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A Myspace Lockdown - Is It Possible?
Raxxon asks: "We (my business partner and I) were asked by a local company to help 'tighten up' their security. After looking at a few things we ran some options by the owner and he asked that we attempt to block access to MySpace. He cited reasons of wasted work time as well as some of the nightmare stories about spyware/viruses/etc. Work began and the more I dig into the subject the worse things look. You can block the 19 or 20 Class C Address Blocks that MySpace has, but then you get into problems of sites like "MySpace Bypass" and other such sites that allow you to bypass most of the filtering that's done. Other than becoming rather invasive (like installing Squid with customized screening setups) is there a way to effectively block MySpace from being accessed at a business? What about at home for those who would like to keep their kids off of it? If a dedicated web cache/proxy system is needed how do you prevent things like SSL enabled Proxy sites (denying MySpace but allowing any potentially 'legal' aspects)? In the end is it worth it compared to just adopting an Acceptable Use Policy that states that going to MySpace can lead to eventual dismissal from your job?"
I have customers who have asked us to do this, and we usually work to talk them out of it. As an employer myself, I have no problem with my employees "wasting time" on occasion, as long as their work is getting finished on time, and they're meeting their deadlines. Work takes more of our time than ever, so there is no reason why people can't take a recess for 5 minutes out of the hour to do personal things.
Nonetheless, the best solution that I came up with (I don't think I "invented" this, but I did come up with it after many days of contemplating) was to have a revolving DNS change for those 20 MySpace Class C addresses. We made it intermittent enough that the employees "thought" it was MySpace downtime, and eventually usage dropped significantly. Every 5-10 minutes a CRON job would add its own random address for one of the MySpace addresses, then 5 minutes later it cleared that and then did it to another address.
The only guy that I am aware of that noticed it is the guy who ran his own DNS on his workstation, but he was geeky enough to probably realize that it wasn't MySpace that wasn't resolving.
I still think that it is wiser to discuss WHY employees might be needing some downtime versus locking them out of applications. Happy employees are efficient, productive and fun to work with. I would never block my employees access to any sites (then again, I would never drug test, delve into their private lives, run a credit report, or any of the usual steps employers take).
I did something similar to this except I blocked all access to the internet and told everyone that a Myspace virus had crashed the server. Then I spent the afternoon sobbing in my office to make them feel really guilty.
Are you hiring? ;)
@HbFyo0$k8 tH!$
...block the service. If you filter out any Javascript from websites (except perhaps those on a whitelist) you'll be able to keep nearly all the malware off your systems - with the bonus of killing a lot of the enjoyment on those productiveness-destroying websites.
You know, there are companies out there that specialize in network-level content filtering. Porn filtering mostly, but they generally have a filtering set for workplace issues available as well. If you can't talk the guy out of it, consider buying a product that's actually designed to do the job.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I make no personal statement about what people should or should not be able to access from work. From a professional POV, if the customer asks for it I discuss the pro's and con's of filtering vs. log auditing (the vast majority of actual employees i spoke to prefer filtering - they feel auditing is too invasive), and usually the customer goes for filtering. It is important to point out that there is no fool-proof solution, and filtering has significant limitations. Having said that, if your customers insists on going the filtering route, try Surfcontrol or Websense.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
It's generally agreed that it's impossible to effectively block web sites without taking drastic and draconian measures. No, it's not possible. With proper policies and monitoring it shouldn't be a huge problem.
Le français vous intéresse?
Any chance your looking for an IT Manager.
Seriously, I have left so many jobs simply because I wasn't happy being treated like a child. Give me a job and I do it, to the best of my ability... don't concern yourself with what I do when I'm not working, and certainly don't tell me that I am expected to spend every minute during business hours working.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
is there a way to effectively block MySpace from being accessed at a business?
Stop hiring teenagers?
I worked at a place (~200 employees) that had a really crappy policy.
There were about 20 people in management type positions that had absolutely no blocks set on the websites that they could visit.
The rest of the employees had a whitelist of work related websites that they could access. Everything else was strictly verboten. No checking personal email, no checking the weather or news.
To me it seemed somewhat Draconian, but that was the policy in place.
God I'm glad I left that job.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
Install websense. Blocks the proxy sites AND Myspace as well as anything else you want.
It's better to be hated for who you are, than be loved for who you're not.
Assuming it is a windows environment, use policy/login scripts to update the hosts file on the client to map the myspace domains to yahoo, or something else harmless.
We went the Squid route and it worked fine. Large orginization too (100K+ employees). This is done a lot in the industry.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
You're going to spend more time implementing blocks for myspace, not to mention all the other sites you then might think you want to block, than you would spend writing a corporate policy draft outlining acceptable use - plus installing efficient anti-virus and firewall software/hardware at appropriate places in your infrastructure.
Not to mention you'll come out of it looking less like a triggerhappy censoring dictator of some (not-so-)long-gone communist or fascist state.
If you have to block, block all and allow access only to those sites your employees need. That way it's not "selective censorship" anymore. Blocking a service is fair, blocking content is not.
Love over Gold.
Squid+SquidGuard
.myspace.com
I had to do this for a school. Basically, set up Squid to act transparently. Set up an acl like:
acl myspace dstdomain
acl work_hours MTWHF 09:00-12:00
acl work_hours MTWHF 13:00-17:00
http_access allow myspace !work_hours
http_access deny myspace
That would allow access during lunch and before and after work.
