Slashdot Mirror
Does Your Company Censor the Content for You?
"In this case, words were not just filtered out, but the text had been changed so that the document still made sense. I suspect that someone monitoring a log and suddenly saw a document show up a bunch of times with the offending text in it. Then they modified the cached copy (I was viewing it a day after it hit the Slashdot front page) to make the alarm go away.
I have mix feelings about this, on one hand, even though the text in this case was meant as a joke and the content wasn't very offensive, I was using company equipment. But on the other hand, this company is a government regulated entity which isn't above pressuring its employees to vote the way management thinks is best (whether it is or not is a question for history). So I guess I'm scared that the company could push an agenda though 'stealth channels'. I realize that the information I read online can't always be trusted, but there are many people who don't know that. It's probably important to note that, while there is a policy of acceptable computer use, there has never been a notice that they might change the content we see online.
What are the feelings and/or experience of the Slashdot crowd on this?"
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The real Gzip Christ is user number smurf
Careful, buddy. You've probably been flagged as a worktime porno viewer
Oh wait, you're not gonna see this message.
When you consider how labor intensive it would be to come up with a sensible rendition of the article with "bad stuff" omitted - how do you propose it could be done.
Programatically? Has anyone heard of a proxy/filter doing this? I haven't.
Peace
In soviet russia, the content censors you!
Just the other day Michael Sims was sending my some pictures of himself, and I noticed that his penis had been air brushed out, I suspect foul play.
I'd rather have content blocked than modified although I'd prefer neither.
I work at an extremely repressive Financial Services company that does extremely thorough and restrictive web filtering -- websites are white-listed, and are white-listed on a per-individual/group basis, so the vast majority of the people in the company can't even go to, say, Google.
:)
We don't do content filtering/alteration, though, though I'm guessing our proxy can do it. If you can get to the site, you'll see what's on it. Period. Well, assuming what's on it is available on port 80/443
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Maybe all the apparent /. server slow downs in the last few weeks are just the company censor machines working overtime to weed out all the GNAA, goatse, and other assorted trolls. :)
I know my Cisco PIX firewalls can block the page altogether after the first infringement which is a cause of headaches for some in the IT dept at our company, but censoring portions of pages- that is new to me (besides blocking content within 'iframes' which is done within the browser settings...)
Someone should provide the link and we can all see who gets filtered and who doesn't...
you are assuming he has a penis.
Down with Big Brother! Down with Big Brother! (etc...)
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
that you must work at such a place :(
When the current government of ghana was elected, the new govt won every district where the TV and radio had been deregulated, and the old one won every one where they were state controlled.
The power of media is very real, and very scary.
Ignore the part in my earlier post re how the submitter should have provided a link. I am a "act first think later" dork and I didn't realize it until just now.
Well at my school, they use NT servers which has many security holes, so instead of patching those, they install little brother software, and merely observe the pages, I find it quite comical tripod pages are listed as sex/porn on it.
More than likely, the article had changed between the time your friend saw it and you saw it. One or both of your proxies are probably caching different versions of the web page, and now when you both go to that site, you both see two different versions of the web page.
It's highly unlikely your company has someone sitting around reading every web page requested through your proxy and quickly censoring it before allowing it to get to you.
whooaaaahhh man whoaaa
Orwell's experiences in Spain would occupy him for the rest of his life and in the end lead to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Later Orwell said to his friend Arthur Koestler that history stopped in 1936. Koestler knew at once what Orwell meant, and agreed. In 1936, objective history disappeared. Orwell did not believe that history was 100 per cent objective, but there had always been events that you with reasonable certainty could assume had taken place. But in Spain he saw that newspaper articles had no relation to reality. History was written, not according to what had happened, but according to what should have happened in accordance with the various party lines. And when he returned to England, he saw English newspapers repeat the lies of the Spanish press. Especially the left-wing newspapers with their more subtle form of distortion had been the main cause why people did not know what it was all about, but the bourgeois press had not kept back, either.
In Spain he also saw a form of censorship that alarmed him. Instead of just censoring articles and leaving an empty space, something else was inserted so that it was impossible to see what had been censured and not.
- linko
Bottom line: if the company informs you of this, even if it's on page 356, Appendix B of the employee handbook or way down at the bottom of the Rules of Use, then you can't complain about this.
Now if they didn't inform you, that's bad. But before asking Slashdot, I'd ask your sysadmin. Or your BOFH. Or your PHB. Of course, that would involve admitting that you read /. at work, which may or may not be a problem at your company. You may find out it was some overzealous PFY in the systems group who was afraid that the PHB might see "lesbian" on an employee's computer and tomorrow there might be a FOX News story "Employees at Company Foo use corporate networks to access porn." Sure, that's a little far-out, but PHBs are primarily concerned about covering their asses.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
I have a govt IT job where our traffic leaves a larger government network to get to the net, because of this, our surfing is heavily filtered, I personally are always getting "ACCESS DENIED" in big blue letters across my screen. I once visited a site with a review for a 256mb video card i was showing a user, i tried to reload the page, and then was met with the aforementioned blue text. They also seem to block ports, i cant even ping anything on the net.
LESBIAN can you read this? SEX
a) You read slashdot and talk to your buddies about the articles
b) you make lame jokes anut the articles
c) You investigate why you aren't gettng the lame joke without assuming that either you are just stupid or (more liekly) the joke isn't funny.
three strikes and you're out! L-O-S-E-R.
Some sites are blocked by some sort of net-nanny filter. It is kind enough to tell you why it is being blocked, and who to complain to if you do actually need to see the site for business reasons.
In the example given I could see the whole article. We could not introduce a policy blocking the word 'lesbian' since we are a company that officially worships at the altar of Diversity.
I am trying to think of a (manufacturing) business related case for allowing our users to see the word 'porn', but it is a bit of a struggle.
As I recall, there's a website somewhere that allows you to type in any URL, and they get the content, replace random nouns and verbs with arbitrarily chosen obscene words, and shows the whole webpage in its new form. Definitely a giggle. Unfortunately I can't remember what it's called or where it is. Anyone know? I'd also really like to see a copy of the sanitised version of the content that this thread's author mentioned. Can you put it up somewhere?
[ UNSIGNED NOT NULL ]
There's more than one way to fux0r 4 $mu|2f
but I'd like to praise my employer for having a very clear, upfront, and open Internet and E-mail use policy.
Chain letters = fired
P2P apps = fired
Harassment = fired
Using Internet resources to maintain your own business is also against the rules, but it is very clear that it does allow casual web browsing, news, industry things, even personal websites so long as your duties at work are not interferred with. Coming previously from Big Blue, I found this to be an amazing change.
I always catch my co-workers looking at porn or something else they shouldn't be doing.
If a troll is trolling trolls, or just non-trolls who could use a good trolling, is it still a troll?
It is becoming more and more common to see this sort of filters. The reasons, in my view, are a bit complex, though kind of obvious.
You have companies that are hypersensitive about any sort of lawsuit involving "sexual harasment" or anything resembling it. Since the court cases have been siding on the side of people who are far too sensitive for their own good, there is some cause for it.
