Slashdot Mirror
U.S. Government Crippled by Sex, Gaming Sites
BobB writes "The U.S. Department of the Interior's inspector general has released a report that says department employees are wasting their taxpayer-funded work time going to prohibited web sites. Some of these sites relate to sex, computer games, gambling and auctions. The study found that almost $2 billion a year in productivity was being lost to these 'excessive indulgences.'" From the article: "Computer-use logs revealed more than 4,732 entries relating to sexually explicit Web sites and gambling sites. Some computers accessed sex sites for 30 to 60 minutes during the test period. More than 1 million log entries were discovered indicating 7,763 Department computer users spent 2,004-plus hours accessing game and auction sites. Extrapolated over the year, that could account for 100,000 lost work hours. Put another way, this would equal 50 full-time employees doing nothing but surfing online game and auction sites."
In a couple of prior jobs executives and managers were the ones caught with gobs of pr0n on their computers. On was actually walked out the door while we all watched, his computer had been examined by the techs and was crammed with child pr0n. Dunno if he was prosecuted, I certainly hope so.
We have logs of our sites activities, too, which can be linked directly to users. I haven't heard of anyone getting the dusting for it, possibly because half the staff in Personnel are surfing while their boss tells me how busy they are and can't do some work which truly belongs to their department.
Even I do a little surfing, but usually during breaks or while waiting for some task to run.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Put another way, this would equal 50 full-time employees doing nothing but surfing online game and auction sites."
I just have one question: are they taking applications?
Monstar L
How many .gov hits are hitting /. every day?
I'm one of those 50.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
It's great and all that we hear there are 50 full-time employees worth of waste, but out of how many employees total? I'll bet you can find as much waste in even some large, successful companies.
Too much time on sex and gambling instead of reading slashdot
err...wait a sec
"The study found that almost $2 Billion a year in productivity was being lost to these 'excessive indulgences'"
How fast does $2 Billion get used in Iraq? I'm all for efficiency, but lets have it across the board.
Those bondage sites were just research for the CIA's "rendition" program.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Thank God I'm not wasting all of my time surfing web sites.
(reload)(reload)(reload)(reload)Yay, new article!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
...every one of the employees would be fired. However, in the US government these days, not doing anything seems to be the norm.
All productivity in the software industry ground to a halt as geeks flocked to shlashdot to check out the story about the decrease in productivity.
I know LOTS of people that use their lunch hour to surf the net or stay late and play video games after 5PM. I don't consider that unethical.
Similarly, I don't think it is wrong to spend 15 minutes checking out an ebay auction or reading your personal email, while some addict goes outside and smokes a ciggarette/takes a coffee break.
Without more information, this looks like a rabble rousing report instead of something usefull.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Well instead of monitoring this issue, why don't they get some proxy servers and firewalls running to stop them. Corporations have been doing this since the series of tubes was invented.
http://religiousfreaks.com/You want me to take a usage study conducted by the same government that made a guy who thinks the internet is a bunch of tubes in charge of regulating it seriously?
I bet this report doesn't take into account people having multiple browsers or tabs open at the same time. Hell, if you looked at my logs it would look like all I did was surf slashdot all day. I can work and keep a tab for breaks open at the same time.
Did anyone else do a double take after reading the first half of this title? US Gov. crippled by sex had me going "Meh, not all that...WHAT!?" Here's a question though, how many full time workers would have to be checking on those 50 workers internetting to equal the amount of man-hours they spent checking this? Face facts, if you give people a PC with an internet connection, they're gonna go where they want if they have some free time.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
sure is jealous of the computer.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
OMG you guys. like why are there not like filters for the government employees? i mean my school does it. jeez they should be suspended! j/k
i'm certain that before the www there was just as much time wasting going on on just as many useless pursuits (cards, crossword puzzles, etc). if you have a job to do, and it doesn't get done, someone notices. but if you have downtime, which frequently happens in any large bureacracy, you waste your time with pointless pursuits. true in 1806, true in 2006
it's just that logfiles make it easy to actually quantify this lost productivity for the first time. but in fact, one could make the case that the internet allows users to waste their time more... um... efficiently (snicker)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This article should go into the dictionary as the definition of the word ironic.
Can anyone please identify when a government agency should have employees using government equipment on government time to fundraise for external organizations? I can't think of any examples where it should be legally sanctioned and/or permissible by bureau policy.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Taxpayers will be a lot happier.
Of course, if these workers have all that time left to surf the web, maybe they're redundant. Then again, if you take that route and start laying off, then you wind up with not enough trained workers during crunch time.
Yup. The practical solution is the middle ground: establish a website whitelist including only essential sites to look at, and give 'em books to read. In fact, what I did as a manager was reach a compromise by adding gutenberg.org and slashdot to the whitelist; but slashdot is a probationary option (if it's abused, it'll go away).
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I work at a big bank and management here has made no bones about firing people because of internet usage. It's because of people like this that they act draconian about it and don't even allow us to check the weather. Thank god for being able to get around the network with good ole dial-up.
these numbers are horrifically bloated. Say one person is shown a funny video on lets say a site which also shows some boobies (That site is deemed sexual). He shows a bunch of his cube-mates, they laugh a bit, than go back to work. Say half of these people leave the window burried for 30, 60, 90, 120, min while going to lunch, doing actual work, meetings etc. Odds are they view that as 30,60,90,120 min of surfing p0rn on some XXX site because the banners spam refresh.
...why work real hard?
