Blocking Instant Messengers?

Michael Mattes asks: "I have been looking for a set of ports/subnets to block in order to disable instant messengers behind my firewall. While MSN is easy to block, ICQ is a little more difficult and it seems as though Yahoo Messenger is designed to do everything possible to not be blocked. I have been reading more and more articles showing companies choosing to block these tools. It seems irresponsible of Yahoo to leave, what appears to me, no choice but to block their entire domain in this situation. Any help would be appreciated."

Comments

Re:usefullness?

[pyite]

Remind me never to use any of your code. You want your programmers to be lazy. Laziness leads to code reuse which leads to quicker development. IM is probably one of the most efficient ways of communicating at work. You can easily talk to multiple people at once, instead of having multiple phone calls going at the same time. You can also copy and paste a block of code so someone can look at it easily; reading code aloud can be difficult because of parens and such. Since you don't like doing things efficiently IRL, I don't see how you'd be efficient in code.