Another part of the equasion are control freaks who worry about what people do at work. They want everything filtered to only allow "work related" things. They want to produce and produce and produce with no thought to anything else in your life while you are there. (These are also the same people who tend to take long lunches and have all sorts of porn on their computers.)
Yet another set are the moral control freaks who think that they need to prevent anyone from seeing anything "naughty". (These tend to be rarer, but I have seen places where this has happened.)
All in all, it just creates contempt and dissatisfaction for the company by the employees. Adults do not like being treated like children, for the most part. People who get treated like this are more likely to bail when the opertunity presents itself. Of course, since MBAs are taught to try and turn all of their employees into interchangable parts, they don't quite get a clue how bad it hurts them in the long run. (Or the short run, for that matter.)
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
I recommend you quit your job immediately. Find another place to work. I am sure someone would gladly accept your paycheck and actually work and not worry about things like this at work.
Thank you for censoring "the content" for me.
Now I have much more time to do my job.
Sincerely,
Worker #511720
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...this company is a government regulated entity which isn't above pressuring its employees to vote the way management thinks is best...
Hell with the web filtering, I want to hear about your crazy vote-influencing company!
This is truly "Orwellian" in it's scope. I'm willing to bet that your log watching IT department would deny changing it too....
...I for one, welcome our new IT overloards!.....
There have been incidents posted here (on Slashdot) before about content/news stories on the big outlets being "updated" without notice. That story you read last week might be "remembered differently" now...
This is simply the next logical step in the erasing history as it happens. Modify content, delete facts or quotes, change facts too.
If you feel this is in error please contact the system administrator.
Thanks for surfing on company time....
this sounds made up. I so don't belive it. all the super computers in the world could not dynamicly filter out dirty content coherently like you describe. if the word poop was changed to p**p maybe. but removeing certain sentences and expecting to remain with a coherent page? no computer filter can do that.
-You're wasting your time. Alfador only likes me.
My Company censored does this practice and it makes me censored mad. What a bunch of censored but censored and censored oh well. At least I work on cool censored
Walter: "Oh, please dear!? I've got news for you: the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint!"
Dude: "Walter, this is not a first amendment thing!"
Walter: "Lady, I got buddies who died face-down in the muck..."
Communism was just a red herring.
I work for a large gov't contractor, and we're told flat out that our email isn't private by any means. However, it still bounces incoming emails for containing certain words. Among them were "erection" and "Viagra." We work right up the street from Pfizer.
Mind you, I can send out what I want. I only know these words are blocked because someone else tried to send them in. As far as I know, though, it never actually changes the text.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
This is what anonymizer.com (and others) are for. You can view any web site in complete stealth, since the data is SSL encrypted and the URLs are scrambled. Unless your company blocks anonymizer.com entirely there's no way for them to stop you from viewing whatever you want in complete uncensored privacy.
SSH client, X11Forwarding yes, Mozilla, and (if required) Cygwin Xwin. There is no way of stopping you without completely shutting you off from the Internet (at least that I can see).
The company my father works for has an MTA that wouldn't let him send mail with the word "Dick" in it. It bounced it back to him explaining that it might be offensive.
As in
Dear Dick,
We enjoyed dinner the other evening...
1) No one posting so far is familiar with such filter, which seems plasusible to me. Blocking on content is routine. Dynamically rewriting content and making it sound correct would be an ambitious doctoral project in CS, not a routine piece of network control software.
2) "But on the other hand, this company is a government regulated entity which isn't above pressuring its employees to vote the way management thinks is best (whether it is or not is a question for history). So I guess I'm scared that the company could push an agenda though 'stealth channels'." Honestly, if your concern is that democracy is being subverted by your employer's policies of mind control you may want to just work elsewhere.
3) No, whatever filters you have aren't there to surreptitiously insert pro-Arianna Huffington messages in Something Awful. They're there because if you and your friend discuss the NumLock article and say "lesbian porn" loud enough for a coworker to hear, she can sue the company for sexual harassment over the creation of a hostile workplace environment, and take money out of everyone else's pockets.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Does Your Company Censor the Content for You?
They don't -- I have to censor my own content.
I am a lawyer, and I can tell you that your work is allowed to filter any outside content that they want, because you're using WORK resources to view the content.
My company uses Websense, which is extremely irritating as it blocks many useful and interesting sites. It doesn't alter them; it just blocks them.
Therefore, I have circumvented it by tunneling most of my traffic through SSH to external machines running the squid http proxy and socks (for IM).
All they will see is intermittent encrypted traffic on port 22 (or whatever port your SSH server is on). Of course it would help if you have an excuse for needing an SSH connection. I'm covered as several servers under my control are co-located.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
No, since a troll can not troll itself. (A trite bastardization of the philosophical principle that states an entity may not operate on itself...but apropos nonetheless.)
Choose the least likely two options out of the following:
A) A person at the poster's company edits incoming web pages to sanitize them.
B) A program is able to remove offensive language while leaving a result that makes sense.
C) Two versions of the article were posted on the original website at various times, and due to caching the poster and his friend are seeing different versions.
D) The poster is in error about or inventing what they saw on the page.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
My company doesn't censor my content for me at all. No sir. Everything is peachy here. All hail the company.
Same thing happened to me. The company put in a new proxy filter and now I AM VERY HAPPY HERE. So, I went to one of the system administrators and told him THAT HE'S DOING A GREAT JOB. Just the other day a friend sent me WORK RELATED MATERIAL. If this keeps up I'll just have to THANK MY BOSS FOR THE PRIVELEGE OF WORKING FOR THIS FINE COMPANY AND ASK IF I CAN WORK FOR FREE.
That is all. Move along. I said move along!
So except for a very few jobs I can think of most jobs just don't require unrestricted access to the internet, hell be happy you get access at all.
If it were my call, and the day to day business of the company didn't rely on the internet, outgoing internet would be blocked 100% except for designated breaks and lunches. And incoming email would be unavailable except for those employees who's jobs require incoming email to function.
Call me an overlord or bastard but when you look at the alternatives (outsourcing to India, downsizing, etc) not being able to surf slashdot during your workday pales in comparison.
--- www.f-theocean.com
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
I filter content at my small business.
I pay my people to work, not to download porn and viruses or play solitare.
They call it "work" for a good reason..
If they want to screw around they can screw around at home but not on my dime.
I don't allow personel email either. I filter non business related email out and I don't all IRC or chat programs.
Again, work is for working. Home is *your* business...
"Seriously, when was the last time you saw something funny on the intrenet? Take off your tin foil hats people!"
I just now read something funny, but I doubt it's because you're trying to be a comedian.
"Derp de derp."
Well in all my time working for AOL (yes its funnn) I've only EVER come across one webpage that I couldn't access over the network/net connection in work. (actually said due to its content etc)
As for modified content, not noticed anything been changed during the past two years.
So as bad as AOL may be to its members (chat rooms etc) it does not seem to restrict to much stuff...
Several years ago when I was teahing high school they would censor out "objectionable" words. However, the censor that they used was so dumb that it would not only censor out typical words, but it would censor out parts of words. So if I were to types something like "I wish it would stop," the censor would see the "sh" at the end of wish and the word "it," and think it was an "objectionable" word leaving blank spaces in my text and rendering it pretty unreadable.
