Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.
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.
We went the other route: 100% Mac on the desktop. Immune to the overwhelming majority of virii (about the same as Linux, I think), we can Netboot from OSX Server, and the engineers get OSX for its Unix-y goodness.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
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
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 &
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
In my office, where we develop in Java, the local proxy server blocks site like www.junit.org or Google (usenet) groups. I guess they want to make sure that the programmers don't cheat and use already prepared answers... :-)
There are so many ways around this - I'll just take my laptop to the part and jack-in the open wireless network that's running there...
Or better yet, I'll go to the bathroom and bring a book.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
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.
With Cisco's CallManger out now for a while, you better get used to MORE Windows 2000/IIS boxes running your most critical business needs. Their flagship VoIP mahine runs off of Windows, and it's my job to sell your executive one.
Plus the phones listen off of port 80, so watch out for DDOS attacks on those as well.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
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.
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.
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
If my company took away net access, would I continue to work, well yeah, would I be any more productive definitely not. Would I be looking for a new job, count on it.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
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
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
Funny, I did it with $0, plus about a few hours of my time.
We haven't either since I installed the virus scanner on the mail server (again, a $0 price tag, plus an hour of time).
I think the whole premise of the article is to find non-"worker efficiency" justifications for imposing nazi-like restrictions on Internet usage at work. The technical/security rationale is flawed, and preventing workers from spending personal time on the web or email is only likely to make them miserable, not more productive.
Jason.
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.
Man, if I only had mod points...
Hey, I'm not in the corporate world right now, but what you say rings true to me. I know the company that cuts off my email and web access is losing an employee.
It was all over the LOC post the other day: productivity isn't measured in code produced, hours at the desk or anything else like that. The internet is my encyclopedia, and if I don't have that not only and I unhappy, but I'm less productive.
So yeah, Right on. I agree.
Christopher
Mozilla
I just love their quote that these systems cost £30,000 to install, or whatever.
(a) in business terms, that's the cost of assigning someone to work full-time for 4 months on something. So consider that before you shell-out for the software: could your own people get a free solution running for less cost?
(b) just how much money do they expect businesses to save? You'd have to waste an awful lot of bandwidth before the cost reached £30,000
(c) Did anyone ever analyse the costs/benefits of this? How much work does a perl developer do without access to perl.com? How much work does any developer do if they have to stare at the program unril they leave, rather than being able to do something else while they think about it?
(d) How long are your people going to stay if they have to keep on working every spare moment, without any distractions? It makes you think of the human-farms in The Matrix.