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Hotmail: Not Safe For Work?
silentknight writes "According to MSNBC, web-based e-mail providers such as Yahoo and Hotmail may not be a haven for your private e-mail anymore. At least not while you're at work. SpectorSoft is introducing eBlaster, which aims to "secretly forward all e-mail coming and going through such Web-based accounts to a spy's e-mail". Corporations will most likely argue that, because of sites like Internal Memos, companies need to keep a tighter grip on the information that flows in and out of their companies. But attempting to spying on private e-mail?? In the words of Homer J. Simpson: "Butt out, Buttinsky"."
That eBlaster software seems like a totally excellent way to increase the amount of spam you receive in your inbox per day.
Thanks, SpectorSoft.com! You've made my week!
- SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)
The time you spend at work, you ought to be working, not sending personal email, making personal calls, or anything besides work-related stuff.
Now this becomes a little tough because we aren't automatons and have lives outside of work that need tending to. However, to expect that what you do within the walls of your company is private is laughable.
Just assume that everything you do there is under surveillance. Heck, all your thoughts are already belong to them.
I have been pwned because my
After this was done, all virus problems on the network dropped from one incident per 2 weeks to maybe 1 incident per 4 months.
As to the privacy issue, the easy solution is to NOT SEND PRIVATE E-MAIL FROM WORK (or at least use GnuPG or PGP!)
http://www.hushmail.com
The best way to make people rise up against this is simply to encourage employers to try to apply the goals and reasoning of software like this against traditional communication services.
How many people you think would be cool with their employer listening in on their personal phone calls, and opening all their personal mail that gets sent to the office?
Apply it to everything, and people will understand that this is an encroachment on what we currently have, not a reasonable measure for dealing with a newish technology.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I mean, legally, I have to side with the companies. Their machines, their time, their liability. The can do what they want.
BUT...it does suck, and I'd hate to work for anyone that would think they needed to read my private mail. My only hope is that more and more people will leave companies that do that to work for smaller companies, or start their own, and that these smaller companies will begin to resist the temptation of corporate assimilation. I see it beginning to happen now, there are some fairly large, privately held consulting companies that foster a great atmosphere for their people. The more I see big companies doing things like this, the more hope I have that this renaissance of the small business will grow.
Their computers.
Their network.
Their time.
Their money.
'nuff said.
slashdot!=valid HTML
... to read each and every one of the 300+ spam emails I get daily to my Hotmail account.
Use ssh or WinVNC (like I do) or somesuch to remotely access your home system, and run your personal stuff THERE. At work, the only non work-related software I run is WinAMP, WinVNC client and a web client. At home, I run an email client, IRC, ICQ, Kazaa, etcetera....
;-)
So long as the employer doesn't mind you connecting to your home machine (and you can encrypt that connection, somehow), then what you do with it is your own business.
Of course, you can still paste memos over VNC/ssh, so this just defers the problem somewhat.
.f00Dave
You're leaving out one major point -
When we (meaning the IT department at my company) monitors what users are doing, either on the internet, or anything else, they're not just doing it on company time...
They're doing it with company computers.
I am an IT manager for a local government agency. We monitor all internet usage on a regular basis. for the most part it is rather boring. This also means that if sombody uses Hotmail or some such at work it gets logged. By state statute here all documents that are created on our equipment, i.e. you type an e-mail. It becomes public record. that means any Joe Blow off the street can send in a request for copies of any and all e-mails that we have on our system. This causes a few interesting problems. So I do a couple things. 1. I do not backup the e-mail system. All users are aware of this. 2. Zero retention on deleted e-mail. 3. A signed Acceptable Usage poilicy for each user. They are all aware of the possibility of being monitored. Does this stop people, no! We have had to take action on abuses several times. Like the guy that wouldn't stop surfing porn at work, he worked in the cube and there are several women that work in that office. Bad judgement. Last week things got worse. I noticed a user surfing a little porn so I checked the logs, I was a little surprised, he was accessing a Sex Offender Database. He was looking himself up! Turns out this guy is a registered sex offender in the neighboring state. I looked up what he was convicted of and it was RAPE. Also 90% of the workers in my building are female. We would have never known any of this without monitoring our system. Our lawyers are working on what to do with him now. People can bitch all they want about Big Brother, but ever consider sometimes this is bigger than one person feeling bad? Think about how you would feel if your sister or mother worked in that office and something happened. Wouldn't you have wanted us to do something about it? Take off the blinders and step off the soap box, because until you are the one responsible you don't know shit.
So it's feudalism at work; democracy on your own time.
Your words could apply just as well to someone justifying plutocracy as the logical system of government for a nation -- the wealthy landowners get to make the decisions, because they literally own the country. Somehow, in these modern times, we've decided that that's just not acceptable anymore. Why do we still put up with it at work?
Man, that site is hilarious! You can't make stuff like this up :-)
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
The last place I worked, I had to do something like this. We had a problem with an employee who was suspected of leaking company trade secrets to a competitor.
It turns out she was using a Yahoo e-mail account to send CAD files of complete circuits to her "ex" boyfriend at a competitor. She was doing this from computers at work, and yes she had authorization to access the CAD files in her job.
Because we were able to monitor the activity, the company knew what/when/where the files went. She was fired for cause and we contacted the competitor and waved the evidence. They had little choice but to fire the person on the other end and we watched them close to see if they introduced any "new" products over the next year or so that were based off of our designs.
* * *
Fast forward to my new company -- a once major telecom giant -- they now block all webmail sites they can find via their firewalls.
Simple fix? Squid proxy on your home computer running on port 443 (HTTPS) and requiring a username/password.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
11. So, if eBlaster does not show up anywhere, how do I get into it?
So does anybody know what those four keys are?
Contrary to the large contingent of "company can do whatever it wants on its property" boosters, there in fact seem to be all kinds of legal protections and privacy expectations established for workers in corporate offices.
The fascist model that says otherwise is not only frightening, it's untrue.
The full quote from the lawyer in the article (in reference to the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act):
Spyware like that produced by SpectorSoft and competitor WinWhatWhere Corp. has not yet faced a definitive courtroom test. But David Sobel, general counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, equated private Web-based e-mail account with an employee receiving a personal letter through the company mailroom. The contents of such a letter are protected by U.S. mail regulations.
"The question is: Is there a reasonable expectation of privacy? I would argue that if a company.com account is provided to me for company business, I can assume it might be subject to monitoring
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
"Mr. Wong, we've been monitoring your incoming hotmail and we can only assume you've spent hours of company time sending out hundreds of inquiries requesting information on how you can lengthen your penis by 3-4 inches with some kind of herbal supplement..."
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
So, they want to read my personal email but they don't want to read my ideas on how fix some corporate IT problems?
Perhaps I should put my suggestions in personal emails sent through Yahoo!, that way they might get some attention.
Speak truth to power.
There are two types of workers, those who WLL get the work done regardless of distractions and those who will NOT get the workdone even if placed in a locked room. Hire and trust good people! Big brother tactics just makes the productive people less productive and won't fix the duds.