails is not work-related. Popular news and entertainment web sites top the surfing list. SPAM and useless mailing lists clog the email queues. Sure, some people can be more "productive" by using online shoopping and banking at lunchtime, but the majority overuse the facility. In fact, look a little closer and, despite the billions spent, productivity has not improved by using desktop computers either.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
Hell, the last company I worked for had internet access so locked down, that it took me 4 months of working there (contract employee) to get net access, and I was in the pc support department! Its pretty hard to explain to somebody that you can't fix their computer for a couple hours, because you can't download a driver till so and so comes back and opens their office so you can get net access!
.
Me fail English? That's unpossible!
This is an area where Linux (or at least FreeBSD) could outdo Windows.
ya damn nazi.
your kind would suck the life outta people and turn them into robots if you could.
fuck you.
When my former employer said it was going to start watching the sites we went to I promised them the I would write an Outlook (ugh!) virus that would hit porn sites all day. The way I looked there were 3 possible outcomes.
1) They would get rid of Outlook and censor (not a total loss, Outlook would be gone)
2) They would start censoring and everyone would be guilty because of the virus.
3) They wouldn't do anything (which is what happened!)
Mac-hater? you sir are obviously sub-human.
fuck off, please.
now die.
thanks.
A few summers ago i worked as an administrator on a University network. My job consisted of answering calls, keeping the architects in the upstairs office out of the pr0n, (re)building computers, and updating hoardes of wintel software. This kept me busy in the afternoon coming from highschool football training. Time goes on, there is literally not much to be done; i've automated everything complicated with VBS and Perl scripts.
Three more guys are hired, and the boss is upset with our inabillity to look busy. Boss takes a request from the architects, the result of a contracting dispute, and sends us to survey the amount of concrete used for the entire campus.
In exchange for the three guys doing grunt work of concrete measuring, i download songs ala AudioGalaxy and burn to CD for them. I was the guy who is in charge of preventing that very type of network abuse.
The boss was pretty upset. I pointed out that he does the same thing on _his_ lunch break. I was promptly fired the next week.
Putting a scare into management is one thing, selling a product with good old FUD is another.
"Workers are NON-Productive when allowed free reign of network resources! Use AmazingBlazing Firewall to fix this productivity showstopper."
Who is the beneficiary of this blatent FUD?
SIGERR: laziness exceeds quota
It strikes me that this whole idea is an attempt to treat the symptoms, not the real problems.
Problem 1 -- Technical threats from the internet (worms, virii, etc). This should be treated by putting pressure on software vendors for increased security, as well as client-side security measures such as virus scanners and mail servers that block suspiscious attachments, etc.
Problem 2 -- People wasting time on non-work-related activities. As other posters have pointed out there are *lots* of ways to waste time at work without an internet connection. Take a long hard look around the office the next time the office has an internet connection outage. There won't be any magic upswing in productivity happening around you. The same people who goof off online will be doing it offline.
There is a class of people in the world who are deathly afraid that somewhere somebody might be happy, and they work diligently to make as sure as possible that never happens.
These people work on the basis of comparative happiness: if you are happy it makes them feel bad by comparison. If you are sad - they feel good by comparison.
If they could these people would bring back the dark ages complete with plague and small pox - in the midst of such misery they are positively buoyant.
The proper way to handle such people is to point out their agenda of misery so that no one is fooled by what they have to say.
In my opinion these are foul subhumans who are responsible for most of the problems in the world; step on them whenever possible. At the very least be exuberant when you are around them - no matter how miserable you are feeling - never show pain, that is what they want.
You and "your kind" may find some kind of security in a "safe", phony, sterile, lowest common denominator workplace, but that kind of corporate inhumanity drives me mad.
Zero-tolerance makes baby George Carlin cry (I don't watch The Man Show).
(P.S. I've been self-employed for years, so I don't have to deal with inane office drone policies (anymore) so my "taste" and "sensibility" doesn't have to be watered down.)
--
Power to the Peaceful
I noticed that the article was written in Europe, so perhaps in America the legal climate is different. I worked for an IT industry that blocked access to adult sites and web-based email. Now I wouldn't dream of looking at porn or anything like that, but quite often a site would be blocked for incomprehensible reasons, and some sites providing email access also are blocked (hotmail, yahoo, etc). Unfortunately, they also blocked geocities and deja when it was around. Need I point out first that many email-based accounts automatically did virus scans before opening attachments, so the security argument was moot, especially because most of the viruses were spread via OUtlook and Windows Scripting Host.
Blocking instant message clients seem to be a logical move, although probably a company might allow company-installed chat clients only to be used. The problem is that for messaging to have any usefulness, you need to be able to speak with users of other IM clients. So it would be ultimately futile for a company to sanction a chat client that can't chat with most of the world.
Restricting access to web-based email essentially means that employers rely more and more on their company email system for personal mail. Employees therefore will receive more email in outlook (mailing lists, etc) and therefore more potential viruses.
Although the Courts have not caught up with technology, they will. As things currently stand, employers can monitor email, but there is also legal precedent preventing a person's personal phone calls during lunch breaks from being recorded and or listened to. The precedent involves a case where a company monitored off-hour calls from the company's telephone system and used the info to fire an employee. The court ruled that because the employee had no easily available alternative (i.e. no public telephones),the company did not have the right to monitor communication even on company equipment.
If employees use their company outlook for personal correspondence, then there is the potential to besmear the company through slanderous posts or abusive speech. Or simple the possibility of embarrassing the company publicly. If illegal or slanderous activity occurred on a company's email address, the company could be found liable. Also, if they wanted to fire an employee for making the libelous or abusive email, the employee could simply say the company did not provide an alternative for communicating.
So by limiting correspondence to company email addresses, the employer gets the worst of both worlds. They would ultimately be liable for employee emails, yet they wouldn't have firm grounds for firing employees for sending emails from the company email (especially if could be demonstrated that it was written during lunchtime or after hours).
This is all speculation of course, but it seems the logical direction for technology law to head toward. Perhaps a company may decide that the real risk of viruses may outweigh the theoretical risk of potential lawsuits arising from unauthorized email. But remember, one case is all it takes for legal departments all over the world to react.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Your waisting company time and resources. Not only that but do you have ANY idea the pain it is to put right a system after some daft bugger runs "that little bouncing dog"? Even if it's not a virus, the next user will get all confused, or it'll be baddly written and eat up all the system resources (when working with big files (70ish 26MB files at once, this is very bad)...
No, out right banning of users access to the net, except when its needed (like for the IT team & management, and at break times) and banning the installing of none-authorised software is a GOOD THING (again the IT is execpt but management are not).
mlk, knows roots password on the firewall.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Man... if there's one thing I truely hate about the place I work at is the amount of time the common non IT person spends surfing the web and playing games on the clock! What really urks me is when these dolts come to me and tell me that they have found this awesome page and that I (seeing that I'm a web developer) should check it out... only to find that it's some stupid ass clcok (www.humanclock.com) that they thought was neat-o. Nothing like having capitolism derailed by Wally cuz he thought he saw a wood chuck! Great... now get back to work and your name is now on the term list should I ever be asked by HR who I THINK SHOULD BE FIRED!
when they ban enctryption only criminals wi$21*J *#JF$%!@#$':
which is that any such preventative measures will only be used on Joe Blow.
When the big guys visited our location last time, I got pulled out of a very important meeting to help one of them get connected to YahooIM
Mr Big will say "oh, you can't take that away. I need that [websurfing|various personal email accts|instant msg|etc]. Since he's Mr Big he gets what he wants.
Then one day he gets an email from someone who loves him.
And in one desperate moment of cuteness his company's million dollar security policy/implementation goes down the tubes.
Face it, it's not your connection, it's not your computer and I pay you to work. If you have too much snot in your nose and wet behind your ears to have ACTUALLY worked...anywhere...much less in IT at a corporation, don't bother replying.
... and so it took me over two months of being billed at the wrong rate to resolve a simple issue, because their customer service personnel could not receive my email or visit the web page that contained my receipt, proving what I had actually ordered. And since you can never call back directly to the same rep you talked to in a previous call, I had to tell the same story to at least a dozen people. I ended up printing the page, driving to Kinko's and dropping $6 to fax it (twice, because they lost the first one). Brilliant idea!
I have a friend. He's had a computer as long as aI have and that's a pretty long time.
When I had an Apple IIe he had a C64. I got an Amiga 500, he got one too. I got a 486DX66, he got one... So on and so on.
I am a Sys Admin. He works outside of the IT world but in a technical job.
He doesn't know the first thing about computers. He turns it on, clicks on Starcraft, or Word and does what he has to do. He surfs the web via Yahoo! has no interest in Google. He once wrote a very large paper in Notepad because he found Notepad before he found Word.
"Why didn't you cut and paste it into Word when you found it?"
"Cut and what?"
This guy has 160 IQ. He's a genius. He uses his computer as a tool. It is something he uses to do some things. He doesn't care about Linux, or Outlook or any of that.
I've talked to him on a number of occasions about viruses. He just got NYB! NYB is about 10 years old. It is a boot sector virus. Took a disk and shoved it into his machine...
