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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."
Aim and the rest have their legitimate uses too. We save hundreds of dollars in communication costs with our overseas factories, and the response time is better than with the telephone (even if they are on a call, they can still answer an IM).
Additionally, the occasional personal use tends to reduce the number of personal phone calls coming in dramaticly, so as long as it isn't excessive, we tend to let it slide.
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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.
Simply because they know how to use it -- and sometimes it's a good idea to be using it. I use AOLIM and MSN to keep in touch with developers that I respect to help me out in my job. We shoot IMs back and forth and work together now and again; it's encouraged where I'm at.
.txt files on them onto a Win NT box and burn it to CD. Not too hard, if the consultant can do it themselves but I kid you not I had to track down 3-4 people in the plant every time I had to do this task. A huge waste of friggen time.
I've seen IT departments that have ONLY HTTP access through a proxy. I was once stationed at a consultant through my full time employer as such a place and when I neeeded to do a text dump of a DB I couldn't even FTP it back to our site because -nobody- in the building could do an FTP transfer. Solution: NFS mount the Unix partition that had the
IT may abuse it from time to time, but take it away and you pull a huge resource from the good workers.
And what about those of us who have jobs that depend on knowing WTF the latest happenings in the real world are?
It is mighty handy for somebody running tech support to know about the latest computer virii before it hits the customer base, or even the networks servers, if it is a virus that does not propagate by e-mail but rather by exploiting a server vulnerability.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
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?
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."
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.
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 think the epithet "anonymous sales droid" implies a disdain for said employees intellect and abilities. The fact is any stuffed shirt or ex frat boy could fill the position, within certain limitations (does not stutter, washes self, licks ass). While sales may be completed by the droid, they are initiated by the engineer/architect/entrepeneur, enabled by the developer/assembly line worker/big red button on shiny machine, generated by the advertising contractor, and profits are accumulated by the reclusive accountant with green billed visor/backroom cigar smoke deal/hidden deep within the recesses of shiny machine.
The salesman has less to do with the sale than the cashier at McDonalds.
I'm currently residing in Japan where this kind of silly matter would never come up.
Quick quiz: How many people in Japan commit suicide from working like dogs compared to North Americans? My guess would be a LOT more, from what I've heard. There's even a word for it; I forget what it is but it starts with a "K".
What about the Japanese idea that an employer owes the worker a lifelong job in exchange for loyalty? That seems way more fucked up to me than putting in 9-5 and expecting a cheque. Of course, the job for life deal isn't really panning out that much anymore, and neither are a lot of other feudal Japanese traditions.
I'll tell you one thing AC, I wouldn't want to be in Japan when the time comes for the Japanese way of life to change. History has shown that societal change in Japan is never gradual, subtle, peaceful, or bloodless.
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I didn't want to leave this space blank.
Well, I dunno about you, but on all the jobs I've had in the past few years, reading slashdot and other similar sites was highly relevant to my job. So was reading assorted tech newsgroups and exchanging email with people working on similar projects at other places.
Yeah, some of the management types didn't like it. But there are enough of them that understand where their profits come, so I haven't actually seen much real interference.
There was a funny case 6 or 7 years back, when a customer sent us the results of a benchmark of our product against several others. When asked why I hadn't run the benchmark myself, I pointed to a printed policy that prevented me from accessing the site that had the benchmark's source. I mentioned that I'd read about the test, but thought that if I downloaded it, I'd get into trouble for violating the policy. The policy changed real fast after that.
Management that restrict their techies from use of the Net are dummies who are just shooting their own company in the foot.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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.
Okay, what email program would you reccommend for windows? (not a troll question, honest!)
Ignoring for a moment paid software, so we're on a level playing-field with Outlook Express, and remembering that an extra $40/seat or whatever for something as simple as an email client can really bulk the cost of an office-full of machines.
Free email clients which support multiple POP accounts? Not many.
Filter that list for those which support attachments, even fewer.
And those which support PGP (ok I know OutExp doesn't either but it's useful) and filtering rules
Now if only there was something like KMail for Windows, we could all stop using outlook express. But if there is, I can't find it.
Any ideas?