I only found out about it after a friend responded to me asking me what I was trying to say.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
If there is any "four letter words" in an email the server won't deliver it. They won't even tell you that it wasn't delivered, it just goes into the bit bucket. I guess only spam has the seven dirty words in the body of the message.
At many of my (previous) employers, there are political action committees (PACs) to which management is "strongly" encouraged to donate, and exempt employees are recommended to donate.
among their usual actions are a election-time list of candidates whose views on industry-relevant issues are favorable to the company.
mmm... yeah... You see, we're putting the cover sheets on all TPS reports now before they go out...
P2P apps = fired
Then how do employees copy work-related files across the network? Aren't SMB/Samba and NFS peer-to-peer services? You might want to discuss this with your employer's IT department, to get "use of P2P apps" clarified to "unauthorized distribution of copies of copyrighted works" or "use of file-sharing apps that communicate with the public Internet" depending on whether RIAA liability or bandwidth use was the main concern in banning "P2P".
Will I retire or break 10K?
I remember reading that an old version of cybersitter did allow filtering content and removing offensive words. If I remember correctly, cybersitter removed this feature in newer releases and just started blocking the page outright because they ran into problems about removing words from quotes.
I think www.peacefire.org may have more info on that feature
There in no religion higher than truth.
Unless your company blocks anonymizer.com entirely
In other words, "unless water is wet".
Will I retire or break 10K?
...where we call caching proxies "censors".
Wouldn't this rewriting violate copyrights? It seems that modification of copyrighted works like that (since they are effectively publishing them) would be against the law.
Bill
If my company censored my incoming messages, websites, or email I would do a few things.
First I would stop any "above and beyond" performance. I would do my job as it was expected of me but I surely wouldn't work weekend or late hours anymore. The office is a 2 way street. I supply my abilities and do the work, they pay me. Thats the usual way it goes. But I also am willing to go above and beyond without complaining because I'm given the leeway in my internet and personal time while at work. If that went away so would the extra stuff. I give them more, they should give me more as well.
Then I would start looking for a new job. Its easier to find a job when you have one.
Didn't Dialectizicer get sued and temporaroly removed for this sort of thing?
Once you edit content, you as the ISP lose your "no liability" status as to what gets sent and received by your system. That's why some colleges got sued by the RIAA when they tried to slow (but not stop) file sharing.
Maybe the company you were at was getting udpates for that page right up until the lesbian comments made it to the top. Then they stopped getting new copies (because they has a fear of lesbians) and gave you the old one.
It'd be a lot of work for your company to re-write all of the pages on the web with such comments. I estimate there to be over one hundred offensive pages on the web. Also, if a human was indeed reading over that page to censor it, they'd probably ignore the case in point since there is actually no pornography at all.
At a previous employer, it was well known and openly discussed how our company was using a proxy server to route all calls for 'doubleclick.com' et. al. to our internal advertising server. I was the fool in charge of dissecting doubleclick's calls and updating the internal ad-server to display the proper size advert.
Why?
1. 'The Man' was a bit loopy in the head.
2. We offered ASP solutions (not the asp script pages; Application Service Provider). We could show our Citrix clients the ads from other clients/ local business.... who just happened to be clients of reason #3
3. We sold a 'increase-your-traffic' service. We promised the standard Search Engine treatment, plus various banner placements across the Internet. Obviously 'across the Internet' mostly meant 'across our ad-server'. Most every client saw an increase in traffic. But then again, most services were local and were specifically shown to a local audience.
Leave the naughty words in place, and replace the rest of the text with fnord
It will work unless your employees are illuminated
The problem with filters is that they [help business and productivity] because it [encourages] the flow of information. Of course, I've found [it helpful] by [complying]. You should try doing that, too, if filters [help] you.
[Vote Bush]
Most censorware only blocks pages that aren't algorithmically correct, but there's some out there that also deletes the dirty words, for whatever value of dirty the authors' dirty minds can imagine. Obviously, as you say, it's highly unlikely that your company has a Squadron of Elite Gorillas reading every page looking for political incorrectness; it's probably a word or phrase filter, like the kinds of things that take out the words CENSORED and CENSORED and MiddleCENSORED. .
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I run my own small business (let's me run things however the fuck I want to)... and I wanted to point out that curses etc in emails etc can be useful because they are part of language! Filter them out, and you lose some meaning or emotion in the communication.
For instance, if I get an email from a customer telling me: "your software is fucking terrible!" then I know this is really bad. If I read instead, "your software is gosh darn poor" then this carries somewhat less force.
You see what I'm getting at? There's nothing innately bad about certain words. Jesus doesn't have a mini-stroke whenever he hears someone mouth off. So I prefer to read unadulterated text if I can.
"You automatically lose the argument if you use an unrealistic extreme to prove me wrong." -- NJG.
You may want to read up on Reductio ad absurdum. Whatever your personal distaste for it, it has fine credentials as a valid and useful form of argument.
-- MarkusQ
How do I get anonymizer to work on my iMac?
one of my old high schools, I am about ready to enter college, the internet surfing rules were easy to follow. if you looked at any inappropriat sites you lost your privlages, outside of that the school didn't mind unless you were disobeying a teacher. it was like that until some idiotic kid decided to spread some nasty emails via a free internet service, and last time I checked at that school they block any url with the word mail in it.
andrewjj20
The best way is to use an Apple Mac. I do and have no such problems with content filtering.
Ettercap can do stuff (replace words etc) live on a normal or switched LAN using the man in the middle principle.
Pretty neat, but I don't know how well it would've worked in a larger environment.
beowulf cluster of these censoring devices!
This filter is really a secret link into SCO's true internal documents! My proof:
l ize2.cgi?lang=en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sco.com%2Fco mpany%2Fexecs%2F
http://www.pornolize.com/cgi-bin/pornolize2/porno
Now it all makes perfect sense.
Maybe he's French. Or, maybe he is stupid. I'm guessing the latter.
Eat recycled food - it's good for the environment, and OK for you.
As a devout anarchist, I'm horribly offended at your lawyers remark. You'll be hearing from my baseball bat.
No my company does not censor content.
It is a good company with excellent benefits and competitive pay.
They support the community and donate generously to local charities and organizations such as [@orglist@].
@companyname@ is an equal opportunity employer.
%UNDEFINED: @companyname@
%UNDEFINED: @orglist@
%CHECK FILTERBOT_GLOBALS.INI
... we get the "Red Screen of Death" if we even attempt to negotiate a site that their proxy deems inappropriate.
:)
Too many red screens, and it's a trip to HR for you... luckily, since they laid off all of the HR reps at my location and moved the operation to a way-far-away place, and they froze travel for everything except customer focus and Dave Cote's perks, there will be no trips to HR for me
Aw hell, I'm sure they could fire me if they wanted to.
If as you say the text had been changed so that the document still made sense well you could replace every occurance of the offending phrase with \random and it would make sense.
The smurf example in the first post is an extreme but you could probably have substitutes for all the offending words in their varying formats nouns, verbs etc and not destroy the grammer. But I think it would be impossible to not destroy the content unless you replaced lesbian porn with ... well to be honest I can't imagine what they replaced that with to provide the same content using different words which didn't run to a line and a half.