Do you think training him will make any difference?
I think there are a lot more of him out there than us. I think lot's of people use a computer to "Get the mail" "Go on AOL" "Write a paper"
In any event it would be much easier to take his disks and block his access than it would ever be to train this guy.
Again let me stress this, he's not stupid he just doesn't care about all the "stuff' that goes on with a computer. He just wants to use it.
This
Several people have commented that the internet is a must for people with anything beyond automaton-style jobs. This simply is not true. The list of sites that I for ligitimate work related activities contains a few scholarly journals, http://mathworld.worlfram.com/, and maybe a few other sites. For most people (i.e. not people payed to develop/troubleshoot techncal products), a list of allowed sites will be sufficient except for maybe a few times a year, and then one can call Fred in the IT department to look it up for him.
Opinions are not Informative, though they may be Insightful or Interesting.
I really wish the slashdot editors and content posters would take a basic, high school level journalism class. It is not a reporter's job to pass judgement; he should simply state the facts and allow the reader to draw his own conclusions. I for one will not even consider paying for a subscription until Slashdot developes a modicum of journalistic integrity.
Opinions are not Informative, though they may be Insightful or Interesting.
A lot of very bright people have been caught in this trap, the most common outcome is that your 'personal, hobby project' becomes the intellectual property of your employer.
When I applied at Motorola, part of the application asked that you detail every potentially valuable idea you had ever had on your personal time, with the understanding that any other idea you came up with from that point on would be the property of Motorola.
(No, I didn't accept the job.)
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
I work for one of the largest insurance companies in the world and I can tell you first hand this is how things are going.
Our tech department has to basically "steal" firewall access from other departments just to find out about hot fixes for win 2000, win XP, and old bugs in NT 4.
We have no internet access, our email is monitored very closely, and we are basically hounded over all day.
This is because the insurance company has only about 10 actual employees, the other 70 are temps who are hired because we are cheaper, have less liability and are easily disposed of.
The company is super paranoid about us stealing data, yet the nimrods leave us with floppy drives and FREE FLOPPY disks.
They should get a clue, all this does is slow us down and make it harder to find fixes for common bugs that we need to troubleshoot all day.
If we wanted to steal, we'd just bring floppies in. And of all the people to trust about not downloading stupid viruses, the techs should be number one, not the users that we fix all day.
So when your competitors are kicking your ass because they have free access to information and their morale is higher, you'll reap the benefits.
Floozer
Look, the company you work at owns the hardware/computers there -- not you. You don't have the right to use their resources as you please.
While I think they shouldn't have the right to snoop on your private documents or e-mails just because you're in their building, that doesn't mean they can't restrict certain types of uses.
A wise company has a distributed system, whereby users login with different usernames/passwords for "leisure activity" and for "work activity". The company should separate the "leisure" and "work" logins and files separately, on separate hard-drives.
A good idea is to give unrestricted access on the "leisure" system, but allocate less resources to them. There's no reason why they need to be operating at 2GHz with 1GB RAM for leisure. Btw, sorry, the workplace is not for playing Quake or Descent 3.
Furthermore, privacy policies should be different on the leisure and work accounts/systems. There should be no privacy on your "work" account, but only on your "leisure" account. The company should also assign different e-mails for "leisure" and "work" accounts for each person; if you want privacy, you'll only use your "business" e-mail for work.
Though an individual's activities would not be monitored on the "leisure" system, the time spent on the "leisure" and "work" accounts would be monitored and compared; obviously, companies don't want to keep someone on the paycheck who spends 4 out of 8 hours a day on leisure.
The key thing here is for employees to realize that they don't have the RIGHT to use their company's resources for their own personal matters.
It, however, is also not acceptable for companies to go back on previously agreed-upon privacy rules in regards to their employees. Companies also shouldn't go on a power trip, as that is likely to alienate employees.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Er, stop me if I am wrong but after reading carefully the article, it appears that the proponents of this new wave are software virus companies. So my question is : "if there is no more danger for virus on the corporate systems by blocking people from download on the fast pipes, will these same virus companies be able to survive just by selling to individuals on their after hours home systems? Aren't they realizing that they are killing their golden goose?"
If your company starts adopting this policy, then it's one good reason for you to start working from 9am till 5pm every day. I don't think that they would prefer that to your current 14 hours that you regularely put on the job, even if your pcshows the slashdot web page every once in a while.
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
Sure we have access to commonplace sites like cnn.com, espn.com, and the like, but this is a very, very touchy situation. Traffic is monitored and regularly audited. The only way you know whether or not a site is restricted is by clicking a link and hoping to god you do see the dreaded WARNING!!! YOU HAVE VIOLATED COMPANY POLICY BY ENTERING THIS SITE! banner. Hell, I once got wacked by our firewall for a URL that happened to have "sex" in it. (ex. www.transexpress.com)
Needless to say, I rarely do much surfing during downtime at work for fear of a PHB confrontation on my internet habits.
...is that they are usually applied without restraint or thought by pea-brained managers who don't know any better. You know, the typical "I took 2 computer classes in college and just spent a week tossing around fish at a management-training seminar" type of drone.
;-p
I recently worked at a big company where these types of rules were constantly enforced across the board, regardless of the fact that the variety of folks that work there are everything from $6/hour data entry types to programmers.
That's like saying that because my 5 year old kid can't drive, I'm not allowed to since I live in the same house.
Now, at a much smaller company, we have one guy who _always_ gets the latest viruses. The minute one of us in the place sees an email with a virus attached (which is _always_ caught by our anti-virus software), this $%#@* always manages to open it and then swears that _his_ anti-virus software, which runs the same version and updated sigs as everyone else's, didn't catch it. Now _this_ is the guy to apply a rule like this to, but don't punish everyone else.
Darn, I told myself I wasn't gonna rant on.
Couldn't stop.
Help!
I'm surprised that companies selling stuff on the Internet isn't fighting this. Online shopping (even on a break) is one of the perks of Internet access at work. You would think the Amazons and e-bays would see this as a threat to their profits.
This would be a valuable tool for employees using the net properly, as looking at where people in similar positions are going will tell you where they're finding good material.
For the rest, most would think twice about abusing the web and having 20 hours of slutgoths.com and bdsmchat.com at the head of their lists.
I'm sure many of you will agree.
:)
Working for a large phone company who shall
remain nameless (Truest of all Horizons), I had to deal with the Mattel-built firewall denying me access to sites like freshmeat.net, peacefire.org, or some IP for a tech site that used to belong to a pornographer...
The result was many screens saying "you have been caught downloading pornography/practicing terrorism/wasting company time. Internet is for BUSINESS ONLY. Upper management is being notified" and wasting a great deal of time trying to get my actual work done.
We still managed to get to CNN, Dilbert, etc.
So, if they want to make themselves feel good (self-gratification?) and make life a pain for their employees, I will take my time-wasting to the water cooler!
How many people in this economy really only work 9-5... everybody works overtime, and very few of us get paid extra, or an accurate amount of extra if it's done at all. So... 30 minutes of personal surfing for 2.5 extra hours of extra work per day seems fair to me!
I was an admin on a medium sized corporate network that used a mixture of Novell, NT, and Unix. I have to admit that virii were a large problem. No matter how much safe gaurd I would set up, how many Norton license I bought, etc ... they would find a way to sneak a virus on to a disk and ruin their whole weeks worth of work. But here is the catch; it was worth it to allow the employess access to the net. Most people brought virii in on disk on in MS Word macros, etc ... not the net. Trying to fiddle with the net on the corporate side is like telling a college student he can only read the young adult section at the library.
And honestly, if virii are overhauling your network Windows is not the solution for you. Try a BSD, Linux, Solaris, Tru64, Sco, GNU/hurd, or something that has better access controls.
This is true. One guy got "laid off" from his IT position. Not only did they walk him out quickly. All the door combinations were changed, pronto.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've asked several of the other IT people in the school, and they've found that limiting the Net usage to places that are important to the school (learning sites, news, email training) and so on helps to cut down on the computer infections. We also find that once we teach the students and faculty safe surfing habits (and not letting them stray until they've illustrated said habits), they tend to stick with the teachings.
Yes, we still get complaints that people can't get where they want to, and I feel bad having to be the bearer of bad news. I'm lucky that the people I work with now are willing to learn. Computers at work can be extremely useful, and that is why we dedicate several classes to using office applications (to give the students with disabilities employable skills) and how to avoid potential abuses such as viruses and common exploits. In any case, many of the incidents we have had are from people who had forgotten what we taught. We're humans; these things happen. Once everyone started to reach an understanding of why we do what we do, things began ranning much more smoothly.
This
"...and that a clampdown would result in a net productivity gain."
bad assumption.If a person is a "goof-off" then taking internet priviliges away will not change anything. They'll simply find some other way to do so.
I've been self-employed for years, so I don't have to deal with inane office drone policies (anymore)
Clearly you don't need to be a part of this discussion, then.
Please move along, sir.
Trolling Trolling Trolling
It could also be an ad for companies that sell E-mail scanners and other associated software.