The study found that almost $2 Billion a year in productivity was being lost to these 'excessive indulgences'.... Put another way, this would equal 50 full-time employees doing nothing but surfing online game and auction sites.
I didn't RTFA, but this would imply that those 50 full time employees have a bill + production rate of $40,000,000/year. Or roughly $20,000 dollars an hour. Unless the 50 employees they are talking about are lobbyist, I just don't see this as accurate.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
These studies all operate on the "presumption" that if they didn't "surf the web", they would be more productive. If they didn't have the Web, they would find some other way to occupy their time, and it most probably would not be work related.
If they were bored, who knows what kind of crap they'd pull on taxpayers.
>
> How fast does $2 Billion get used in Iraq? I'm all for efficiency, but lets have it across the board.
A better question: What economic output are these DOI employees (and for that matter, our mercenaries working for private contractors at 5-10 times the expense of an enlisted serviceman/woman) supposed to be creating that's worth $2B per year? In order to speak meaningfully of productivity, one first must be in the business of producing stuff.
This is government work. Nothing's being produced, only consumed.
I do sometimes surf at work. I only do it when I am waiting for something or on my break. I used to work for a company where I would surf all the time because I was on the night shift and it was quiet and I did not have much else to do. I know that one of the managers there just surfed porn all day and that was pretty much it. If the government wanted to keep the emplayees from surfing porn or other such sites they can use a proxy to restrict where the users go.
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.- Douglas Adams
As per the old jokes:
..and..
Q. How many people work for the government?
A. About half of them.
Q. What do you get when you put 50 lesbians and 50 gov't workers in the same room?
A. 100 people who don't do dick.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
This explains the recent bill to ban online gambling.
Since they apparently didn't correlate it to breaks and lunches and stuff.
I wonder how many full-time-employee-equivalents it would take to cover all of the time that DOI employees spend eating, in the restroom, etc? And are those crises too?
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
Total all the "hours" spent surfing junk sites ... for 100,000 employees ... and even at 6 minutes a day you'd have 600,000 minutes = 10,000 hours = 416 hours = 52 employees working 8 hour shifts.
Now, for 50,000 employees, they'd have to spend 12 minutes out of an 8 hour day to get those numbers.
25,000 employees would require 24 minutes out of an 8 hour day.
And so forth. These "statistics" are meaningless without knowing how many TOTAL employees there are and what the mean and median are. Are there 10,000 employees and 5 of them spend 10 hours a day surfing junk while everyone thinks they're working? And the rest of the "hours" are people surfing junk sites during lunch?
Send all Internet connections thru proxies. Hire a couple of admins who have the job -- and nothing else -- of reviewing logs and applying content filters. Just flat out block porn, auction sites, non-official e-mail/webmail, stock/investment, gambling and sports sites. Start working down from there.
Post a policy, make everyone attend an "awareness" class, make them sign off on it. Make sure they all understand they are being watched and this sort of thing won't be tolerated.
Have the policy contain some teeth. Warn people on the first instance, reprimand on the following, suspend on #3 and FIRE THEM on #4. Make the termination public -- tell the rest of the staff why that person is no longer with you.
Apply it fairly, up and down the chain, from the Department Head all the way down to the janitors.
I'd also suggest taking inventory of what software people NEED to use for their daily jobs and then locking the system down so they can't install other software. Terminal services (Citrix, LTSP, whatever) is an excellent choice for non-power users.
Will it be 100% effective? No, of course not. But it will make a major dent in the problem. I've guided several financial institutions thru this exact process and it works.
Hospitals and health care institutions are a different animal. Nothing is more entertaining than watching some poor net admin try and tell a Doctor (aka GOD) that he can't do that. Heh. Subtler means are necessary...
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Haven't these people ever heard of an access control list before? Really now.
Although the report is likely accurate, I think it is too easy to see internet browsing as loss productivity. I think a useful report should also include how much productivity is gained by providing uncontrolled internet access. Furthermore, how many of us are multitasking in a computing environment?
/.
For example. I may be browsing through eBay for an hour, while I am doing some tech writing, and also doing some sys admin tasks.
I think the report is too narrowly focused, but at the same time it wouldn't hurt to set up site-blocking tools to reduce the temptation to goof off too much.
Like posting to
But then again the cost of internet access control software may cost more than loss productivity too. It ain't cheap stuff!
Why is it implicitly assumed that if they weren't able to go to those websites they would be working? People have always wasted time at work, staring out of the window if nothing else. I suspect nothing has changed but our ability to find out what people are actually doing all day.
If it wasn't being wasted on unethical activities, that would be enough money to fund an additional tap on every American phone.
2 billion dollars of productivity lost, 100,000 hours per year being wasted... $20,000 per hour?
How do they know when someone was on a site for 30-60 minutes? My browser (Mozilla) always has a tab open to /. Would it show that I surf 24/7?
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
Man I'd hate to think if they counted the hours I spend reading /. Sure, Sure I can tell them that it's all research, I might even get away with it. I guess it's only a matter of time until I reach the time out error on my web browser.
Back when I did IT work for a certain government agency, I'd often have to clean porn dialers, viruses and spyware off users' machines, all obviously the result of people browsing inappropriate sites at work. We even had to fire a few individuals for using the office T1 to swap songs on Napster (this was back when Napster was both popular and illegal). This sort of behavior wouldn't suprise me at the typical office, but many of these individuals were in their 40s or 50s and had Masters degrees/doctorates and made high 5 digit (or even six digit) salaries, with good medical and benefits. It suprised me that so many of the engineers and other govt. employees would waste so much time and basically damage government property at work instead of waiting until they got home to do it - it's not like they couldn't afford their own computer and internet connection. Often the stupid things they did would prevent them from using the machine to actually get work done, because the software they had installed impaired the operation of the system.