As someone responsible for network administration in a "government regulated entity" (quote and quote) I am just sick of employees caught on watching pornography saying "Oh, come on! It wasn't that offensive! Someone just sent me a joke and I absolutely had to see it in my work time!" I'm sorry but I cannot tolerate it. Two years ago we were sued by a woman employee who saw pornography on the screen of one of our workers and she won. We will not make this mistake again. Actually I was the one who opted for not only filtering, but also modifying the content of packets travelling through our routers. I used snort(8) and ngrep(8) together with netsed(1) and a custom libcap app to change pornographic pictures into our special picture (it changes the img html tags src attribute) with text saying usually something like "We are watching you! We have 328 resumes of people willing to take your place, you sick pervert! One more time and you're out!" and I have to admit, it works like a charm. We had to fire few sick bastards to show that we're serious, but those new kids are working much harder than them, so it was actually good to our organization. How do I say a picture is pornographic you might ask? Simple. If it's not on images.google.com with strict filtering on. Of course people are still willing to cheat using "covert channels" but we made it clear that those are in violation of our internal policy and we can sue them for it. It's much better to work here now, but of course I still have to monitor all of the traffic. You wouldn't belive how innovative those sick perverts can be. Unfortunately we cannot fire all of them.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Upon a careful rereading I came up with two possibilities. First, and most likely is the math lesson on bitwise math operators. In my experience the average person get very offended why I start talking about math. On several occasions I have feared for my life. Most of the time, though, the bird I am chatting up just walks away.
The other possibility is that MS had sent a cease and desist order. The article clearly puts Excel in a negative light by indicating that it has not always been the only Spreadsheet, and, even worse, implying that other spreadsheets had more functionality. I am sure this violates the Excel licensing agreements. Likewise MS may have sent a complaint for the mention of DOS.
I hope someone will post the edited text so I may understand the offensive material.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
My company used to censor the goatse guy. No really, this is serious (see - I didn't even link to it).
For some reason the block seems to have been lifted though so we can now... well that's enough of that. (-:
One of the amusing rules the content filter used to censor was sites about working around content filters. Duh.
Or even direct SSL? I'm sure there'd be a way of incorporating GPG signing into an HTTP header, but I can't think off the top of my head of a secure way of doing it.
If your company is modifying web documents, even if they have a right to do it, surely you have a right to know they're doing it and decide what weight to give to the information.
Create an SSH tunnel and run some kind of proxy on the other end (I used a Perl script to help out a friend of mine). Then tell your favorite browser that all your web are proxyed on localhost 22, and BOOM employer can't see that you are browsing the web and can't filter it either.
Probably possible to do something similar with mail, at least with an outside address.
If you don't have SSH access it *might* be possible to actually run your SSH tunnel out your companies port 80. Assuming that such a thing wouldn't be noticed by Evil Proxy (tm) should work just fine.
The Anti-Blog
If you're worried about your company's proxy re-writing things or just plain filtering/blocking out content, use another proxy... preferablly via https.
I use megaproxy.com... cheap and works well.
If you have Apache, mod_ssl, and a broadband connection, you can download a CGI proxy that can be configured on your server. Anyone observing the connection would only be aware that a connection between you and your machine was taking place, and have zero knowledge of your activities (other than the date/times). This would prevent them from filtering or changing anything.
At our school, we don't earn a degree when we graduate—we earn pi/180 radians
It looks like they might once have allowed you to use their service for free, but I just tried viewing a few sites with it, and it looks like most dynamic content (eg, Slashdot, any forum or blog-type page) requires that you Upgrade to their Premium Service with New Privacy Features!!!!!
Yeah. Sure.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Yeah, they change all the Slashdot comments to trolls!
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
This seems like it is a good example of copyright infringement. Wish the RIAA would flip out over this one. If I provide two versions, a clean and a dirty one, that is one thing, but if you a third party in the middle changes my shit and reweites it to be less offensive to ???themselves and you read it and it doesn't make any sense, then I look like an idiot. that's copyright infringement.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
People are more or less trusted where I work, though occasionally I'll skim through the logs, mostly to look for suspicious traffic like adware. We do have some pornsters but they're too valuable to fire.
At another place I worked, I must say there's nothing quite like showing a new realtime log analyzer to your boss and seeing it pop up a bunch of suspicious animal porn (?) links during the first minute, after several days of rather uneventful testing.
It is a Proxy service run through a University in Germany.
I use it at work even though they don't filter anything (or so they say, but they can still log where one goes).
It is pretty "smart" in the sense that it also re-routes all the DNS requests through them, thus nobody will be any wiser on where you're going, all they see is an SSL connection going somewhere, I guess they could decide to block the ip-block, but supposly the system can get around this as well.
There were some concerns recently as the BKA (the German version of the FBI) ordered the University to allow tracking of users who visit a specific website (something with child porn) they initially complied but later got the courts to revoke it and it seems the police overstepped their boundaries, but of course a lot of people wonder now if they really don't monitor anything.
Having said that: I doubt your boss is going to force them to rat out on you.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
...where a coworker built a special ad hoc version of our software for a particular customer.
He sent them an email to explain how to use this bastardized version, but thanks to email censorship the message never got beyond the firewall.
Well, back in the day Microsoft LAN Manager was specifically sold as a "Peer-To-Peer" service, and I believe the NT resource kits touted this functionality as compared to "client-server" systems like Novell NetWare.
But we know what the root poster was talking about.
They completely block the page, of course. And also some pages which are relevant with absolutely no offending material.
[sarcasm] It's a corporation after all, and controlling what the users surf is key, and if you have to block a couple of good pages along the way or things that are necessary to work it's not that bad right? [/sarcasm]
Trolls dont like to be Flamebait, because they burn so well. Protect our Troll heritage!
Where I work, they have some sort of thing that detects keywords in the web pages that go through it. If it detects anything naughty, you get a red screen instead the page with a notice about acceptable use and warnings about accesses being logged. In a former company I was at, an employee was disciplined for both quantity of web use and sites accessed. If one really wants to get around it, just set up an SSH session to an outside computer and enable X11 forwarding. Then you can run your browser on the outside box and have the drawing commands sent to your current desktop. It is slower, but doable with broadband access. Another thing people can do is an advanced image search on google with adult filtering disabled. Not that I ever look at naughty pictures or anything ... however there are times when the red screen comes up for legitimate sites.
Our town public library filters out words like that from the public-access Web terminals.
A couple of years ago, I was reading a friend's journal online, where he seemed to say that someone had sent him an E. Another page showed me a list of " ing lists". It turned out that they block out a certain set of words from all pages-- and one of the words was "mail"! (They have a special room with computers which let you read email, and you have to pay for that, so I guess that must be why.) Of course nobody ever has a legitimate reason to look for sexual health information on the Internet, so predictably "sex" was another word being filtered. One of the local bus routes is Stagecoach Express route X5, and the library's system removed "sex" from the link to "SEx5.html", thus rendering it useless.
A rather interesting discussion blew up around this on the town newsgroup. We even had one of the librarians trying to give a justification of the system.