The CEO said any checking of "non-company" email and any surfing "not work related" is grounds for firing. All the smart people have left now. (I have an interview tomorrow) They even have some lackey's sniffing the wire watching for http/pop3 traffic. They seriously think they can catch the last Unix admin.......
Of course they don't realize that my secure shell sessions are tunneling monster and slashdot back to my desktop.
I just read my email though mutt on my home mail server.
It really is sad though. They took a fun company and destroyed it. It seems to be a growing trend among Corporate America. Oh well at least I have a choice. I feel sorry for all the smaller guys/gals at the company. Companies will be sorry, all the talent will go to companies that actually care about their employees (a little).
Just my
Actually I am starting my own company, in New Zealand if the government doesn't pass the Digital Library Act. (you have to give them your info at your cost)
However if that stupid MP for Wellington Central has her way, I'll make sure the previous idiot for Wellington Central gets his seat back.
Your company would be better off if you use a firewall with a immune computer, iMacs are cheap and good for an internet cafe area.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
This is new? Hell my old company was very restrictive in the net use. Absolutely nothing non-work related. Since we were a healthcare software shop we could only visit HCFA and federal sites realted to HCFA. I once was told taht I was in major trouble for visiting cnn.com during lunch.
One of the natural reactions to the downturned economy is to remove some of the privledges that workers enjoyed through the salad years. When the labor market was tight, companies had to create a more open culture in the workplace, providing more services and benefits to the employees in order to get them in the door and convince them to continue sitting at their seats. Though unemployment has only creeped up 2 or so points, the more important problem is that the laor market isn't as fluid as it was; people are staying at their jobs longer because they're worried about finding a source of income. In this situation, the employers have the upper hand. They can demand more time from employees, who can be replaced with equally competent people who have been out of work for a while. In an employer's labor market, the employer gets to set a lot of the rules for work.
Evil corporate America wants people to stop screwing around on eBay and Hotmail instead of doing real work on company time? Someone notify Ralph Nader!
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
I can really see management loving the idea of locking people out of the net. When I came to my current employer, all the virus profiles were out of date on the clients and the servers. Sheer ineptitude no doubt.. but the place was racked by virii, and the employees had never been told to beware of what's in the mail. We were SO close to pulling the plug on the net (email was going to stay) it wasn't funny.
So, we setup Norton Anti-Virus Corp Edition, which automagically updates it's profiles nightly, and all the profiles of the clients. We installed Trend Micro's Web-Surfing-Proxy scanner, their Email Proxy Scanner.. Since then, we haven't had a single virus. If Trend Micro doesn't get it, Norton grabs it outta the outlook mailbox. Hell, sometimes Norton gets it out of the TEMP directory of the Interscan Proxy *BEFORE* it goes to the exchange server!
Now with all these controls in place, management are much more laid back about people surfing.
Of course, Trend Micro's VirusWall Web Proxy also blocks any kinda fun site, news site, porn site... oops, did I say that
It's like 1984, but we're clean..
-=-Ze End-=-
"...but only because by and large, people are lazy and will look to any excuse to avoid working."
Are they? Sounds similiar to the problem "Are people inherently good, or evil?" And the answer just as exclusive.
Or are we looking in the wrong direction to apply a fix? Most of the destruction caused by employee web-surfing is the result of launching some hell-raising Exchange virus via Outlook, which is apparently a majoy FLAW with MS software. So, should we damn our employees because we choose poorly for enterprise eMail? Or, rather, should we be looking for better options / lobbying for better (read "bug-fixed") software. It's true that productivity is not a simple deduction from hours worked...there's a whole quality-of-life factor (as it applies in the workplace) that is germane to this evaluation. And it just seems to me that, rather than immediatly salve the symptoms, we look to medicate the disease.
Yes, we surfed the net and wasted company time, but for most people, the time savings of being able to look up the phone number for the Bumfuck, Idaho branch of TD Waterhouse, or check breaking company news without having to go over to the Bloomberg machine, or do a google search to track down who bought Joe's Pickel Factory so we know what to do with the old stock certificate someone gave us, far outweighs the wasted time.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Absolutely untrue. I'm sitting here right now on a Windows box, with no IE, no Outhouse, no Windows Networking. I have Opera, Lynx, and Mozilla available for webbrowsing, and Pegasus Mail for email. Yes, a real professional cracker could probably find *some* way into my system, but it's easily more secure than some default Linux installs I've seen, and it has *NO* vulnerability to any of the exploits that have cost large amounts of money and productivity lately (Nimda, Code Red, etc. - I received all of them and was infected by none.)
I've had to setup the kind of insecure and insane systems most companies are now running, with IE and Outhouse and open shares hanging out like trails of blood attracting the sharks - but it's NOT because it's impossible to set up a reasonably secure systems using Windows boxes - it's because I've been ORDERED to setup the blamed things that way.
Frankly I'm so sick and tired of being ordered to do things in the stupidest possible way on a daily basis I've decided to find a new career. IT has become a haven for morons where having a clue means you are perceived as a threat to everyone elses job.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Why not just judge your employees based on the quality and effectiveness of the work they produce, rather than insisting on controlling every moment of their existence?
I rank this right up there with drug testing. Invasive and in the end, pointless.
If you don't give up your freedoms, then Microsoft will have to given up instead, and that would be just WRONG!
An aspect that I haven't seen brought up, however, is the productivity that comes from keeping salaried employees at work. Being able to handle personal business online and not having to take long lunches or leave early before the stores/banks/etc. close is a benefit to employees, employers and even the environment.
that being born means you will eventually die. Whatever. Studies and statistics are always scewed. Anyone who took stats in college knows this.
Unless you use your personal email accounts to subscribe to developer mailing lists such as I do. Or perhaps go to Google or various troubleshooting boards to find information on the problem you are having.
Not to mention Google is a better index to IBM's site than the lame-ass search feature on the site. I looked for something on the IBM site a few days ago and came up with some 187,000 hits, most of which were so similar as to be useless. The answer I needed turned up in the first ten hits on Google -- on IBM's site. Sheesh.
We're allowed to send 3 personal emails a week and receive 3 (all without attachments) we can surf the web for personal use for a max of 1 hour a day during breaks and cannot use chat rooms and webmail. We cannot do any ecommerce. Failing to adhere is a serious disciplinery action and permie staff and contractors can be dismissed.
That's the "official" policy but in practice, people seem to be disregarding it so far.
I can understand that companies want to protect their systems and to not lose productivity by people emailing and surfing when they should really be working. Internet access at work is a privilege and not a right and it's abuse of this right that has led to this, as some see it, "draconian" policy.
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
I'll take a 6 day work week if I know that ever 3 weeks I get 3 days off for some holiday. And 2 weeks off for vacation is actually looked at as normal.
Let them surf the net. Let them talk by the water cooler. Let them come in a few minutes late here and there. After all, we are human. Aren't we? Aren't we?
We should shut down employee cafeterias because food can bring harmful bacteria into the company and we might get sued.
--Blair
Why is this her fault?
Really. Think about this. She just did the natural, normal thing, to investigate the attachment. It's not her fault, it's the 'software engineers' at Microsoft who had the knowledge, background, and ability to have made an interface that did NOT execute an executive email attachment so easily!
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The problem is with the picking and choosing.
It's really much better just to stop all outside web access in the work environment. This way you don't have to decide which sites are "acceptable" and which aren't.
People often forget that bandwidth is a whack more expensive outside of the USA. I'm the NetGeek at a small "historically disadvantaged" (i.e. black) university in S/Africa. We're sitting on just about a T1, and seem to have about 400 staff users and a couple thousand student Net users.
A lot of the cool P2P stuff, MP3 suckers, streaming audio, etc, just isn't on -- I reckon 3 users would fire up 128Kbps streams and that would be the end of it (we're have a 480Kbps CIR from overseas).
I've bashed out some stuff that bolts onto squid so that the students get preset usage limits, and see these in the face every time they fire up a browser in the lab. It seems to be working ok, and I think its a good solution to controlling B/W abuse. I'm still worried about the content scanning (virus) issue. I can't imagine implementing any kind of "quarantine area for attachments". The academic staff send Word/Excel & a bazillion other kinds of attachments to colleagues at other universities several hundred times a day I'm sure, completely legitimately. (And the secretaries send AVIs of Fabio to all their friends...)
But, one of the PHB types in our management wants me to monitor how much time staff spend on the web. I told him I don't think this can be done reliably since people leave their browsers tuned in to sites that automagically refresh all the time -- I can see a handful of people with "WWW sessions" that run all through the night. Believe me, a couple of HoDs have asked about web usage stats as they would use these when drawing up retrenchment shortlists.
This is yet another thing which boils down to people holding to the outdated "theory x". There's many sites out there (like this one) that can explain this better than I.
Bosses: treat your employees nicely, make them enjoy work and they will enjoy working. If you treat them like slave labor, productivity will decrease.
Anyone who has never heard about these theories needs to take an intro level "business relations" class before they're put in charge of people.
Heck, even as a male, I would be very unsettled dealing with any idiot that put pr0n wallpaper on their screen.
