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Pornographic Spam And The Workplace
dolo666 writes "The BBC posted an article about how UK legal experts are warning businesses to take a more active role in the prevention of pornographic spam. If you get an explicit email, how exactly do you show it to your boss, without looking guilty yourself?"
A good first measure, especially if you are the guilty party, is to sign your boss up for lots of porn mailing lists.
Then, he/she will know it's perfectly normal to get up to 10 penis enlargement spams a day, and it has nothing to do with the way you surf the internet.
It's a joke, laugh.
Pornographic spam is quite a problem...
Anyone remember farm sluts?
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
If this applies to companies in the US at all, does anyone have the emails to all the employees at SCO? Get Linux out of the hot seat by forcing their legal team to deal with all the cases their employees will bring against them!
Sadly enough, I would not be amazed if this underhanded tactic would actually work...
That's scary.
We monitor ALL traffic entering and exiting our network.
We don't hassle people about porno spam or the occasional mis-navigation to www..com. It's pretty obvious when someone is really surfing porn or doing anything else inappropriate.
I don't think it's clear at all. Should an employer be responsible because someone decides to randomly mail dead-tree copies of porn magazines to their employees ? Or because some individual decides to make a random sexually explicit phone call to one of their phone numberS ?
(IANAL, if in the above situations employers *are* supposed to be responsible, then it's just another good example of the stupidity of the law.)
If you get an explicit email, how exactly do you show it to your boss, without looking guilty yourself?
Silly! You don't show this to your boss! If I were you, I'd let the issue "bubble up" to management without putting a bullseye on my shirt. How to do this? Use the time-honored method of watercooler smalltalk.
Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. You met your coworkers there any chat about whatever. Occasionally you use that time to tentatively throw out an issue that bugs you and see if anyone else latches on to it.
Bob: 'Morning Guy. 'Morning Sally.Sally: 'Morning boys!
Guy: Hey everyone. How's things going?
Bob: I just spent an hour cleaning up the code after that asshat Maurice committed a bunch of stuff that caused compiler warnings. Sure, they're not strictly errors but still we should strive to write good code. That really bugs me.
Sally: Yeah? Well I got to work 30 minutes late today because there was an accident. It had been moved well off the road so there wasn't any reason for a slowdown in traffic. Except, of course, the fact that every little shithead had to gawk at other people's misery. *That* is what really bugs me.
Guy: You know what really bugs me? All that goat porn spam that floods my Inbox. I mean, I like to look at naked girls like everyone but that stuff is sick! You know what I'm talking about?
Bob: *cough*
Sally: Um, I've got to go. Just remembered a meeting I'm supposed to be at. See you later, Bob.
Mark my words: a few watercooler conversations like this and sooner or later word of the problem will trickle on up to management.
Hope this helps,
GMD
watch this
Read the article...
It seems anti-spam vendors are saying companies could be sued for emotional damage if they don't block spam.
I don't know about the UK courts, but I could just see this one going to court in Canada...
Plaintiff: Someone outside the company emailed me an ad for porn and it hurt my feelings so much I suffered a financial loss.Judge: You clearly have psychological issues that are not the fault of your employer. Seek counselling. Case Dismissed.
IANAL
The part about "looking guilty yourself" refers to the fact that many bosses are going to blame you for being on the spammers email list. As stated in the article, there are plenty of reasons (not necessarily good ones) for assuming that receiving pornographic spam is the end result of visiting porn sites on company time. A lot of bosses aren't even aware of the email harvesting that spam-bots do. If you start telling your boss "I'm receiving a lot of porno spam" and no one else is telling them that, a typical PHB -- consciously or unconscously looking to minimze their work and/or liability -- is going to assume you're the only one receiving this stuff. It has nothing to do with forwarding the actual content to your superior.
GMD
watch this
If you get an explicit email, how exactly do you show it to your boss, without looking guilty yourself?
why would you be showing your boss your spam?
* delete it upon arrival
* use some spam filtering software of some sort, forward the spam to him/her
* don't let your work email get onto the internet unless you're ready for lots of porn spam
* virtually everyone gets porn spam, don't worry too much.
1)The UK's new and shiny anti-spam legislation will only protect personal inboxes, not those of businesses. This effectively means that workers have not legal protection against inbox pornography
2) Anyone with a corporate email address that's been around for a while is likely to get 90% spam or more, assuming the company doesn't filter their mail. Especially as these are often unmunged on the web.
3) You have to read your email to do your job.
In other words, employees have no choice but to look at porn in order to do their work. In that situation, the primary duty of the company is to care for their employees. My university account gets tonnes of explicit email, some of which (like bestiality) is still sort of illegal in the UK. If I had to read it to do my job, i'd be pretty pissed off.
Long run, I hope companies will try and pass any incurred costs to the spammers themselves via civil action. Hopefully, it'll help unite the business community against spam.
These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined. -- Homer Simpson
About a year ago I had a nasty surprise. I cleaned out my mailbox. Once finished, I got up to get a drink. When I came back, there was a picture on the preview pane of a woman who was... involved... with a horse. Since my mailbox was clear, it displayed the first message that came up. That bothered the hell out of me. I doubt that any of the women in the office would have assumed it was porn spam if they had walked by at that moment.
Ugh. Yeah you gotta be careful. Even though I doubt I would have lost my job over it (I work with understanding people), the thought of disturbing one of my coworkers really bothers me.
"Derp de derp."
That's just it -- forwarding it to the local IT guy (unless you're the type of user that makes an ass of himself) explaining that you haven't a clue as to where they got your email, etc would be enough to CYA.
As for "assuming that receiving pornographic spam is the end result of visiting porn sites on company time" - uhm, simply visiting a pr0n site while on the clock isn't going to instantly give someone your email address.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
There are two immediately obvious options on our mail server. Halfway down the back of the case, there's a blue cable with an RJ-45 Jack, and at the top of the case there's a black cable with a 3-holed trapezoidal plug. Unplug either of these, and you'll block 100% of spam coming into the server.
Maybe its just me, but it seems that no one has any sort of skin these days. At the first sign of anything that might offend them, they scream, "sue!" Why don't people toughen up a bit and realize that they are going to be exposed to things that may be contrary to thier sensabilities? You have an email address, and its on the corporate web site? Then you should expect that its going to get spammed at some point, and some of it may be offensive. Delete it, deal with it, and move on for fucks sake! There is a great big world out there, and most of it doesn't give a tinker's damn about you. The rest of it just wants your money, if you can't handle a little bit of emotional distress now and again, how do you ever expect to survive?
Sorry for the rant, but people without the slightest bit of ability to cope with stress piss me off. I have four words for the people involved with this sort of lawsuit, FUCKING DEAL WITH IT!!!
Ah, I feel better. Please forward all complaints to: FuckYou@I.Do.Not.Care.com
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
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~==>RocketSHE