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
My company _____ (between 60 and 70 Fort500) likes to censor/block email though. We apparently aren't allowed to curse via outgoing email. After a bit of game playing w. a buddy of mine - we determined that he could write me an email full of "the swears" and I'd get it... Ahh then I reply back and it won't leave the corp firewall... Which was oh so lovely when a client used colorful language in an email to us... He couldn't get our replies... lovely.
As someone who formerly did network administration for the military, I can understand your point of view - why don't these people look at their kiddie pr0n at home?
The thing is, I moved out of Kadena and over to Scott, and there they used a filtering system that just plain sucked ass. They wanted me to keep up with my career field, so I spent most of the time at work reading tech stuff (I got stuck at the comm center there - 30 minutes of work on an 8 hour shift) and I had a problem with several pages I would go to. I mean, "teen" is part of a number, don't filter it! All kinds of stupid crap would pop up filtered when it was relevant to my work.
I much prefer the way we did it at Kadena - no filtering per se, but our firewall guys would get a proxy log report, investigate, and deal with it that way. People who got caught surfing porn or similar were very publically punished. Email was the same - no filtering of content, but anything suspect would be picked up and logged.
I imagine that the actual content blocking does intimidate more, but it can also prevent you from accessing information that you should be allowed to get. Of course, that may not apply to your organization, if the needs of your browsers/email users are specific to a certain area. Ours were for entire Air Force bases.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
It was a snippet of sample code written in f*ck f*ck.
If you are so concerned about the content you post to be accurate use a news group that has SSL enabled. In case someone can modify that post to sound accurate and you can prove it, you can cash in from your SSL authority :)
If you're using SSL between browser and server you'll instantly get a notification from your browser that the page has been modified.
Why not start using that more extensively?
Like the previous poster pointed out the 1st only applies to government. The 1st bestows no 'right' whatsoever, rather it crates a limitation on power. Chances are he has signed a non-disclosure agreement with the company he works for has every 'right' to take him to the cleaners. At the very least he should be fired for speaking out of turn.
As a devout anarchist, I'm horribly offended at your lawyers remark. You'll be hearing from my baseball bat.
As a reformed geek, I'm horribly offended by your use of the word "baseball". You'll be hearing from my laptop.
Like what I said? You might like my music
As a reformed stripper, I'm horribly offended by your use of the word "laptop". You'll be hearing from my social worker.
Your best option to "get away with" (for a little while) browsing stuff at work that they don't want you browsing is to proxy your requests through a HTTPS TCP/443 proxy of your own construction, and keep the connections short and the traffic low-volume.
Or better yet, when you are at work, do your job, and save the NSFW web browsing for when you are off the clock, on your own time, your own bandwidth, and your own equipment.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
We used to get a message prompting us to phone tech support if we stumbled on a banned domain name. The only problem was that a number of educational establishments have documentation repositories called xxx.domain.edu. I had fun trying to explain this to them. Not really a problem cos I'd just set my home machine up as an SSL web proxy and surf through it instead.
My company does not do that.
Just today I was reading "Mobie Wienie" from the Project First Printer collection during lunchtime, while preparing to digest the huge cylindrical pork product from the cafeteria.
Two weeks ago, I was at a conference of a youth organisation in the city of Leipzig (Germany). In a free moment, we went to the school's computer room (reading email, reading /.). When I tried to show a fried a letter between me and a Federal Office, the browser just said no; something like "permission denied" - "content: drugs".
After further investigation I noticed, that the whole folder www.presroi.de/recht is blocked. Thanks to squidguard.
Here's the funny thing: Most of the content in this folder is legal stuff: Laws, Federal Acts and paper from parliamentary debates...
They did not filter "my real" drug pages such as hanfbroschuere.de, lsdbroschuere.de, xtcbroschuere.de...
A part of the degree dissertation of mine and a friend was a censorship experiment. For this experiment we coded a proxy server, which is able to make a lot of complex manipulations, but the most effective is a simple word changer ;-) Change your proxy to: proxy.odem.org:7007 and look at the live log
ODEM.org Tour (about censorship)
At the high school I attended a couple years back this was common practice, although it wasn't too difficult to circumvent using web-based proxies, http-port tunneling and the like.
One interesting thing is that it also scanned our E-mails. Just to give you an idea on how "effective" this software was, the software refused to send an e-mail once because I had used the term "processing speed" (in an AP computer science course) the reason listed: "drugs/paraphernalia."
I worked for eight months for a British company that had a degree of paranoia that was only balanced by its technical ignorance. A new IT manager was brought in, interviewed solely by a EPHB (Extremely Pointy Haired Boss) who knew nothing. We then discovered a new species we've called the Pointy Haired Sys Admin. A scary thing. He introduced Websense at the cost of about ten-thousand pounds (this was for a small company with a very dodgy financial history). For some reason management thought that we the employees had to be controlled. It took five seconds for us to realize that Websense can be circumvented by setting a Proxy in IE.Of course, as far as managemnet is concerned, this is hacking. I don't recall ever actually bothering to circumvent, although it pissed me off when I found Websense banned Mathematics under the heading 'Games.'
The company also hired a contractor to install a PIX firewall (the sort that comes with a thousand user plus licence) to protect us against hackers, ignoring the fact that for the first few months of our IT Manager's reign, the network password was a single-case, single-English-word that had to do with security.
I was finally fired (mysteriously shortly after telling them I quit) for installing Black ICE firewall on my PC, which they said would interfere with the Cisco firewall (I'm impressed) and threaten security.
I guess what I'm getting at is that yes, I worked for a company that did everything it could to censor and limit the employees, but it seemed that this attitude went hand in hand with technical ignorance. One reason for their behaviour I think was that computers were such a black art to the management that they didn't trust those who used them - it was something they couldn't control.
You know, the ones that have xxx in the url? My high school used to censor these out, so you couldn't read an abstract for a school assignment and say "The lastest research is examining the question of..." because the paper was censored.
my local ISP has a specific rule : NO PORN
How dare they? Who gave them the right to pick and choose which bits of the internet we can access? Bar stewards.
HEY! I said bar stewards, darnit.. oh never mind
My experience on proxies and filters in a French plant of a very-well known firm:
* Google Groups (French version) is banned by the "Websense" filter as being part of "Usenet" - but the international version is still allowed ?!?
* I put pictures on my newborn son on my website, and sent the link to colleagues. One of them could not access because it was categorized as "sex". No idea which part of www courtois cc/bebe the filter found so horny.
Same thing happened with a friend, from a French bank this time.
I wonder which part of this is caused by the language problems (Websense is American-based, the proxy is in England ; has "bebe" a sexual connotation in English ?!?).
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).
written my thoughts about your company but it seems like you won't be able to read what I really said. So I gave up.
less is more
My school uses a combination of several methods to stop students from doing "naughty" things, preventing us from downloading files (unless you add a "?" to the end of the filename, but don't tell them that), and from viewing porn, unfortunately.
The problem lies in the method of preventing us from viewing websites, a program called ContentKeeper. Unfortunately, either by mistake or design, this site is indiscriminate in its actions, blocking not only porn, but games, weather, "unsavoury" content, and, interestingly, Australian Government sites.
Nothing is more likely to stop students from working on the school network than viewing the website of an obscure island nation, as we well know.
So consider yourself lucky if you only miss parts of a page, because right now, I'm having difficulty viewing my daily dose of Australian politics.
