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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."
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.
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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.
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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
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.
I wish they would limit it at home too so I would get some work done because I wouldn't spend so much time on /. !!
I stole this Sig
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
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.
Have you read the Moderator Guidelines yet?
We went the other route: 100% Mac on the desktop.
;-)
Speaking as an Apple employee and shareholder, thank you. Tell all your friends
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
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.
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.
So the internet lowers productivity by 25% just by connecting to it. Anyone with any brains at all would pull the plug.
Maybe you don't remember time wasting activities in the pre-internet era. Things like: wandering the plant on epic donut quests, endless banter with your office mates, reading thick publications like Byte and PC-Week cover-to-cover, writing video game emulators, calling all of the car stereo stores in the Yellow Pages looking for the best deal on an in-dash cassette player, and countless others.
I'm guessing that Internet usage has cut into the above activities more than into real work. In my case, I think the amount of off-topic time I spend at work has remained roughly constant over the last 15 years. (And it's been more than balanced by work I've done while at home).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
---
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
We should shut down employee cafeterias because food can bring harmful bacteria into the company and we might get sued.
--Blair