So true! There's a huge difference between having porn on your computer for your own personal consumption and advertising it so that anyone who walks by can see! (For that matter, it would be fairly distracting to you while you were doing stuff on the machine.)
This reminds me of my dorm room freshman year, when my roommate had a nude poster on the wall on his side of the room. I had no problem with it, but when my girlfriend came over, she didn't like it. I used to stick a blank piece of paper over it with poster putty while she was over.
There's a whole host of ethical issues with porn just dealing with the *making* of it, the least you can do is not make more problems for people with your *viewing* of it.
P.S.: I love pr0n myself, don't think I'm ripping on it. Sometimes the way that some men enjoy degrading women disgusts me, though. I don't like degrading women, I prefer to admire them.
Just a shame you can't do anything with them really. If you add up the cost of what you paid, you probably could have had twice the number of PC's AND expensive filtering software.
Smokers are also less likely to get RTS injuries, because the stop typing every hour and a half or so to go have a smoke.
Smokers also save money on the company retirement plans and health insurance policies, because smokers tend to die younger and quicker (heart attacks and lung cancer are much cheaper ways to die than slower diseases).
Bosses who take frequent smoke-breaks are much less likely to be hard-assed about you going to Starbucks every morning at 10:30.
Conclusion: I don't smoke, but would never discourage others in my office from smoking. It is mostly to my advantage that they continue.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
...I'm reading this from work
All employees should be chained to their desks from 8 to 11:30 a.m. and from 12:30 to 5 p.m. Of course this missing hour is for lunch, but they must know that being a minute late will result in the loss of their position.
Drinking coffee will also be prohibited as the act of lifting a coffee cup to one's mouth many times a day can be a cumulative waste of time. All those sips added up across the company means 30 lost man-hours per day.
Restroom breaks will be allowed at 9 a.m. for those who forgot to go before they arrived and at 2 p.m. for the after-lunch necessities. These are timed perfectly to minimize loss of time as employees may use the restroom DURING their lunch hour.
Furthermore, while at work you consent to anything the company or any of its management proposes. This includes indescriminate, spur-of-the-moment (forgive the CowboyNeal pun) demands for anal sex. After all, when you are at work you must give of yourself.
Any complaints about these rules means that the employee is not interested in the company's well being, and as such employees consent to have their little toenails removed with a pair of needle-nose Vice Grips as stated in the work contract.
AFTER ALL YOU ARE GETTING PAID -- IT'S NOT YOUR TIME.
Be sure to remove all floppy drives, too, so the secretaries won't have their friends email them the latest joke .exe's on disk.
OH, YEAH, and also remove the doors from the bathroom stalls while your at it so you can see what the employees are doing at all times.
Im surprised anyone still has it. Here in australia we pay for bandwidth used and we monitor our usage carefully, we dont dictate we simply provide guidelines (which are international for our company) and people ar expected not to go outside them. We do scan our proxy logs for certain keywords and trust me get caught looking at porn its instant dismissal - no questions.
/. who whine about liberties and freedom are missing the point - its work, we pay you for a job and we pay for the resources you use and the computer you use them on - if you dont like it then find another job, internet is NOT a right.
.mov, .mpeg, .mp3, .wav, .vbs, .js and a lot of others - we spend a lot of time securing and managing our systems and theres no work reason for any of the above products (we would block jpegs as well but they are sometimes (our work study indicates only about 30% of the time) work related.
None of my staff can bypass it as the scan results go directly to Human resources and i support it - they have no reason to be doing anything like that.
Now this might seem a bit extreme but thertes good reasons why i agree.
1. We encourage our staff to use the Net responsibly and for legitimate research and work purposes, we dont mind reading a newspaper, looking at the sports results or catching up with a hobby during their breaks.
2. We expect them to have the good sense to know what isnt appopriate and they sign a legal agreement noting they understand the conditions and the consequences of their actions BEFORE they get their login and passwords to the system.
3. its work - not home
The people on
PS we dont allow newsgroups, ICQ, IRC or Instant Messengers and we block FTP for all expect IT users - our support calls for people who have downloaded software have gone thru the floor and as its also a breach to do that people dont try it anyway.
Why did we do this?
our internet bills went thru the roof thats why and we looked at the traffic - guess what ? Porn sites, movie sites, tucows, game sites etc.
2 staff sacked for breaches and now its a whole different workplace.
I have zero tolerance for whiners, in a previous management role i was the one who had to deal with kiddie porn found on a computer by one of my support guys when he was fixing it (Aust gove so i had to call the police etc) and it was the most disgusting thing i have ever seen. Look at porn on my network get your balls lopped - what you do at home is your business and i like naked chicks as much as the next guy but i dont see it as appropriate in any circumstance for work.
PS and for those of you who think iam a nazi we also filter mail and block
Internet access is not a right at work, its a company provided privelege
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
Sounds bloody familiar. Like my last employer. The control freaks at tech support even had the gall to forbid installing ANY drivers and/or patches into the NT machines. So I have a BSOD 3 times a day and I lose at least half-n-hour of work every time? Tough luck!
.net access was thru a http proxy.. There was ONE PC with telnet access and ssh. So I used that to access my linux box remotely. Notice I said telnet access. They wanted to monitor whatever it was you used the damn thing for.
I finally got terminally ticked off at them and updated every driver for every device in my box. Not one crash afterwards.
And the only
Oh, and they decided encrypting email with confidential docs might be a good idea. After one of our clients walked after some of their docs had leaked.
Unless you installed a 3rd party tcp stack, it's very difficult to be certain all elements of "windows networking" is gone.
Umm I think by "windows networking" he meant SMB, which is called "Windows Networking" over at M$FT. And it's not difficult at all to get rid of it, you just have to be willing to hit OK when Windows comes up with a misleading and overblown warning message.
A close relative of mine works at the SBC corporate headquarters where they just changed their policy up a bit. In the past they were not allowed to surf the web at all or do personal email stuff. Now they can.
The article did not mention one company that was considering doing what it was suggesting...makes me think it was just an add for the firewall and filter makers. At least I was able to come up with one example contrary to their "news".
Give me a break with your "virii". As if it wasn't bad enough using the word instead of "viruses", now you feel you've got to use it in the singular too. If you're so determined to speak geek just call the fucking things "viren" and get it over with.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
The 18yo masquerading industry, otherwise known as the FBI ...
Bob the amazing AC
We use Websense as well and I have the same problem - Websense blocks sites I want to get to (though interestingly not Slashdot!). However it doesn't block the various anonymising services so subscribe to one of these and you can get unrestricted access to the Web.
On email almost all attachments except Word Documents and PDFs are blocked which limit both personal and business use.
We are allowed 'reasonable' personal use of both Web and email thought I have never seen a definition of what that is, and never heard of anyone being picked up for 'unreasonable use'
Basically I couldn't do my job (IT Project Manager) without access to the Web and email and I'm sure that applies to lots of people out there. I have no real problem with our set up apart from Websenses apparently random blocking of sites, e.g www.laplink.com is blocked - do they think it has something to do with lapdancing!
I am amazed by companies that offer completely unrestricted web access - seems to me to be asking for trouble.
"I deny nothing, but doubt everything." Lord Byron
...if you think that people wont waste time with their access cut off.
Id venture to say that most here have never worked in a non-coputerized environment...you know in the dark ages.
Believe it or not, people worked without computers, companies made money and employees
DIDNT work every minute of their working day.
I dont even get your secretary analogy.
So what? You want to block her access because of poorly written software? Why give it to her in the first place?
She either needs it or doesnt, this half-pregnant stance doesnt make any sense.
Your bandwidth excuse is lame. Most IT companies have some kind of attachment protocol.
Ours is simple...dont become a problem or we'll cut you off. The 65k jpg or greeting card isnt a problem. Its the 6.5meg mp3 that is.
Oh yeah...know what? We also allow people to use the phone. How much of that do you think is work related?
The artciel describes micromanagement at its best.
These are probably the same companies which decided that casual fridays were detrimental to work output (all those gang colors) or that flex time leads to anarchy.
Know what our drug policies are? Dont let it affect your performance on monday morning.
Yup, no piss tests. How about that?
A company that trusts its employees.
We offer counseling and support at work but the bosses are libertarians who believe that unless your job has been affected, you dont have to prove your innocence.
Its refreshing in this urine-soaked job market.
That's why we had to hire extra people in the human resources department: every time we hire, they get swamped with CV's from people that want to work here.
Work doesnt have to be a jail.
The smart businessmen know that.
The poseurs in suits dont.
zack
A decision today to choke access to the 'net might be setting up management for a huge debacle in years to come.
Imagine, in 3 or 4 years, when a fresh group of entry level employees arrive (job function will not matter at this point.) Manager asks new employee, tell me why X is happening. New employee doesn't know much about X so he/she wants to do a little research first. In their HS/college days, the research was done on the net, so new employee opens up the browser and attempts to access a search engine. Only an error is returned, citing restricted 'net access. So the new employee, after having to ask around a bit, finds out that you must get approval to have any sort of access. Now the fresh-out-of-school employee has to call IT to find out the procedure. He/she then must get various signatures from HR, management, and whoever else. That HR person is on vacation, so forget about getting approval this week. Later on in the day, eager to find out how his/her new employee is doing, the manager asks about the answer. Now the new employee is screwed, on their first day.