--- Egads, I glow in the dark!
I wrote a message board thingy in Perl which starred out the words "fuck", "cunt" and "wank", replacing them with "f**k", "c**t" and "w**k" respectively. My rationale behind this was that there are plenty of other words in the English language that can be used to express one's feelings, and beside which it was still reasonably obvious what the person meant. After all, it was running on my equipment, anyone using it was a guest in my home; and, if they really wanted to use those words, they could always download and edit the source code and build their own message board. And yes, it was smart enough that you could still write about a town on Humberside {Scunthorpe} and/or a type of rotary engine {Wankel engine} with impunity.
In a later version {using SQL instead of text files} the starring-out was done at display time, according to user preferences. So you could be as potty-mouthed as you liked, but other people had the option to block it.
By the way, I have heard that Scunthorpe council themselves had serious problems with Internet filtering software altering the name of their town.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
As a reformed certifiable nutcase, I'm horribly offended by your use of the term "social worker". You'll be hearing from my imaginary friend.
In Malta, if you send an email to a local council (which uses the government's mail servers), you have to be careful not write any word in CAPITALS, or your entire email will be blocked as 'SPAM'.
it's best to write to them in complete lower-case
just in case the system trips over....
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
My ISP blocks ports 135, 139 etc. "for security reasons". Shit!
To find out if your company is filtering out crap when you surf, simply browse Slashdot with all Trolls rated +5. If you see a blank page or an error message complaining of exceeding capacity, you know it's in place.
Really now. You guys are supposed to be the cream of the crop when it comes to technical stories. Some schmuck sends a submission with a highly outrageous claim and you post it for discussion like it's a legit concern?
I bet if I sent mail to Wired News asking the same question this guy asked, if someone was to write back, they would probably inform me of the fact that the pages was modified, then cached.
In these days of companies losing money, laying off workers, etc there's no IT department I've seen who has the funds to hire an army of people to dynamically change content for their employees.
You'd also think, if there was software that was intended to do wide scale dynamic changes web content the moderators of one of the biggest geek sites on the planet would know about it.
Be wise.. !
Wow, how intelligent way to start an argument... I am really impressed.
Oh, great... Just blame the victim! For the love of god! Are you insane?
Have you ever stopped to think about menthal health issues? Of course it didn't damage her eyes! That's the most stupid question I've ever heard!
Actually, there was a very physical evidence all over the place, since she puked. I was hoping I wouldn't be forced to talk about it, but here you go. Are you satisfied? Physical enough for you?
Those "nudy pictures" as all of you perverts keep calling illegal pornography was no bullshit in the eyes of a judge. As I've already said, she won the case.
My example of frivolous litigation? I'm sorry, but I was the one who was sued, god damn it! For me it wasn't a "frivolous litigation" (quote and quote) as you call it! I was terrified.
Please... It's all ones and zeroes to me. I don't care if I pay someone to work and he wastes this time on consuming pornography in the form of pictures, sound, text or a freaking holograms! Pornography is pornography.
He was masturbating for god's sake! How much more "dirty" you can possibly get? I just can't believe how much sympathy you have for this fucking pervert! I for one am glad he's in jail now.
Ministry of Thought?! Thought control??? Are you nuts?! Heve you even read my comment?
I am not trying to "decide what the rest of [you] think and know" for crying out loud! It was my arse which was sued because I was the one who let a menthally unstable young mother see a fucking sick perverted bastard jerking off watching child pornography on the fucking hardware which I personally installed and configured!!! I'm sorry I reminded you about your god damned orwellian phobias! Sue me!!! You make me sick.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
I believe the group photo with Stalin where they removed Trotsky was one of the first modern alternations.
See how your company delivers bartcop.com to you. They occasionally get reports of companies censoring the "outrageously liberal" site. Not infrequently, links to criticism of the current administration are bad for one reason or another. And, yes, the same news article on "big name" sites can mutate from day-to-day if it apparently displeases the Ministry of Truth.
You got a problem with that citizen?
I think the original poster said nothing about Kiddie Porn, but about Porn in general. However, you now switched it to Kiddie Porn. Granted I agree with the blocking of Kiddie Porn.
Now about not letting people surf porn, and publically humiliating them, well why not have a good old public flogging? Why in England floggings were events to watch, etc, etc.
What gets me overall in this is that PORN = BAD argument is the double standards. I wonder if the same agencies looked at human body bits being blown up and shown in explicit details will the filters be triggered? Will there be comments like, "You sick pervert?"
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I just realized you worked at the Air Force. Ok the Air Force may have to refer to some "interesting" battle pictures. So ok there is an "exception"
What I was more referring to is a while back somebody sent me footage in the Afghanistan war about a Taliban soldier being blown apart by a bomb.
I agree it is war and the Armed Forces need their footage. What disturbed is that the guy who had nothing to do with the Armed Forces said things like "Cool, watch him blow apart, Amazing".
IMHO that is disturbing!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Whoops, putting the f word in the subjects blown it
It isn't your companies proxy, it's the radiation from your monitor. Just wear a tin-foil hat, like I do, and the problem will go away.
... whilst you surf the web and post on Slashdot !
https
for faster encryption check via story on the same frontpage
A. Slim, though big companies do have PR people at every site for just this sort of thing.
B. Good, your objection is a non-sequitor. The removal of all content between one lesbian porn line and another does not HAVE to make sense. Indeed, the company would like nothing than for such pages to not make sense.
C. Zero. Straight dope is just that. The lesbian porn lines were there when I looked.
D. Low to Zero. Why bother, so they can get coproate black marks and fired? This kind of stupid stuff is very much in line with the technologically illeterate and wrong headed attitude of most big dumb companies that have "acceptable use" policies because they don't trust their employees to begin with.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Are you paying Google the appropriate fees for automated use of their service? You knew that's against their TOS if you're not paying for it, right?
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
This doesnt sound likely to me.
The source, staightdope, shows the last change of the story as 7th October.
The story was posted the Slashdot on the 8th October, one day later.
The poster accessed it on the 9th, one day later still.
It seems much more likely to me that a network admin modded the cached version to prevent it triggering alarms in some censorware that operates inside the DMZ.
You were using company property and company bandwith for personal use, discussing a slashdot story. In some companys they would have flogged you, in others fired you.
I know I am taking it far, but the real truth here is that you really don't have a lot to say about how a company uses it's equipment and if you don't like it your options are limited, put up with it or leave.
It may not seem right but perhaps that is because we feel freedom should extend into our jobs but the reality of it is that we sell some of our freedom when we accept a paycheck. We all know this and have to somehow accept it and live with it.
There should be a law against middlemen altering content without notifying the reader of such content. Anytime this is done to a page, the page should contain a big and bold sentence warning the user that the contents have been altered from the publisher's source, or other obvious notations like "[expletive deleted]".
It's the company's network and computer, so they should be free to BLOCK any content they want, but they shouldn't be able to use that power to mislead the reader into believing the publisher was saying something that they didn't. It's fine if they want to ban me from using their phone to make personal calls; but if they allow me to make personal calls they mustn't secretly use voice processing hardware to alter the words I hear or speak.