:)
And strangely enough, in my free time while administering some fairly sizable gaming forums, I've actually had to ban users with hostmasks indicating they were using government internet connections. I even went to the trouble of tracking down the name of one individual and contacting their boss about their behavior. It's suprising how badly some professionals will behave at work when they think nobody's watching.
(And yes, IT is watching you. Always watching.)
Boy am I glad I don't work in IT anymore.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
I know few persones that will click on any links they see in all of those SPAM email they get...
I bet that most of that time spent on those sex and games site are just b/c lots of people just don't understand what SPAM emails are...
And not Big Game sites?
Think about it. Game - as in hunting - is part of the purview of the Deptartment of the Interior.
Not sure about the Gambling though.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
$2 Billion a year / 50 full time employees = $40 million per year average salary!
Sign me up!
So out of 14,000,000 work hours, 100,000 are lost to frivolous web browsing? That's less than 1%, or less than 5 minutes per person per day. That's remarkably low; the government should be congratulated on effectively policing internet use. The numbers only look big because there are so many employees in the study.
You have to wonder if some are park rangers, kind of lonely (sex sites), who like to play poker over the net since the next human is 500 miles away.
Ah, bet you forgot that they're part of the Department of the Interior, didn't you?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
We're allowed to surf the net whenever we want. They don't ca [DTR NO CARRIER]
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Lets look at the numbers. Over a week they counted about 7,000 employees going to illicit sites. This represents about than 1% of the 70,000 employees of the DOI. Furthermore they found that these employees spent 2000 hours on these illicit sites, or perhaps 15 minutes a day during the test week.
From these stated fact, they found three interesting things. First, the wasted time represented 50 employees, or less than 0.1% of the workforce. Second they found that the internet use represented about 24 hours of internet use, presumable bandwidth. They then took this 24 hour number and, presumable, combined it with the total budget of the DOI, 10.4 billion, realized that 24 hours was one fifth of a week, and came up with 2 billion dollars in loss.
So here is what we have. 1% of the employees, wasting 0.1% of the potential productive time of the DOI, uses 20% of the budget. This result does not indicate a problem with the employees, but a fundamental issue with the process of budgeting and managing money. Any structure that exposes 20% of the budget to risk due to the actions of 1% of the employees is surely inadequate.
Now, the article did state that 'some' computers were accessing sites that would normally be considered uncool for work, and certainly those few people at those 'some' computer can be handled by management, unless those people are themselves high ranking officials that cannot be easily reprimanded. One wonders why those 'some' computers are even allowed to go to those sites.
In the end it shows the lack of logical skills possessed by the average reporter, and, i fear, by posting it on /., the lack of logic skills of the average geek..
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I am APPALLED and OUTRAGED at this unauthorized government subsidy!
I demand that they hire 50 more employees to surf my sites to even the playing field.
"You have liberated me from thought."
Because I would have skewed those numbers way up.
Game... blouses.
The problem is most of these logging systems cannot distinguish from legitimate browser surfing from spyware, bots, dialers, malware etc.
No I certainly do not blame the users for having to deal with insecure software provided by paid third party vendors. I don't care what you think it is simply not the users fault if their machine gets owned, the responsible
party is the software vendor.
Got Code?
Couple of projectors in very public places running something like DriftNet which sniffs network and displays passing image files, and combining user's name and photo with the image.... Could be fun....
Nothing like a public humiliation.... Of course the flip side is people intentionally trying to make it on there....
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
Stock the break room with hookers and blackjack.
Same problem across the board. If we learned anything from the Clinton years, it's the desperate need for a White House bordello.
-kgj
-kgj
With Foley gone that number should be cut in half.
Put another way, this would equal 50 full-time employees doing nothing but surfing online game and auction sites. This article must have been posted by a Government employee, considering the obtuse view of the statistics.
A less jaded statistic would be:
7,763 Computers / 100,000 lost work hours in a year = 12.9 hours per year per computer terminal.
So, with an average of 50 work weeks, 40 hours per day, thats 2000 hours/12.9 hours, or a total average waste of 0.6% of their work time. And this is without considering breaks, lunch time or pre/post work hours. If this data is accurate, I'd bet people spend more time on personal phone calls, daydreaming, doodling or just plain screwing the pooch than they do looking at boobies or shooting aliens. But that won't stop some dope of a politician from turning into a soapbox issue, wasting $$$$ of better-spent money on studies and easily-broken/obtuse preventative measures, and some poor dude getting sacked for mistyping a URL (well, so he says).
Of course, that said, the number seems incredibly low.
Are you sure it wasn't referring to web pages?
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
The only limits on the growth of a bureaucracy are the competence of the denizens.