Moral of the story? The next generation of employees is being brought up in an environment where knowledge is known to be easily available on the 'net. Due to this, they begin to rely on this means of learning more. Web classes are now tought in most colleges, many secondary schools, and some primary schools. 2nd and 3rd graders look things up for homework asignments on the web. Students learn to rely on the web to help them learn and solve problems. But when they get to work, they won't be able to do so and will be stuck on their first days.
Don't beleive it? You should. There is absolutly no way I could preform at my best without the web. It allows me to find out anything I might need to know in order to be an effective problem solver (a major part of my job.) I started using the 'net to help myself learn around '93-'94, at the beginning of HS, when it [the 'net] was in its infancy. Imagine someone who began using it yesterday, or today, as a secondary school kid.
Although the security problems merrit much concern (hey- I'm in IT too!), a simple end to unrestricted 'net is a very short-sighted solution. And I'm not even mentioning all the other aforementioned reasons 'net access is inherently good.
BTW, on a personal note, the day I am stripped of 'net access is the day I stip my employer of any thought time spent on company business off company time.
I never though about it that way, but as a smoker, I must completely agree with your assesment. Now that I reconsider my time at the last large corp I worked at, it makes too much sense. Very insightful post.
I have implemented restricted internet access BY DEFAULT at any site I have connected to the net.
Ping : No Fscking Way
Outside DNS : LMAO
AIM/IRC/ICQ etc : You must be fscking joking.
Direct HTTP Access : Go and boil your head
You get proxied and filtered HTTP access and thats it. Active content again is blocked. Trying to bypass it through SSL tunnels/whatever is a mandatory P45.
Fsck with my perimeter, the IDS spread randomly throughout will see what you are doing. Again you will be joining the ranks of the unemployed.
All inbound/outbound SMTP AV checked & filtered with active content blocked and held, through 2 tiers of mail servers running complimentary products.
Access to 'everyone' in the mail directory is restricted to supervisor use only.
Group security policy makes amateur gyneacology over HTTP a sacking offence.
Nothing new there. Wake up Yanks, the way we do things in Europe is a tad different from over there.
Curmudgeon
I'd take the time to contact a lawyer and ask about a wrongful termination suit. Perhaps there was a clause in your contract prohibiting this, but my gut feeling is that this was a bit less than legal. I think it would be worth your time and money to consult a lawyer about it.
Better get rid of all these distracting phones and reference manuals too. Brick up the windows, total sensory deprivation will provide a huge increase in productivity and employee moral.
...why won't they look at the source of the problem and ban Outlook. Or, even better, Windows?
And if they are so indoctrinated with "we-need-Windows-for-our-business" stuff, why not just block all email attachments (and learn to communicate in text)?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
This is complete bull, if the big corp boys would invest more in proactive virus detection and keep theire systems patched and secure they would already eliminate 95% of the risk, the remaining 5% could be reduced to 1% with proper education and notification the last 1% is usually to either sabotage or pure idiocy.
;-)
I use the internet for personal use at work 3 times a day on MY break on MY time. The effect on productivity is null and I am willing to bet the the smokers who run to the dedicated smoking room or outside probabaly use more time per day than my own net breaks.
This story is all FUD if you ask me and any manger dumb enough to buy in to it should be fire on the spot.
My 2 cents
I would remind all of you that it is work; playtime is for home. Most firms are right in asserting that IRC, personal email, recreational browsing, etc are verboten in the workplace. Why are they paying bandwidth fees and your salary for you to goof off? If you want to play all day go back to kindergarten.
And besides, what the hell kind of Techies are you that you can't get around shit like this and are even CONCERNED About it? SSH Tunnel to a remote box and do all your stuff through there. Or employ any number of things. If it came down to them restricting our access to the outside world (ssh, web) at all it would be another issue - we'd be unable to do the development testing and research we needed. But for now it's just locking down stuff like email and web usage. I don't see a big deal here.
I need to have SSH open in order to support and work at our customers. And as long I have SSH and HTTP I am happy. It's amazing what you can pipe through these ports. ;-)
So what you're suggesting is that "senior management," the same people who have thus far had the insight to fund and open up internet access to employees with no statutory requirement to do so, the same people who have with few exceptions respected the email privacy of their employees even though they don't have to, that these are the same people who will now be scared off by somebody who "alerts" them to risks?
Who's the fool?
<bart
Not everyone will be willing to do this of course, but I got around our company's strict proxy server (that only allowed http over port 80 and ftp over port 21) by using Remotely Anywhere in HTTP tunneling mode. I am not sure if there are other products that will do this, but I tried 3 or 4 others before I found one that worked.
It's attitudes like this that convince me daily that we need a stronger labour movement in technical industries.
I am continually amazed at the attitudes out of people here at Slashdot. On the one hand, we've got all this fire and fury for free software -- a concept which seeks to dissolve the idea of intellectual property, for reasons which apply to all property -- yet we have, on the other, people who seem set that it's OK to sell yourself to your boss, for 8 hours or 10 hours or whatever... and that during that time, only he -- and his privileged managers -- have a right to tell you what to do while you're at work.
I'm not saying we've got a "right to surf the Internet at work." That's trivial. Still, I'm shocked by the prevailent argument that we don't have a right to complain, or to have a democratic say in the policies that govern us at work.
It's insane. I would've figured there'd be more self-respect out of this bunch...
BRx.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
Let's say "Mobile", "GSM", "PDA", "Wireless". In the near future, the scope for cyber-skiiving increases dramatically.
They can't stop you using these tools, if they're your own. (OK, they can ban them, but you just go to the restroom, a quiet meeting room, or whatever).
What'll be next, banning non-company PDAs and mobile phones?
If you trust your workforce, then let 'em do what they want (but educate them about potential risks and remind them that they are there to work now and again!). If you don't trust your workforce, the company has problems, and rules won't change that.
Money implies poverty (Ian M. Banks)
It would be nice to see some US vs EU policies (maybe even edu vs cc polices, too) on the issue of "Acceptable Internet Usage" policies.
Like a majority of those who commented, I rely on the web, ftp, and ssh at the office. However, we place no restrictions on our users - except one: back up important data to the file server, because when their system crashes, we're just going to ghost it.
The only issues we have had at the office have been with a younger employee amazed by two things: bandwidth and porn. Go figure.
Is the article FUD? IMHO, yes. Use the resource responsibily, just like anything else.
I also wonder if similar objections/restrictions took place when the telephone, fax, pager, cellphone, pda, etc, etc came to be common place in the work environment.
Ever Onward, Forward Bound
What really is scary, though, is that it never occurred to these people to turn off Outlook. It's a given fact of life that every computer runs Windows, Outlook, Word and IE. Other software simply does not exist. Linux on the desktop my ass...
>|<*:=
As some one who does not smoke, but who sees his colleagues head out for about 5 minutes an hour to take a shot of niccotine, I see my web browsing as my equivalent, epsecially as it helps me relax, much in the same way a cigarette does for a smoker, but hopefully without the high addiciton factor.
:-)
Perhaps if web access were to be stopped I'd be allowed to leave work a half hour early
Some may actually be stupid enough to lose all of the benefits of the internet in the workspace due to complete paranoia over security risks, but I don't think the majority will allow it to happen.
I regularly save the company money by the information provided to me by the internet. I download language updates, CPAN modules, bug fixes, HOWTOs. There is a wealth of information and tools available for programmers. Usenet alone is a place where others can help me solve complex language problems. It would cost millions to cut us off now.
Besides, as someone said, there are a ton of security fixes for Windows. Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, the list goes on.
Shutting down an internet connection because Microsoft knows nothing about security? Just dump Microsoft you twits.
Navarre
From the article:
The biggest developments are around email prevention, experts say. Elaborate content filtering software, which can run upwards of $30,000 to install, can block all but the tamest incoming emails, and most attachments, said Trend Micro's Genes.
...
But instituting these new security measures can be a costly and labor-intensive investment, experts say, likely discouraging firms with meager IT budgets from upgrading beyond the status quo. "It's a question of resources," said a spokeswoman at UK-based Sophos Anti-Virus. "If you have one or two guys implementing IT at your organization, it's not going to make much sense."
What a crock... I am a network administrator (and basically the ONLY IT employee) for a small company of about 50 people and using some procmail scripts on our FreeBSD mail server, have been able to accomplish this with probably about 3 hours total of set up time. For those interested, here's a URL to a FREE solution to blocking e-mail attachments based on extensions, filenames, and even content (it can scan for Office document macros). Procmail Security
Since I've been there, we've had absolutely ZERO e-mail based viruses/worms that penetrated the desktop through our mail server (One did get through but that was through an executive's AOL account...)
So far, most employees have been very cooperative towards the policy and are grateful that they don't have to be so worried when they read about e-mail viruses going around because the server automatically mangles or quarantines viruses that match the ruleset we implemented.