It is a violation of free speech because it *secretly* robs the content publishers of opportunities to deliver their intended message. If they block a web site or inform the user that the content has been altered, the user still knows they can go elsewhere and access the unmodified content. But when it is altered secretly, the user is misled into believing the content had certain information, without the knowledge that they need to go elsewhere to see the real infromation.
I can smell a lawsuit from the content publishers brewing.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
the company ****** in many ***** so as to protect *** *******. While ***** there are **** valid **** ***** ****** free use of the ****** is approved *** all employees.
----- "It's all fun and games 'til somebody puts an eye out, then it's just funny."
Our environment is strange I saw/got the 22,000 file joke but there was a URL on CNN a month or two ago that had the word Onion in it (regarding that faux braindead satire news site..) and I got the pop-up stating Forbidden/Company Polices...
*(Hex-Deci and Binary URL encoding doesn't pass through our proxies either, Ah the wonders of Novell Border Manager)
I understand we actually buy the URL reject list from someone. The only thing that infuriates me to no end is that Thanagorim is blocked!!!! ARGH!!!!
Just add some GET parameters to the URL:
For example, if the url that is cached is "http://www.slashdot.org/"
change it to "http://www.slashdot.org/?asdf"
By changing the "asdf" portion to different random letters or numbers, you will force the proxy server to re-fetch the site (because the URL is different), meanwhile you will actually just get the latest version of the same page.
Hope this is useful for someone.
Enough said...
My internet connection is: DSL thru TELMEX, formerly a government owned telco, + Microsoft ISA server, domain based security with http only for the majority and a few extra ports for a few selected users. Noting special about content filters. Regular out of the box installation.
Not long ago, a
To my disbelief, whenever I tried to tourist around this site, THE WHOLE INTERNET SERVICE WOULD BLACKOUT FOR 5 MINUTES. I mean, this action would disconnect us from the internet (all the users sharing the DSL) on the spot!!!. I tried a few times, to eliminate the coincidence factor, but it did the same during the few days we were researching the reasons of this (political) oddity. I'm embarrased to say that my department is responsible of administering the proxy server, but at the end I had no answer...
I keep having nigthmares of Bill Gates calling home and asking me what was I expecting to find in that terrorist oriented website.
Cheers!
Of course I'm paying the (inappropriate in my opinion) fees. Do you think I'm stupid? I was sued by a coworker for allowing other pervert watching pornography on our equipment, do you think I'd like to be sued by Google now? The answer is: no, I most certainly would not.
Yes. Right. Stop asking. Are you Google's lawyer or what?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Wouldn't this rewriting violate copyrights? It seems that modification of copyrighted works like that (since they are effectively publishing them) would be against the law.
Damn straight and exactly what I was thinking. In fact, I searched for "copyright" to find your post.
No third party has a right to surreptitiously alter copyrighted material without the author's permission. If I think that the proper phrase to use is "fucked up", no born-again-Christian censorware writer has the right to change that to "messed up" prior to the reader seeing it. If your company doesn't want you to see naughty words, then they can block access to the offending sites, but they have no legal or moral right to change content written by others.
sorry for fucking that up on you.
Buddy works for a different company in a different state. And the company I work for has like 200,000 employees, it's unlikely that anyone could find "the" sysadmin if they needed to.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -- Homer Simpson
Humor, or clever flamebait. In any event, I applaud.
Maybe he's French. Or, maybe he is stupid.
No need to be so redundant, their one in the same.
Since I am the Master of the Proxy (at my company, at least), I control ALL!! You miserable cretins! Bow before my awesome censorship power!!
When their numbers dwindled from 50 to 8, the dwarves began to suspect Hungry.
Step 2: Install plink (part of putty) on your machine at work.
Step 3: Set up a tunnel with plink, change your browsers proxy to the port from that tunnel.
Step 4: Tunnel home and surf anywhere you want!
Works like a champ!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Dammit. I was hoping to get away with that. Yes, I am guilty. I mixed the Thought Police and the Ministry of Truth together to make a point. I really should not react to senseless comments on Slashdot when I am tired :/
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
For a short while I considered the possibility that Pan T. Hose, PhD.'s comments could be a joke, but I guess I am a sucker for flame bait. Anyway, I think I made some valid points...
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Some students at a German college made a web proxy experiment (page in German, feel free to use Babelfish). You have to love the s/Ministerprasident/Obersturmbahnfuhrer/ part...
Heh you must be the geek that fumbled the foul ball that pretty much cost the Cubs game 6 (and possibly the Series, the penant, etc.) Now THAT guy was a flute toting band dork. Possibly retarded too.
This is a simple issue of Corporate Rights.
1. It is their computer.
2. It is their network.
3. It is their monitor, it is their hard drive.
4. They paid for it, they can do what they want with it.
5. You are their whor^H^H^H^Hemployee.
6. They paid for you, they can do what they want with you.
Simply put, your rights as an employee are subservient to their rights as an employer in terms of the information you access in their emplyoy. Yes; you have rights over theirs when it comes to discrimination issues (age, gender, race, creed) but, in terms of information, censorship is entirely their right.
7. You have the right to leave at any time without notice and without fear of reprisal.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Yes, but I think the issue wasn't with the company editing any of their own employee's outgoing email. It was only with censoring incoming mail.
I have a personal issue with either one, incidently, but there's a considerable legal difference between the two.
While outside works (web pages or even emails) coming in to a company may well be copyrighted and illegal to modify without permission, it's still questionable if the employees' outgoing email (written on company time) is even their own copyrighted property. In most cases, companies already claim copyright to anything you invent/create while working for them - so they'd probably just say this extends to your email, too.
(Note, in all of this, I'm talking about United States law. I can't speak for the situation in other countries.)
That is indeed what I was talking about. Sorry if I wasn't clear about this. I, as the author of a number of web pages and nearly countless emails object to the illegal changes to my copyrighted works by corporate censors.
Of course, censorously changing outgoing mail might be illegal from another point of view. It may not be copyright infringement if you consider everything written during working hours as a work for hire. But it certainly is fraud if you send someone an email allegedly signed by some employee, but in fact modified after he sent it.
Just imagine what effect the creative insertion of not or even just a few zeroes can have...
Stephan
I lost this one...
interesting
Actually, no. Not at all. I don't force them to watch those sick pictures of disgustingly humiliated people. They like it. Therefore they are perverts. It is not my fault. This is a fact. If they don't want to be called perverts then why won't they stop being perverts in the first place?
I'll take the liberty to answer your question with another, much more interesting question: Don't you think that browsing their friend's recently-poseted photos of their hiking trip during the time I pay them to work is a little bit unfair, to say the very least? They get what they are asking for if you ask me.
Please... No one has ever told them it will be easy job. If they want to quit I have lots of other people waiting in the line. I'm not forcing anyone to work here, although I have to admit they will be lucky if they get even a web monkey job not violating the NDA they signed here. But they were not forced to sign it and that's what's important -- free will.
Somehow I highly doubt you'd get the required security clearance. Do you have a resume published on the web somewhere? I could see what I can do. (Especially if hiring you is good for me, if you follow my drift.)
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
> sorry for messing that up on you.
Oh no it's just fine I don't see the problem at all.
What do you mean?