- Smoke breaks every 15 minutes
- Judicious use of the restroom (with porno mag in hand)
- Trips to the store (you know to buy stuff for work and just about anything else you can do while not in the office)
So the point is that time wasted surfing websites is probably not any worse then other time wasted and all these things are not cummulative. I mean at some point your boss is going to notice if you don't get a single thing done in a given week.A couple of years back when I was just leaving a job, they put in a picture scanning device that was able to retrieve pics from the data stream and pull out skin pics. It was just installed as a test at the time and it was a pretty cool device. They were very surprised by the amount of skin people were looking at (this is a government agency btw) and in one or two cases, what they found forced the government folks to take action against two employees. I suspect it was child porn since they were just laughing at the regular porn I saw.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
While visiting these pOrn sites they infect their PC's with spyware/adware and all kinds of junk, helping the spread of malicious software, putting everyone on their mailing list at risk and indirectly help the distribution of spam which fills our inboxes day after day, eating up valuable bandwidth. (These idiots don't even know they are putting their own online security at risk by visiting these immoral, spyware infested web sites) http://www.cybertopcops.com/
www.cybertopcops.com
"Put another way, this would equal 50 full-time employees doing nothing but surfing online game and auction sites."
Normally I'm not in favor of pointless job creation schemes but I wouldn't mind applying for one of those jobs!
Meh, They'll probably get out-sourced to India!
It isn't a feeble attempt to protect me from myself, but a way to force payment processing companies to keep Government workers away from online gambling sites . . . . so why no anti-internet porn bill? One that passed, I mean.
Apparently they don't have to do anything.
If you can log the traffic, you can block it.
E.G. The United states spends 1million hours per year blinking -- Just think how much time we could save if we could outlaw blinking
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Come on, this isn't rocket science.
It has been my experience that people goof off most at work when they have nothing else to do.
So what they need to do is find more work for them or fire 50-100 of there full time employees for surfing the net to much and and not replace them, problem solved.
Saying that the Government is crippled due to this is like saying a comatose parapalegic is crippled by a zit.
The porn and gambling overlay is just stupid. How many people waste equal amounts of time on cute puppies, lip syncing asians, or shopping for deals? Porn and gambling just happen. Almost anybody's work computer has stumbled on a popup that shows Jessica Simpson or a Poker site. This is a really misleading study and snippet.
In a New Report on Reports it was reported that reports are a waste of time and money. Reportedly the report reporter was unavailable for further reporting.
Did anyone see the last South Park? el oh el
Best logical deduction I've heard in months.
I don't know if it still is, but it used to be once you got a civil service job, you were set. No layoffs, and very difficult to fire you.
Well, now if you get caught "misusing government resources" not only can you be fired but possibly prosecuted.
So how about it managers and directors? Do you have the balls to fire people for misusing government resources?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"Some computers accessed sex sites for 30 to 60 minutes during the test period."
Wow. These guys are slow!
And they came to that conclusion just by looking at Congressman Foley's computer alone! Wait until they get to the rest of the government,... ;-)
I bet Dubya sits in the oval office looking at naked Chimpanzees in flightsuits,... :-)
In a 30-60 minute test period, 80% of all slashdot views came during business hours from employee workstations. Slashdot now accounts for $50 million/year annual lost productivity, and the trend is continuing to grow.
That is excellent for firing that annoying dude in the office next door. When he is off.. surf to couple of really bad porn sites on his computer and then ring the inspection. Now he is wasted for good. Jeeez is it that simple?
:-(.
Well, that is pure evil, but kinda unpreventable
The original report actually says $2 million ("$2,027,887.68"), not $2 billion:
http://www.doioig.gov/upload/InternetUsage1.txt
The space unintentionally left unblank.
A few people have mentioned this, but I can't believe it's not the first response from everyone. How the hell is it that someone is supplying unrestricted access to the Net? Doesn't everyone operate behind a firewall and web proxy with a control list/filter policy and have employees sign an acceptable usage policy? I've worked in IT for 12 years now, and since Internet access became ubiquitous around '99/'00 I've never worked somewhere that didn't filter web access. I can't fathom not doing so. I'd have to ask "Are you defective?".
As for the specific report, (Obligatory) Lies -> Damn lies -> Statistics, and 75% of all statistics are made up.
Put another way, this would equal 50 full-time employees doing nothing but surfing online game and auction sites.
If you look at the numbers like that, I'm sure theres a few thousand people being paid by the federal govt to take shits. I don't see the point in reworking numbers like that.
Quick, somebody send Dubya an email loaded with urls to sex sites, eBay, and games, before he does something else.
For that matter, send one to Congress as well, but I think we know that we can dispense with the eBay and gaming links on that one.
This government is not nearly crippled enough.
$2 billion a year... 50 full-time employees...
Who the heck at the Department of the Interior are we paying $40 million a year!?!?
4,732 Entries - that could just be from one user accessing a site or two 30 - 60 minutes apart every day. Not to trivialize it, but they aren't telling the whole story - our firewall logs every item on a given page. Just pulling up slashdot and replying can pull up a significant number of entries.
Just imagine your "typical" porn site - or google search with safe-search turned off. That's a lot of items.
From above, this comes to 15 minutes per week, or 0.6% of each worker's time. In corporate America these days, blaming all inefficiencies on the bottom-level employees seems to be the norm. But try and poke at your pocket calculator a bit before going on your rampage.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
How much money is wasted sending IMs to 16 year old boys? On average?
...and that was just Mark Foley!
...the researchers determined that all the sex sites were only accessed by Congressman Mark Foley (R - FL). They further commented, "well, that problem appears to be solved". :-)
</troll>
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
So they're losing some productivity? Well they could compensate by making online gaambling legal in USA and scoring a whole lot of tax.
Of course there are those that argue that it is more productive for these people to be surfing pron than doing real work (which, for public service desk-jockeys normallys means drowning productive members of society in red tape).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Instead of surfing, they would just take coffee break, or bathroom break, or cigarette break, or jab in the hallway...