For those who are just tuning in, the 'bozos' in question are from Trend Micro. You remember those small timers who make second-grade antiviral software at Antivirus.com. The same poor fools who give away OEM copies of their software to motherboard makers, to bundle onto that driver disc you never used.
They are simply doing these absurd announcements to scare people into believing that virii will hail upon the end of the world. The result of such scare might lead foolish IT managers into buying enterprise versions of their antiviral software, because the thought of unplugging from the internet to avoid virii is too disturbing.
Imagine the weather channel being bought by an umbrella manufacturer; then every day they announce pouring rain just to coax people into buying umbrellas out of panic. Same thing is happening here.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
They are having a tough time these days :-)
That said, I'd have to agree that quite a few "capitalists" that actually run companies don't regard the value of labor as high as they probably should.
An AC posted this at Score 0, but it is very insightful:
"I've been self-employed for years, so I don't have to deal with inane office drone policies (anymore)
Clearly you don't need to be a part of this discussion, then.
Please move along, sir."
It has nothing to do with being safe, phony or sterile. In a professional environment where you have all sorts of people, everybody has to make some compromises. Since you're self-employed, you're free to do what you want in your place of business; but for a large community of employees it's a different context.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Heh, I'll carry on using the net at work for as long as I wa#*
Work for smaller companies or for the software development teams in a larger corp. Smaller companies tend to be MUCH less draconian (typically because you also wear the admin hat; there is no IT department, per se) and it's kind of hard to build a case for killing the lifeblood of a software development team even in big corps - spam blocking, porn blocking, virus blocking, etc., all make sense in the big picture - but just shutting it down? For programmers, that's like tying one arm behind your back and then saying, "okay, get back to work, you! Why aren't you typing faster?!"
I also imagine that the "authorized personnel" in the article will tend to be executives, upper management, their favorite little cute secretaries, etc...in other words, politically-based, not based on any real need.
Boss: A good manager hires people who are smarter than he is.
Eemployees: So... your boss is dumber than you?
Employees: And your boss's boss is dumber yet?
Employees: According to your theory, our CEO is the dumbest person in the company.
Employees: Unless you are all bad managers.
Employees: Truely we are doomed either way.
Boss: This concludes the motivational part of the meeting.
What about when you need some tips or source snippets from your favourite online resource. Its funny to think that if this happens to software development companies the development time will go up and everyone will need more books. The unrestricted net is the ULTIMATE research tool and some corporate fucker wants to take that away? For this section of this industry the reverse effect will be achieved!
I actually started smoking due to the fact that I was in an office with smokers only. They always went to the kitchen to get a puff, and I was left there. So I started going to take a smoke with them. Actually smoke-breaks are very enjoyable breaks :-)
Now back at the office (bodyshop for IT related stuff) I go out and smoke with the Managment types. You get pretty interesting viewpoints about the company and what goes on.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
You know what, this guy has hit the nail right on the head. Well said!!!
In related news, scores on Tetris and up over 30% worldwide .....
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
If XML becomes the de-facto standard for document content and styling, proprietary formats (e.g., Word) will no longer be an issue re: security, and neither will their consequent e-mail attachments.
"One empirical experiment is worth a thousand expert opinions." -Bill Nye
I can't believe people here actually think the policies stated in that article are BAD. I mean, anyone with a few weeks experience in a decent sized corporate IT environment can tell you these kinds of rules are needed to keep order on the network.
Yes, we have virus scanning software that scans all email, desktops, and user shares, but that still does not mean viruses do not get in. Users like to check their 'free' email on Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, and other places and bring many in around our normal system.
People complain filtering content in the workplace seems draconian, but I see no reason users need to be viewing 'hot, young, fill-in-the-blank' websites anyway. In fact, in some states, like in Virginia, it is illegal to view adult content on state owned computers. As a former employee of the state, I saw 14 people fired in a one year period for surfing adult sites. You first get a warning and they start monitoring all http traffic from your box. Next your gone. People still thought they could get away with it.
As far as the other so called harsh draconian measures, think about this - most users are not techno-savvy. It's not a Microsoft issue, it's a person issue. Some people hate computers, they hate to use them, and they break them often. All software crashes as some point or another. Reviewing our helpdesk tracking software I can point out many Mac's and UNIX issues that they have had to solve as well as microsoft issues.
Think about this - do you wear a tie to work? Why? It's corporate policy. Do you work better with a tie on? Why don't we just ban tie's because wearing them seems useless. Corporate polices are there for a reason. Apperance, preformance, and substinance counts. It's what seperates the Fortune 100 from the rest of the pack. Polices like the ones discussed further this mentality. If you don't agree, fine. Work for a small more personalize company, but don't expect to be on the cover of Forbes anytime soon.
Bottom line, most users not in IT are computer ignorant. They call up and ask what their password is, after they create it themselves. Should we blame the companies that make the software? Should we blame measures put forth to stop people from hurting themselves? Why should we try and place blame on anyone? This is more of a western philosophy. In eastern thinking, people focus on the problem and fixing it, not on placing blame on a group or individual.
An old tech guy I used to work with summed up this argument pretty well in something he said to me about the shipping department in a company I used to work for. The department had multiple new calls to the helpdesk every week from these guys. Many times, the guys down there (large, burly, bearded men) would break their boxen so bad they would have to be replaced. We couldn't even figure out how they broke some of this stuff, but they did, constantly. I asked about it one day and he said to me:
"The shippping department? Well...I'll put it this way, you could leave three cannonballs down there on Monday, and by Wednesday, they will have broken two of them and lost the third one."
Sometimes you have to save users from themselves.
{/rant}
-Sternn
I'm all for it. Maybe companies will begin to be productive again, and Microsoft will have to find some other means to maintain their stranglehold on the monolithic legacy desktop computing environment instead of trying to push all of the user's data out to the web into some Microsoft-controlled, centralized environment.
I just searched through and didn't find one mention
of temps, so I thought I would throw them into the
mix. Anyone here who has temped or hell, in today's
sh!tstorm of an economy might still be temping, knows the
salvation of the web. Hell even aim, though it is a bloodsucking
leach that leaves you cowering in the corner still keeps you fingering
the light, knowing that you aren't completely a wasteproduct of the economy.
In any event, for temps, and no it isn't a right,
but on the same level is the right to work a "right?"
um, well yeah according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 23,
Everyone has the right to work, to
free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions
of work and to protection against unemployment.
Sidesteping the rant that is evolving on
weather or not temp is beneath the acceptable level of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights you have to
understand that as a temp, most places, there is a
smidgeon of work to do, that a person of average
intelligence, and I see a lot of temps that are
college grads, but in the "Liberal Arts," the work
can be done in two hours.
What happens next?
Do you report to the boss, tell her you are done,
what else can I do? Well, that is a wildcard, in
some cases temps are keeping the seat warm for
someone to come in to take the job, and if they don't
have a policy about getting their workers from temp
agencies (some places do) then you might show that you
are proactive and can get the job done. However, in
many of the other places, there really isn't that much
work to be done, especially for the type of work that
they would give a temp. Once you finish that work, you
are out. Rent is due, bills have to be paid, and yo'
baby momma is kicking up drama. Well I don't know about
the last part, but without the web to bide time, to at
least offer the chance to put on a strained countenance
when the boss walks by, so maybe she thinks, "hunh he is
really pondering that spreadsheet," when in reality you
are thinking "how in the fck does jon katz get paid to make observations?"
No surfing the web may not be a "Right,"
but i would argue it helps keep people who otherwise would be,
well who knows, maybe out of work, on the dole, welfare,
whatever, in the office, working, just not all the time.
..if your company has any business-related email
access outside the company LAN. The last 6+ viruses that hit my desk were forwards from employees, who got them from clients/contractors/other employees.
Also, most of the engineers at my work need web access to get tools and support from vendors, and IT is too slow to make it dynamic, so we'd have general access anyway....
Yes!!! If I'm focused on a high priority project, I don't have time to post on /. In fact I have no problem working thru my breaks, lunch, and OT. However, if work is slower, or bogged down, or waiting on someone else, that's when I browse/post. Prior to having Web access, I'd go shoot the bull with a co-worker, and I guarantee that if he was also having a slow day, I could easily blow MORE than 2 hours there.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
get a clue, we are all expected to be robots with no other human value whatsoever, we are expendable therefore we can be placed in any work environment management decides upon ..... unless we start doing something about it soon, I dont want to even dream about what kind of work environment my kids will have to deal with!!!! :(
.... MAKE LIFE BETTER, we are human!
....
we all need to learn from all these policies and layoffs
we spend the MAJORITY of our lives at WORK, therefore we should EXPECT work to be at least a pleaseant place to be
and please dont say that people can go out and work elsewhere, well temp agencies and layoffs negate that mostly, but dont forget that the shit is hitting the fan hehe, and it splattered everywhere!
"Corporate inhumanity" is a fact of life, it's called capitalism. If you don't have to deal with it, more power to you, but the rest of us do.