(Note how my responce not only changes the words by as a result effects the content and meaning)
I don't actually exist.
Just call Ralph Nader. A massive lawsuit will straighten them out.
MDCPS (miami dade county public schools) blocks all email services, games and everything. Instead it returns a big page saying "X_STOP has blocked this page!" I cant check my yahoo mail, or any url with mail in it. We have been getting around it through proxy servers how ever. The computer kids, have been getting proxies servers and stuff, but they are constantly getting blocked.
Also a program called deepfreeze doesnt allow us to write files to the hd's. My programming teacher allows us to save our work to his windows server though.
Its not terrible though, my programming teacher gave us three pcs to put linux on and a server for them, so we play games and waste time on them. he wants samba on the server though so the other kids can use it, he doesnt trust microsoft but doesnt understand linux.
No, becaue of the lack of sick deviant nature of eating, as opposed to the very act of masturbating. (But it's a good strawman argument -- nice try.)
No, of course I don't.
Are you kidding? Do you really think that I allow them to do anything with our equipment which is not work related? Maybe I should also allow them to run DDoS attacks while we're at it?
What may be a "c00l 1337 pr0n" for you might as well be illegal in the eyes of the judge. It was a ground for legal action against me, bacause I provided the techical tools (i.e. the TCP/IP network connected to the Internet) which allowed sick perverted deviants to watch pornography in our lab. Please read the rest of this thread.
Nobody has ever needed to tell them how they were going to be treated because our employees are treated much better than before when they were on the test period for the first three months (at least those hired without my personal recommendation) when they were not paid and were constantly exploited by our full-time workers. Somehow they like our money. Do you think they are crying all the way to the bank? I don't think so.
Oh, please, for the love of god... You just lost a perfectly valid argument in the very second you introduced socialism to the discussion. You may compare anything to Hitler and Nazi Germany but the argument is completely lost.
If (and I sa
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Still I believe there is a huge difference between having a bad taste and being a perverted deviant, don't you think?
I'm glad I finally convinced you about that. (For the lame Slashdot filter: I don't care if I have enough number of characters per line -- what a stupid filter indeed.)
Fair enough. (For the lame Slashdot filter: I don't care if I have enough number of characters per line -- what a stupid filter indeed.)
Political correctness? Scattered throughout my post? Are you serious? Or is that another example of sarcasm of yours, which I once again fail to recognize?
Please don't call me like that. When did I say you mentioned masturbation? I was the one who mentioned it first and I thought this is what we were talking about. Haven't you read all of the comments in this thread?
Well, it doesn't. I thought I made it clear. (For the lame Slashdot filter: I don't care if I have enough number of characters per line -- what a stupid filter indeed.)
First of all I am replying from my home so this is not an issue. But second of all I would not violate the policy even if I did indeed post from work, because I am explicitly excluded from that point of our policy. So I could legally post to Slashdot from work if I wanted to and all I would need would be circumventing the firewall blocking Slashdot.
Once again, I am replying from my home but nonetheless the rules don't apply to me.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Porn "industry" be damned! I was talking about the real industry, not a bunch of perverted freaks calling their sick deviations a so called "industry" to justify their sins and feel better while they should be seeking professional help instead if you ask me. In the Real World watching pornography is unacceptable. Period. This is one of the most basic and widely accepted social norms.
Are you kidding me? Not socialist? And what do you think the "-zi" in Nazi stands for if not sozialistische? Please don't tell me (because I won't believe) that you had no idea that Nazi means Nationalsozialistische, from Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers Party), the infamous NSDAP, which Adolf Hitler changed the name of Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (German Workers Party) to, after becoming its leader. I hope it wasn't some outrageously stupid joke. One of my friends who had survived the Holocaust unfortunatelly passed away this year so I am a little bit sensitive to jokes about Anti-Semitism.
Of course not everything can be purchased, it was just an intellectual shorcut of mine. Some things you buy, other ones you lease, some other you license, et cetera. But these are details. The point is that you have to work to get anything and those things you get for your work I call a payment. I don't think anyone can really know the value of anything if one doesn't have to work hard to get it, be it material wealth, intellectual enlightenment, mystical illumination, sexual intercourse or platonic love -- anything. In my opinion only hard work can result in true and honest appreciation.
You are not dumb in my opinion, not at all. You might be somehow naive in your utopian
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
First of all I'm sorry that you had to wait so long for my reply. It is not true that I didn't wish to address your "incredibly valid arguments" as you said. I didn't know that you are awaiting my answers, since you posted a reply to LuYu's post instead of mine which would have resulted in Slashdot forum sending me a message informing me about your post. It was not the case. It was not until now when I accidentally found your post and now I am replying as soon as I can.
I didn't know I would ever have to say it in the first place. It may be hard to believe for you but I am not exactly proud of this shameful incident. I wish it hadn't ever happened. It's not something I particularly enjoy telling people about. But unfortunately it has happened and now all I can possibly do is making sure that it is absolutely impossible to ever happen again.
Of course there is a lot of adult pornography. Please excuse me if I take offense as this banally obvious statement of yours is clearly implying that I do not realize the most simple facts. (I hope offending me was not your intention though.) Contrary to what you might think, I believe that unlike child pornography, merely watching adult pornography in private should not result in prosecution. Being a deviant is not a crime, because such a person is violating only her own soul and body, and instead of a punishment we should offer our help to these people.
This is not the case though if the pornography is being watched in a public place like a place of work where other -- completely innocent -- people might see it by accident against their will. I believe absolutely no one -- adult or otherwise -- should ever be forced to watch those sick perverted materials.
I am not quite sure if I fully understand your intentions hidden behind this statement. Would you mind clarifying what did you mean which was not already stated in other points above?
Commenting these "incredibly valid arguments" as you keep calling them, I haven't ever said it was "related to censorship of the written word" but in fact it is related very closely. Pornography can use many shapes and forms -- namely photography, movies, audio recordings, paintings and last but not least, written text. As for someone being able to sue me "because they are pissed off" then, well, I'm not sure if "[being] pissed off" is a strong case for legal action. As for the DMCA, could you please quote a fragment you are refering to? Thank you.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
What are you talking about? Do I know you? Is that some kind of stupid joke?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Who are you? I have no idea what are you talking about. If you really know me then you should also know my email address instead of contacting me here on Slashdot.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
I belive this is something completely different than confirming to a journalist that some pervert was masturbating in the public place in a gov-sponsored lab. I don't have any friend named Sado Domina or whatever and therefore you not only spread obvious lies but you also waste the time of Slashdot readers. If you indeed know me then contact me privately. Otherwise, get lost and stop wasting my time.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
"Publically," eh? Fine. We both know you are bluffing. Oh, by the way, are you really that naive to think that I cannot find your identity if you post as "Anonymous Coward" on Slashdot? As for the video footage, if you knew the case you'd also know that this tape was being used as the main evinence in the court and as such was already in public domain. I can't believe you want to talk about it, it was years ago! Just get over it.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Sorry. I'm in the middle of a major depressive episode. I'll try to reply as soon as I am back in the hipomanic part of the spectrum. I'm really sorry but I just can't write anything with sense right now. I hate it when it happens but I can't help much. Sorry.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."