People have been wasting time since the idea of "job" was invented.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
When I saw this headline on my phone's RSS reader, I read it as: "U.S. Government Crippled by Sex, Gaming Sites, Slashdot". haha.
I bet all those log entries are from visiting their own sites: You all know those flashy pr0n advertisements, don't you? The government staff themselves hid secret pr0n-ads in their webpage during the evaluation period to generate requests. You know it's gotta be true! =)
I suppose by the time I post this someone else will have already pointed it out, but just in case...
/., the lack of logic skills of the average geek..
Over a week they counted about 7,000 employees going to illicit sites. This represents about than 1% of the 70,000 employees of the DOI.
Actually, it represents 10% according to your figures. [7000/70000=.10]
Also, the loss they report is 2,027,887. That's two million, not billion, dollars....
In the end it shows the lack of logical skills possessed by the average reporter, and, i fear, by posting it on
Err.........
Also, the loss they report is 2,027,887. That's two million, not billion, dollars....
Now I have to admit to reading the article.
You are simply gone the next day and "all questions must be referred to HR".
They are very aggressive about this kinda stuff because otherwise their insurance will go through the roof.
---
And yes.. I am home sick today.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
If the equivalent of merely 50 government employees were squandering my tax dollars, I'd be pleased. It's a small price to pay to keep them gainfully employed.
and only 50 of them are sitting around doing nothing all day? That's a hell of a lot better than most work places I've experienced.
h e_Interior
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Department_of_t
The study found that almost $2 Billion a year in productivity was being lost to these 'excessive indulgences'. ...this would equal 50 full-time employees doing nothing but surfing online game and auction sites.
50 people make $2,000,000,000 a year at an average salary of $40,000,000? Something's fishy.
How much is left for the rest of the government employees? ;)
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
How many of these hits were adware infested win95 PCs. We are talking about government systems here, and I am hesitant to believe that a report like this was carried out with such an attention to detail and covering all known variables. In the unlikely scenario that someone doing a statistical study actually payed full attention to detail (which would probably be a first), and even if these people did intentionally visit the sites on the job, you can bet they were managers/executives in which case they don't classify as people, but more like greater demons. Nothing to see here unless they happen to post some good pr0n links.
Put another way, this would equal 50 full-time employees doing nothing but surfing online game and auction sites.
Wow. I've been in places where all 100 employees did nothing but that and porn, so they must have cost the company $4 billion, which is close to the GDP of the little country that company was in. I'm in awe of the power of laziness.
Meanwhile I suggest that those civil servants get their butts back in gear. It was you dept. that got online gambling banned, you clowns. This is not funny. How dare you waste my tax money? Isn't it enough that billions of dollars of MY tax money is going into cluster bombs that kill kids around the world, now I learn that the money is being wasted on the breaking of laws by the government execs who made them? I'm f*cking furious!
We, of the corporate world, can waste money all we like, because we only take money from customers when we produce. You lazy b*stards can't, because you take our money anyway. You have been warned.
"I've been asked to distribute the new regulations regarding office pool displays. The enclosed memo is a new subchapter of the EBGOC Procedure Manual replacing the old subchaper entitled PHYSICAL PLAN/CALIFORNIA/LOS ANGELES/BUILDINGS/OFFICE AREAS/PHYSICAL LAYOUT REGULATIONS/EMPLOYEE INPUT/GROUPACTIVITES.
The old subchapter was a flat prohibition on the use of office space or time for "pool" activities of any kind, whether permanent (e.g.. coffee pool) or one-time (e.g., birthday parties).
This prohibition still applies, but a single one-time exception has now been made for any office that wishes to pursue a joint bathroom tissure strategy...."
-- QED
This sort of thing gives some justification for enforcing the .xxx domain.
.xxx at the corporate firewall and a big part of your problem goes away.
Simply block
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
We even had to fire a few individuals for using the office T1 to swap songs on Napster (this was back when Napster was both popular and illegal).
See, now, when my office had this problem back in the days of True Napster, they just emailed everybody to say that the internet usage policy banned this sort of thing, and the problem went away without them losing any valuable, trained employees.
That's the difference between companies that value their workers and those that seem them as a commodity.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Everyone knows you can't possibly surf a website while conducting business on the phone.
Also, how do they know you're on the site for 30-60 minutes? If I open a website, then minimize it or leave it up with my screen locked, is it clocking that time? Hell, I could be "surfing the web for 8 hours a day".
4,000 -7,000 entries sounds like a lot, but lets break that down. I got to site A, which pulls adds for sites B and C. Is their system going to log that as 1 site or 3? I would need to know all of the details before I even thought about giving this study any credibility.
If you mod me down, I shall become less powerful than you could possibly imagine.
You mean the federal government is wasteful and inefficient? You mean they don't work hard?
My best friend and my Uncle have been working for the government for years. It's pretty much worse than you've ever heard (and I've heard bad. "I write one or two memos a week and make 6 figures." "There is a cot in the back room, they sleep on the job in shifts"
It's infuriating and why I tend to vote for anyone I think will cut government programs regardless of party. This story of slashdot is nothing compared to what's going on.
One of my largest clients once realized they were paying a LOT for outbound phone calls. Even local ones got their attention, because they needed to pay for the outbound lines to support the traffic. And while they were a 24x7 operation, the telecomm manager thought their call volume late night and early morning was excessive.