As for George Carlin, he's an irritating commie pinko anyhow :-)
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
In 1992 I finally convinced management at Corel to let me hook them up to the Internet. How did I do it? By telling them that a lot of the bright engineers they were hiring fresh from university were going to expect it, and if they didn't have it those people might seek placement elsewhere.
:-)
Management has to realize that keeping their engineers both productive and happy (through unrestricted access to Internet resources) is a {good thing} and will be beneficial to their bottom line. You just need to let them know that fact in your own subtle hacker way
I'm currently working on getting approval from my current management for table tennis equipment...
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
...the people proposing this aren't the companies concerned about security, but rather people with a vested interest in selling you a "solution" to your "problem".
If they were interested in security, they'd be suggesting much less agressive reactive measures (even with such draconian measures, something will slip through and present you with the same woes as without them...) and suggesting more proactive ones.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
5t00p1D phi1T3r5 c4n'7 s70P U5!
you're at work... do you know what you're supposed to be doing at work.. that's right; work!
n g". All too often do I get done with doing some mundane task - nescesitated by ignorant users to go 'walk the floor' (I work for a newspaper) to find users gleefully playing on yahoo games or candystand.com - why is this right?
You're using their bandwitdh - their computers - and their time; all while wasting their money. I'm a system administrator and If I could I would institute this policy quicker than you can say "just_a_minute_while_i_finish_this_game_of_mah-jo
Else they could loose their source of income, bored techies browsing slashdot at work.
The problem is the MicroCRAP software that they are using. Get rid of Exchange and Outlook.
Use a unix based mail hub, prefilter the email
before you drop it into a email box. Gee!
The problem is you have these Coporate SysAdmins
that think they know what they are doing.
Write your own filters. It's not hard. Hire people who use there minds and don't rely on shrink wrapped software.
I surf your hard drive from my desk looking for games to delete (actually lock you out so you can see it, but can't run or delete it). I walk through the rows of cubes looking for people playing Tetris, SMB, and yes even Solitaire is outlawed. I watch the web logs for suspect sites, and then I set up surveillance. Hmmm, looks like user jdreger is writing an email to his friend about how silly Martha's being... We can't have that. Oh lookie here, and hes getting around the firewall with a proxy site. He's fired. Make an example of him so the others will comply.
At my work I am one of these creatures. I used to be one of the users, and did the same things they did. I feel bad about selling out sometimes, but my boss wants to ensure 100% efficiency on the part of the technicians. And a technician playing games or writing email or surfing the web isn't making money. And that technician not making us money may be why I get laid off next year. It's a horrible fascist regime we run at my work. No wonder we have such a high turnover rate.
Lousy facepalm.
Yes, but... your examples (as well as others in this thread) all differ significantly from unrestricted Internet access: The threats they pose impact only the individual employee and/or his small work group. Spend all day making phone calls or flipping through a magazine, and you're only letting down your team, or helping your boss miss his deadlines -- that's a small problem.
If, on the other hand, someone decides that work is a good place to get all his MP3s, or check his personal email, or or or in the name of "taking a break," etc, he may represent a threat to the entire company's network, or, at least, impact to however slight a degree the company's shared Internet connection.
But, again, them's just my $0.02, and most certainly not worth even that.
On some Air Force bases, one is not permitted to access yahoo, snotmail, outside pop servers, etc, while on duty and with military computers. They have proxy servers that attempt to restrict access to such sites. It also attempts to block access to "questionable" websites (any site with the word "sex" in it, even if it is a biology/scientific site, gets blocked - there are a lot of other sites that sporadically suprize me with a message about not being authorized to access this site and my ip has been logged). Nonetheless, I STILL access my outside pop mail servers - I simply find the chink in the proxy armor and get my mail anyway. Usually, the same tricks I use to get to my mail also works for other incorrectly blocked sites (with a "bad" keyword associated with its URL).
You are not supposed to connect any computer to the network that isn't registered and thus authorized either (no personal laptops allowed without special permission). I am able to connect anyway and make it appear that my laptop is my authorized desktop machine. Of course, I am in a somewhat privaledged position - being the supervisor of an IT subgroup on the base - and I know how the system works, what is techinically not allowed and knowing how to foil most of the blocks. It is doable to get around restrictions on accessing personal email, etc. It just might take a certain amount of tinkering and experimentation.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
This is going to sound stupid, but how do I get my mom to see port 3333 instead of 21? I've seen the ipchains directive to do things on my end, but I have not figured out the other side. Most family members will only use a browser to look at things, sad but true. What does is it look like on say IE or Mozilla? ftp://65.x.xxx.x -what?
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
No employee has the right to surf or dick around on their computer. They might have the *privilege*, but this is entirely at the discretion of the company and *not* the employee. The company can set any fucking rule it pleases with respect to their equipment. If the employee doesn't like the fact that he can't screw around on company time anymore, then it's time to fire this sorry shit-sack of a loser and force him to get a *real* job in the *real* world. Let the whining little pusbags work on the line for awhile and see what they think of company-sponsored internet access *then*.
Christ, but look at the number of fuckwit morons who jump out of the woodwork to defend their 'rights' to mess around on company time with one lame excuse after another. Yeah, you, you pathetic little loser scumbag, the guy who sits in his office downloading Natalie Portman pics while reading slashdot when he should be doing some actual work. If you don't like company policy then start your own damned company.
Oh, but wait - that would be *work*, right? And we've already established that the whiners don't think they need to put in 8 hours on somebody else's dime; god knows they won't put the effort required for this endeavor. It might cut into their Portman or porn or slashdot time....
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
- employee activities cause functional problems at work
- employee activities cause legal problems at work
- people who gripe about using company resources for personal use
- people who gripe about (possibly) losing company resources for personal use
I'd like to comment on each of these.
I can think of a few employee activities which have nothing to do with the Internet which can be defined as disruptive behaviour. Using a hands-free phone in an open cubicle with the volume turned WAY up; plugging in a device (like a coffee maker) into an overloaded circuit; propping open a "secure" door to permit a cooling breeze (thus allowing anyone to walk in). Never mind that someone could show up to work under the influence, or with body odour, etc. Or showing up with a miserable cold/flu/whatever because he dare not take any time off work! Horrors!
- if an employee brings booze or recreational drugs into work, he could be putting the company on the legal hook; harassment is another potential problem; potentially activities that the employee does at home could end up implicating the employer, or at least drag them through court and a sea of expensive lawyers.
- Doing personal things on company time isn't a new phenomenon. Wild speculation on my part, but this could have been a problem since the abolishment of slavery, and perhaps even before then. Short of taking time off without pay (and I'm sure it'll add up to a substantial amount rather quickly), employees will still need to phone their doctor, their dentist, their kid's daycare/babysitter, their spouse, their accountant, their mechanic, their real estate agent (and lawyer), and so on. Sure, they could use a cell phone (if they have one, even assuming it works on the premises), but the obvious answer is for the employee to take 15-30 minutes to find a pay phone off-site, or simply walk/drive over to the person they wish to speak with. And if the person is busy or unavailable? Guess the employee will just have to make another visit. Maybe I'm one of the few people here who remembers what life was like before the fax machine.
I'm in agreement with those comments which suggest that a happy employee will likely work more effectively and/or longer hours. And yes, if it's not the Internet, then it's yakking on the phone with a friend (or with a headhunter) or wandering the office in search of a fresh pot of coffee or that water cooler with the perfect temperature (and obscure location), or taking extended "bio breaks", or for those folks who need it, more frequent smoking breaks. An oppressed employee is someone who will try to abuse the system the most. (Again, wild speculation on my part.) Either that, or his spirit will be broken and his motivation will be weak.
Personally, yeah, I get personal e-mail and check the web now and again. In my personal time at home, I enjoy online chatting. But when I'm at work, I get grumpy when I start to see more than just a couple of e-mails on what I would call a "fluff" subject. And it sure takes me far less time to describe certain information in an e-mail (or to forward it to a friend or relative or business associate) than it is to have someone phone me, I write it down, I hang up, I phone someone else (maybe a few other someone elses), I painstakingly give the other person(s) the details I'd written down, and so on. Heaven forbid if anyone in the chain made a transcription error!
Obviously, downloading any porn or viruses using an employer's computer/network/firewall/electricity/time is A Bad Thing, but sometimes you do a web search, you think you find what you're looking for, you click on it, and much to your chagrin, hidden links start turning your desktop into a popup porn-fest. The embarassment factor speaks for itself. So what do you do when the Net Abuse Police come and give you a stern talking to?
As far as virii, sure, put a firewall in place that can scrub the Evil Virii from incoming messages. It may not be a perfect solution, but a flu shot doesn't protect the recipient from all new strains, either. And it won't stop employees from bringing in things like floppies, CD-ROMs they've burned at home, zip drives, or even that egg salad (tainted with camphylobacter) that they brought in for the team to enjoy.
As they used to say on the Firewalls mailing list many years ago, if you want a secure system, no problem: just turn it off, encase it in concrete and toss it in the ocean.
Another point to consider (which I think someone already alluded to): Unhappy employees will leave inflexible corporations for the likes of greener pastures; happy employees will help their companies build superior products which will supersede those made by the inflexible corporations.