He ran simple report, listing the top 10 numbers dialed. Surprise! The #1 number called?
xxx-xxx-0000. The local Gay and Lesbian HotLine. Interesting.
He circulated the report, with just phone numbers, at the next management meeting, and asked them to consider it and come back next month with ideas for managing phone costs.
Now, I suspect it took all of 15 minutes for those managers to figure out what the phone number was. And knowing that the report could list the most popular numbers, some managers figured the next report would list who was calling those numbers. And no manager wanted anyone on their staff calling that number all hours of the day and night.
Next month, the telecom manager was happy to report that not only had usage gone down, but they had been able to avoid buying $100,000 worth of line cards to expand the switch, and would be considering the trend and perhaps turning off some $3,000 a month worth of dial lines.
That phone number didn't make the top 100 report. Ever again.
Just posting the logs without names or IP addresses might go some ways towards changing behavior. A little peer pressure works sometimes.
The second month's posting would probably have to include specific site names, and userIDs. I'm assuming government employees are largely without shame.
If nothing else, it would drive them all to surf on their cell phones, wasting several times more work hours waiting for the screen to refresh.
Just a thought, or two.
-rick
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Our government is "crippled" by people wasting time on taboo web surfing? Give me a break. This is a distraction from far more serious issues.
The Senate just voted unanimously to approve another $70 billion for the Iraq war and a record $484 annual budget for Pentagon (the House approved it 394-to-22). Now THAT is a waste of money, and THAT is why there are no funds for programs a majority of Americans support, like universal health care, increasing money for schools, jobs and paying everyone a living wage.
How do 50 full-time web-surfing employees constitute crippling the government?
TT
Where I used to work in the government I would have to agree that a lot of time is wasted on the internet. Even when there is work to be done people are still surfing the net. Block the sites? Get a good filter? Most people know how to get around it or know someone that is willing to show them. Also the people that are set to monitor and stop such behavior are either overwhelmed with the amount of it or contributing to the hours spent. Work doesn't get done and people notice, but will they take the internet away? No because the one thing us government workers hate more than work itself is complaining about our co-workers who will not be fired, will not be punished, and most likely will get promoted ahead of us simply because they probably know somebody.
However, this happens in the real world; outside the government (except wher eever Mayor Bloomberg may see you). It actually is probably worse in the real world because so many people get into back office jobs where they really are responsible for themselves. I used to play many a game with friends while they worked simply because they had no direct supervisor near them. Hell I knew a guy that would close the PC Repair shop he worked at simply to get something done in game (Dark Ages of Camelot). Even now that I've gone back to school I watch as half my class every day surfs the net or plays little games until the teacher catches them... and this school has some rough filters.
But still surfing the internet... people are still right there at their workstation. How much time is lost to the true bane of the workplace... SMOKERS!? I actually kept a log of how long smokers were leaving my old job because I was plain sick of getting the raw end in the morning meetings because work wasn't done. I was told I can't stop them from smoking because it's not their fault the smoking area is all the way downstairs and outside. What horse crap. Not to mention the stank breath smokers have and their generally piss poor attitude when they don't get a smoke break in.
While we're at it lets count up how much time people waste at the "water cooler" or how time most bosses waste getting people just to work. All lost work hours. It's easy to blame the internet for lost productivity because the higher ups think they have some sort of control over it.
WTF?! Do they think the internet's a freakin' truck that they can just dump their sex or gaming sites on?!
-Rich
The Australian Dept. of Social Security or Centrelink recently implemented 100% electronic files. Shortly after this, they had a bunch of staff fired for in-appropriately accessing confidential material. Did computers create this problem? No. Computer based systems meant that staff were no-longer able to grab paper files and read them without leaving a trace of them doing so.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
And yes, there are people who actually sit around all day and surf the web instead of doing work. There are also people who basically go for 20 minute walks every hour or sit around reading a book, doing sudoku puzzles, knitting, whatever.
The Internet isn't the problem here; the problem is that it's an environment where there are little to no repercussions for slacking off all day. Hell, I knew a guy who just plain didn't show up to work one day. Six months after he disappeared off the planet, he finally got fired.
It's contagious, too. The bright young college grads come in and are even working 10 hour days for a few months. Many become disgruntled after seeing people around them putting in little to no effort and start to follow suit (or leave, as I did.) One guy I know reads wikipedia half the day with the justification of "half the people in our department don't do anything and get paid the same I do, what incentive do I have to put in a full day's work?"
Sure, lots of employers have "dead wood" employees due to apathetic or timid management. However, where I worked, the process for non-voluntary termination was so difficult and time consuming that even managers who WANT to fire people ended up rarely doing so.
Yes, in corporate you have the people who do the bare minimum to stay employed, but I have NEVER seen so many blatant do-nothings as I did during my time as a civil servant. If the government wants to stop losing money to lack of productivity, they should stop doing stupid studies and just make it easier to fire people.
So, instead of concentrating on some of the employees who are actually using a significant amount of their day surfing the web, or the even fewer who are actually going to sex and gambling sites, most whom were likely known prior to time that the money was wasted on the study, someone else's brother in law is now much richer at the expense of our natural resources.
Seems like Congress would be a better subject for this study.
:wq
My observation is that the vast majority of people do not like doing the same thing for 8 strait hours. Thus, if they don't goof off on the web, they will goof off in other ways, including non-web ways such as gabbing on the phone, gabbing to their cubicle mates, doing their homework, taking long breaks, etc. The calculation is thus NOT web versus work because if you took the web away, they would goof off other ways.
It is similar to the software pirating fallacy that copied software is equivalent to lost sales. It is not because they may not use that software anyhow if they had to pay.
Table-ized A.I.
there are definitely worse things to be crippled by.
I work at a small (~3500 employees) federal agency. We are warned numerous times that the IT people watch our Internet usage. The reasons for them to watch it are, I think, legitimate--as someone who runs a small website in his free time, I know that every web server keeps logs. It would damage our reputation if some porn site posted its logs and our domain name came up frequently.
The agency does not block websites at all. I'm not sure the reasons for that are legitimate--they claim that they don't want to block anything because in the course of our work we often visit a wide variety of sites. That's true, but I would think there are some obvious porno domains that could be blocked.
It's my understanding that the agency employs software that monitors all Internet traffic, and flags traffic to certain sites as suspect. It may also work based on keywords in the pages, but this I am unsure of. There is a person in the IT department whose entire job it is to sit down and review the usage records of those who visit suspect sites.
If this IT worker reviews it and it looks like porn, gambling, etc., then he puts together what's called "the package." It has printouts of all the nasty websites (the actual pages themselves), as well as the person's surfing habits generally. This often reveals that the person surfs all the time, making one wonder how he ever gets any work done. "The package" comes upstairs to the general counsel's office, where an attorney reviews the documents to ensure that, well, it is really porn. That's no joke, as on rare occasion OGC has decided that the person had a legitimate reason to look at the sites that the IT worker flagged.
Upon a determination that is really is porn, the General Counsel does a final cursory review, and then The Package goes to the offender's big boss. Disciplinary action is taken.
The agency loudly and repeatedly tells us that it watches internet usage. We are warned in staff meetings and in email notices. We are told whenever someone gets caught doing it. We are warned again when the summer interns come on. We are warned that it does not matter whether we do it during work hours or not during work hours. We are warned that we can't look at inappropriate stuff through the government network, even if it's from at home or a hotel room (we are provided with software and logins that we can use to access the network when we're away.) The general counsel once told us that if you want to look at porn, do it at home on your own Internet access. "Then nobody will be watching you. At leat not us."
But people keep doing it anyway. Every few months someone else gets caught. That's what they tell us, anyway--the cynical might think they're lying to us, though I have no reason to believe this.
The agency was considering implementing a policy on "excessive" usage as well, but it seems defining "excessive" was too hard. Probably too much judgment would have to be used--is reading a newspaper site excessive?
I'm concerned about some elements of the Internet policy--we're told not to visit "hate" sites, and there is no clear definition of what that is. But overall I'm just surprised that people keep looking at porn. This is no agency of idiots--a majority of employees have grad degrees. But apparently they just can't shake the porn addiction.
Too damn bad the 50 full time surfers weren't 435, and doubly too bad that they weren't congress.
Things might be better if they spent more time whacking to web sites instead of molesting pages and generally fscking up everything with their stupid bills.
-Styopa
And if I've got one machine formatting, another fsck'ing, a third reimaging, and still yet another compiling a kernel while I happen to be reading a slashdot article or two, I hardly consider it slacking. Sure I'm doing something non-work related, but that's because all my resources are being tied up doing things that are work-related.
So, is that 50 full time people surfing gaming and auction sites out of ...1,000...or 10,000...or 100,000 employees?
And how much did this study cost? As well as the cost to enforce strict AUP?
Just curious...
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
The government could be spending ~2 billion a *WEEK* on a neverending war on the otherside of the world while ignoring a natural disaster zone stretching for hundreds of miles affecting hundreds of thousands if not millions still, on its southern borders.
Oh wait...
No sig for you!!
If you read the report itself, there is an estimated net loss of $2 million, not $2 billion. I believe there is a mistake in the article.
All you stupid fucks who want to ignore the facts can ignore it all you want, the fact is that guns are guns and people are people and the two are totally disconnected from each other. Everyone tries to bring up these flamewars by mentioning this, for instance I would have never thought about talking about this subject if it weren't mentioned by the parent poster. So what the hell, I'll get modded down for this, but I think it needs to be brought up.
:D
As for porn viewing and such costing $2B a year, keep in mind we have an administration in iraq consuming hundreds of millions of dollars a week on a mistaken decision. No one ever mentions THAT as an analogy. Come on people, sure, things like CHILD porn should be prosecuted but overweight secretaries picking their nose probably waste more government money each year than all the 50-year-old virgin jerkoffs in various government IT departments.
Hell the people who commissioned this study probably jerk off themselves incessantly on the job. They probably were told to do this study in exchange for being able to keep their job. To all of you people who can't control the dick in a civilized work environment: do it in the bathroom or something. Seriously who is stupid enough to do that shit on the job anyway, can't you save it for home where it's much more private?
As for online gambling, keep your damn gambling problems at home. Those arrogant assholes raking in millions off those gambling sites are some of the least ethical scum out there. The HP board has better ethics than they do.
Bottom line, stop strokin it, stop the slots, get on the job and make that shitty software at least somewhat usable. Make everyone's life easier so that normal people can have a functional family and have sex that actually CREATE something, something really special like children. Read up and "Gamble" on something where chances are reasonable, like the stock market. Stop putting energy into useless shit.
End of rant. MAN is this gonna be modded down.