All of this may be moot: the pendulum will swing inexorably towards wherever the benefits are perceived, and in the short term those benefits may be perceived as being rooted in extraordinarily inflexible access (if any) to the Internet.
The postman hits! The postman hits! You have mail.
Odds are if you are laid off it will have nothing to do with your websurfing but more to do with how upper management perceives your cost vs value to the company (usually as a unit). I know our company let go a number of contractors, it had nothing to do with their performance, only a need to cut costs.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Our agency's firewall blocks out slashdot ads:)
You are so right!
Just last night I was lamenting the fact that the Mac has no tools for
image editing and graphics creation like Photoshop, Illustrator, Freehand, Cored Draw or Corel Photo-Paint,
web site creation like BBEdit, GoLive or Dreamweaver,
3d graphics like Bryce, Ray Dream Designer, Maya, or Lightwave 3d,
home or professional accounting like MYOB, Quickbooks, or Quicken
life sciences research like Blast, Imagene, LifeLab, or PolyLife
web servers like Apache or WebStar
Remote access like Timbuktu or Apple Remote
audio production like Cubase, Logic, Digital Performer...
Yeah. Macs are friggin' useless!
(And don't even get me started about how Macs don't even get mainstream products like Microsoft Office or access to most open source software written for BSD!)
--
"Words are relative. They're only symbols. If we don't use ugly symbols, we won't have any ugliness."
Computers were not meant to be networked. They are for
doing desktop calculations.
Granted, certain military and academic institutions may have the need to
share large amounts of data that could not be easily shipped via US Mail,
and they may still be connected over a govermnet approved
network. However, the general public has not proved worthy of the ability
to network computers.
Look at what 5 years of public Internet has gotten
us: Melissa. ILOVEYOU. Michelangelo. Pr0n. Napster. BackOrifice. Internet
love affairs. Stalking. AOL. Columbine. Addiction. Chat-rooms.
I see no good reason to continue to allow the plebeian populace access to
this network. Therefore, as of September 30, 2002, the Internet will be
turned off. Ownership of all fiber, transmitters, cable and routing
equipment will be assigned to the Defense Department. Universities and
research institutions needing network access will apply to the Pentagon
for time-shared access on the military network.
In addition, telecommunication carriers will apply a filter to the voice
channels that will prevent analog modems from connecting over voice grade
networks. High-speed in-home delivery such as DSL or cable modems will be
allowed to only connect to read-only television distribution points under
the control of the data-provider.
All data providers will be registered
with the FCC and all content and programming will be reviewed quarterly
to ensure appropriate family and American values are being
represented. This shall include traditional print and television media as
well. These traditional data outlets could be compromised by
anti-capitalist forces and used as distribution of copyrighted or
subversive un-American work.
All data receivers, such as televisions, cable modems, DSL routers,
etc. will be registered with the FCC. No user-initiated upstream traffic
will be tolerated. However, the data-source providers may upload limited
demographic information about the data-browsing habits of their
customers. This data will be available to the FCC and other government
agencies under the Emergency Powers act of 1999. This data will be kept
confidential in and among the various federal agencies who require access
to the data.
Also, all private radio transmitters and receivers will be licensed and
inspected by the government. All HF receivers will have a blocking coil
installed to prevent their use as a high-speed data receiver. New digital
data RF relievers will have, prior to deployment to civilian markets,
reporting capabilities built in. This will allow for ease of accounting
tamper proofing of the digital data RF receivers. All HF data
transmission companies shall be under regulation by the FCC, and shall
report back all data gathered from the customer receivers.
Finally, taxes no less than $1,000 and no more than $5,000 per
data-receiver will be implemented to cover the costs of re-educating and
providing for the safety of American's data.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Cool! Someone actually hates Macs enough to mod my reply down for being overrated!
You ROCK, anonymous Microsoft employee!
--
"Words are relative. They're only symbols. If we don't use ugly symbols, we won't have any ugliness."
Fine. Take my net away, and I'll be chatting on the phone all day long. Don't they remember that's how it used to be before the 'net came along? Or take some time off to go down to the travel agency to plan my vacation. And since I can't look up my sickness symptoms on the net, I'll have to go to the doctor more often.
And what the hell, I'll go back to playing arcade games instead of net games.
At least to me, wanting to do things that are not work related is a sign of unhappiness. If There isn't enough to do or the tasks do not require thinking, reading one's personal email feels emotionally like a good alternative.
:)
When work is busy enough and interesting enough, very little time is spend on other things.
I even though of writing a little script to count how often I read my personal email from work and when the count (or frequency) gets too high, an "I resign" email is sent to the current boss. It would require some testing, though.
I have heard Mr. Hipponene speak before, and read comments from him in the tech and mainstream press, so I was very distrubed by the article and his comments. I emailed him directly yesterday and got a response regarding his article.
/ 20020318/wr_nm/tech_internet_security_dc_1&cid=582
First, My Email:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm
Mr. Hypponen,
I can only say that I am deeply disturbed at your attitude towards security. After reading your comments, and knowing that they will have some influence on lesser minded IT individuals through out the world, I stand aghast and ashamed to be a part of this industry.
Let me ask you a question: Since when does it fall on the end users to be responsible for network security? Think about that for a moment. What you are advocating, in part, is that users are responsible for network security and, since they are not capable they should not be able to utilize the power it gives them individually and as a company. This is inherently wrong.
IT staffing is responsible for building networks and securing them from internal and external threats. I put forward that the lack of sufficient experience, training, and tools is the culprit when security is breached, not the end users. End users are NEVER responsible for security... it should be their right to expect this of their IT staff to provide and ensure it.
It is analogalus to the end users being responsible for knowing every aspect of the computer and software they use no matter how small the detail at home or at work. You and I know this is not the case, no matter how we may feel when supporting end users who are not knowledgeable. The computer equipment, in this analogy, is supposed to make their lives easier and just work... not force them to take on another job that draws their focus away from their primary task.
The other arguments, centered around reduced productivity, are pure bunk in my opinion, and many differing points exist to support the view that net and email access are actually production enhancers for a variety of reasons. Indeed, for every article and study that equates net and email access by employees as counter-productive, I can find two or more that state the opposite. In my opinion, it's is a mindset and management issue... poorly managed employees will abuse IT technologies available to them at the cost of work efficiency, while happy and well managed employees will only benefit from access to these technologies and be more productive.
Companies, especially in the United States, pay a flat rate for their managed internet connection; they pay it whether it is used or not so any argument made that it costs IT dollars to give these 'privileges' to users is, again, bunk. Again, if a company cannot properly manage it's resources and staffing, they should not be in business; at no time should the blame fall on employees in a manner such as this since it is truly an IT or Management failing.
One more point on viruses. We get at least a half dozen attachment and script viruses a day in our email. They are all filtered out by an AV product on the desktop, and users are strongly cautioned on how to handle email with attachments from unsolicited sources. 95% of our email is work related, and 100% of all viruses come in work related email. I have read where, on average, only 20% of large corporate email is personal and non-work related and that less than 25% of viruses originate from non-work related email sources... either way, a properly secured network/client infrastructure and a properly informed user base should not experience problems with viruses unless the IT staff has failed, which is typically the case anyway when viruses strike.
As for my company, I have every intention of maintaining an open access system for the employees. I will, to the best of my ability, maintain my systems in a secure and up to date manner, and educate the end users on key issues so as to ensure they are aware of the risks and capable of making rational and functional decisions about the use of email and the net. I encourage them to use our resources as needed and appropriate, and I only 'censor' web content minimally. It is much better to have a happy, informed, and connected staff than an alienated and mis-managed staff who does not like where they work and whom do not feel trusted (or alternately feel let down and do not trust their bosses and IT staff to do their jobs correctly).
His Reply:
Thanks again for your comments. Our views on the issue at hand don't
actually differ much; the Reuters article only quoted one sentence from
15-minute interview I did with them.
I do agree that it is the responsibility of IT staff to take care of
security issues and that these things should not burden end users. I also
have nothing against employees spending part of of their work day for
recreational surfing to news/sports/humour sites.
Then again, I've seen several large companies start to filter a wide
variety of e-mail attachments: a recent example includes a major
multinational company which is now automatically dropping all attachments
except: txt, gif, jpg, png, bmp, pdf, zip, doc, xls, ppt. This action alone
automatically would have stopped most of the major e-mail worm outbreaks we
saw last year. It does have create inconvenience for end users, as some
attachment types are dropped (such as exe, swf, pps, mp3, mpg, avi, mov).
Most importantly dangerous extensions such as pif, shs, eml, chm, com,
.exe which are practically *only* used by viruses are dropped
automatically, preventing unknown e-mail worms from entering.
I don't see web browsing as a big problem from security point of view and
don't think web filtering is needed for this perspective.
--
Mikko Hermanni Hyppönen - Mikko.Hypponen@F-Secure.com
F-Secure Corporation - Securing the Mobile Enterprise
I think that the mainstream press is mis-using commentary and quotes to sensationalistic ends...
so that we can get some work done!
8 1&u=/nm/20020320/tc_nm/technology_cybercrime_dc_2
See
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=5