Slightly off topic. A few years ago at a company all-hands meeting, the CEO scolded us for wasting our time surfing the web instead of being productive. He revealed that he had the IT department create some statistics for him, and he flashed them up on the screen in nice a nice Perot-like chart.
"Look here," he said, "We have 1,672 visits to the Double Click site in the last month alone. I want you people working, not surfing to Double Click!"
Muffled giggles can be heard throughout the auditorium.
"And look at this this next site. I don't what kind of site Google is, but it doesn't sound like anything productive to me! This is your last warning, people. If this misuse of company time does not stop, we will block all internet access."
To this day I don't know if the IT guy charged with this "study" was making a deliberate joke, or just as clueless as the CEO.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Dan's Guardian anyone? Anyone? Bueler? Anyone?
I have it set up at about 5 different locales, none of them have issues with unauthorized usage any longer... Once you get past the first week of death threats against IT because some schmo can't surf to pornville from work, you get a nice boost in available bandwidth...
In at least one site, we were able to cut the amount of bandwidth needed by 50%... once they weren't able to download music, watch porn, and fuck around all day long surfing and shopping, there was plenty of bandwidth available for work-related items...
Work at work, surf for porn at home... not too hard to understand...
>The study found that almost $2 billion a year
>[...] equal 50 full-time employees
Does that mean a full-time employee earns $40M a year? O.o
If you work for the government, inside a government building, using government resources, EVERYTHING YOU DO IS MONITORED. Always has been, always fucking will be until the day you leave the government and turn in your badge.
MORON ALERT!!!! MORON ALERT!!!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
.... Considering our "leadership" >:-/
As usual this is just another load of old crap spouted by some bean counter or other.
:) who cares what the people doing the work get up to during the time they're at work ?
At any place of employment there is (usually) a job of work to be done. If the work is getting done, on time, within budget, and to the satisfaction of the customer (assuming there is one
The real question should be if we took out all the anal retentive bean counters who produce reports like this and shot them would anyone notice ?
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
It's all bullshit. To even get close to what they're trying to prove, they need to document time spent:
Here's a clue for all those busybody "researchers" and managers who think they're getting ruined by Internet surfing: It's none of your business what a clerical employee is doing at any particular time. There are only a couple of things you need to worry about:
Other than that, mind your freaking business, and stop prying into your employees' personal work habits. Sticking them into a warren of veal-raising pens, you're lucky they get anything useful done at all.
Most people don't even think inside the box.
Hmmm, 15 minutes per person to close porn pop-ups and spam is probably about right. Sounds like the typical inept IT department that can't run proper filtering proxies...
Next week he'll release a report into the scatological habits of ursine mammals concluding that bears do, indeed, shit in the woods...
Using the non-cited stats on wiki, a blink takes 100ms start to finish, and there are 10 blinks per minute on average. 16h/day (awake), 60min/h, 365.25d/y
Almost 100h/year (per person) spent blinking.
The US actually wastes almost 30 billion hours per year blinking!
'cause knowing is half the battle!
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Clear thinking amongst the slashdrones stands out like a beacon in the darkness. Thanks.
One problem with government employees is that once they get a job, it is almost impossible get rid of them. I knew a guy that worked at an AFB that was transfered to another dept because he was too productive. The problem was he was increasing the output of the dept and this was causing the management to expect a higher production level. This meant the rest of the dept would have to contribute to this and they didn't like it. Didn't have the internet back then, but with the internet, I can see this problem only getting worse. AR
Actually, given who is in office, ie. the current administration, and all those SLEEZEBAG REPLUBLICANS in congress, what did you really expect? However, in my view, the news of government employees surfing sex and gambling sites may not be such a bad thing. That means they're spending less time stomping on your rights and freedoms and less time thinking up new ways to screw you and steal you blind. In fact, I'd say let's all chip in and contribute our favorite sex and gambling sites to help them out... http://www.thehun.net/ and http://www.goldenpalace.com/ would be good places to start. WARNING to good, honest working folks-- these are NOT work-friendly sites! For all you govt surfers out there though-- rock on and bon' appetit!
It is good to see that government employees are only spending 15 minutes a week in slack time (2004/7763). But, I'm wondering how much of that time is spent waiting on web pages to download. If we provided faster internet connections to the US employees, then perhaps we could cut the slack time down to 7 minutes a week
-looking
If you really gotta talk with me, de-spam the email by removing the _
Having worked in the Federal sector I have to chuckle at this. The sad truth is that most of the gov't IT employees I've encountered are only capable of producing at levels equivalent to those in the private sector who earn about 50% less. Factor in the bureaucracy-induced ineffectiveness of 40% and you've got a net waste of about 90%. So what if they're surfing the web during extended periods, it's not the root cause and consequently isn't going to impact anything.
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately attributed to ignorance. -Napoleon
... they'd have plenty more to do. They're in a circling pattern waiting to get axed or hired away to lobby their former coworkers.
They lose productivity to these web site visits.
But how much do they gain in increased morale from people getting to take quick breaks?
A high morale employee who maintains said morale by taking an hour out of the day in visits to various websites is likely more productive than a low or even moderate morale employee who simply works straight through for 8 hours. Granted, the type of work being done and the workload will have an influence on how big a factor this is, but I haven't seen this discussed at all in any reports. It might be buried somewhere in the original report, but it can be a significant enough factor that the press summaries should include it.
ALL of that can be blocked by relatively inexpensive (for enterprises or governments) products like Surf Control or Websense. I know there are several open source solutions out there, too. Spend about $200k and save $2 billion. Easy math.