If you want to block against proxies, use SquidGuard plus some blacklists. The ones at urlblacklist are good, as is the isakurldb list (it's based on dmoz). Another one is the one from shalla.de. All have social networking categories as well as proxy sites, though shalla's proxy and spyware lists tend to overblock.
I'd recommend merging urlblacklist's lists with isakurldb, and also shalla (but remove yimg.com from the redirector list manually) for both proxy and social networking. Then use SquidGuard to restrict the access.
"The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
End The FED. -
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
So block the class C's. Things like Myspace Bypass are not your problem, the average user probably won't know about that. At a certain point, you'll find a user who will just run an SSH proxy, and is it really worth the hassle for locking out the more advanced users like that?
By developing an 'acceptable use' policy you can define unequivocably the sites that an employee is allowed to access while in normal working hours. Rather than blocking any content, it's better to log all accesses through a pass-through proxy or some other mechanism. This way you can screen the users and see their adherance to policy, flag those for follow up and arrange time to discuss their opportunities for change. The real truth in IT management is that it must be mandated from the top down. If 'the powers that be' define a policy limiting company resource use, then it's easier to track than to prevent. Having all users reminded at each log on of their duties and responsibilities with respect to network access is also trivial and given such daily notices they would have little wiggle room with an 'I didn't know that was wrong.' defense. In the short term, you'll experience a small amount of pain with the unlimited access, but with a sound policy, you'll soon be reaping the benefits with lower administration times.
Failing that being workable, it's always best to 'deny all' and whitelist the sites that are acceptable, further containment of this concept is possible by group restrictions. This method would allow you to tune internet access by employee type(s) giving unfettered access to R&D but limit access to clerical who may just be spinning their productivity away on a myspace romp.
It's important to remember that these network services are paid for company assets, and the disposition of assets REQUIRES policy.
if I claimed I was emperor just because some watery tart lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away!
At my place of work, we use BlueCoat proxy server. It seems to do a fantastic job of URL filtering. I have yet to find a proxy site or link via a web-search that is not blocked.
I remember once being at some old ruined castle with my parents when I was, hmm, perhaps about 10 years old.
There was a small wooden fence around an area containing the moat and some potential dangerous ruined stonework.
I said: "what is the point of that fence, it's tiny, I could climb over it easily? it really doesn't do anything to stop me ending up in the moat"
They said: "well, the thing with fences is that they're not there to stop you getting somewhere. They're there to make you KNOW that you're not supposed to go somewhere. If you just fell into the moat, the castle owners are in trouble. If you climb over a fence and fall in the moat, the castle owners can say, 'well, come on, he climbed over the fence that clearly marked that area off limits. You can hardly blame us, and he can hardly claim he didn't realise he wasn't supposed to be going into that area'."
Likewise with your problem.
Yes, technical measures can always be defeated by the determined myspacer, such as via a proxy. However, I would say some technical measures are worth considering hand-in-hand with the AUP, as a sort of 'fence'. If myspace is banned by the AUP, but not blocked, then everyone will go there, and when they do, they can claim they didn't realise it was against the AUP, or they clicked a link which took them to myspace without realising that's where the link led, "honestly"... etc, etc.
If myspace is blocked, on the other hand, then you force people to "climb over the fence". Yes, they can still get to it via a proxy - but the fact they've gone to it via a proxy means it is explicitly, unarguably obvious that they knew they weren't supposed to be going there, and deliberately went out of their way to get around the rules. This, imho, means you will be able to enforce the AUP more stringently.
Install squid. Having a program be invasive for you is no more invasive than trying to do it by hand. I don't see how you could think otherwise.
Of course, there's the obvious solution of: give up, your goal is technically impossible.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Bill Hicks put it best:
-Why aren't you working?
-'Cuz there's nothing to do.
-Why won't you pretend to be working then?
-Why won't YOU pretend that I am working? You are paid more than me, you fantasize.
Assuming your employees only "need" a finite, relatively small number of web site to do their jobs, why not approach this problem from the other direction and avoid a lot of the hassle.
Instead of trying to keep up with every potential "myspace bypass" and blocking every site like it, just block all access to the internet by default, and then allow them out into only those few sites they actually need.
I can't imagine actually working at a company that did this, I treasure my ability to mindlessly surf from time to time when I get stuck/bored, but I believe this would solve your issue. This way you'd only occasionally need to allow access to another "good" website, instead of trying to keep up with countless "bad" ones.
I'd say the best way to take care of the problem would be just to passively monitor their Internet access, and give them *kind* warnings in their email when they go to (insert forbidden site here). Also, you could inject little "Big Brother is watching you" messages at the top of web pages on occasion, just to keep people on their toes
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
Punishments are Draconian, not rules. Draconian would be cutting off your fingers for violating the policy.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
As much as I'd hate to carry a banner in this direction, I think leaving the doors open and clandestinely monitoring your employees' habits is far more illuminating on the quality of people you hire than just blocking it off.
If I were in charge of that sort of thing, one who spends more downtime in the office on myspace versus, say, wikipedia is someone I might be less inclined to give a project with challenges and forces one to learn and aquire skills. Likewise, I would be suspicious of giving high sensitivity projects to employees to frequent lots of forum sites, as they might be more inclined to share things.
Don't judge a book by its cover, judge a book by the qualities of books that are around it.
More Twoson than Cupertino
I work for a school, and the most complete solution to problems with Myspace (and any other website problems) is Lightspeed Systems, Total Traffic Control. It lets you block the sites you are worried about, and it also lets you prevent your users from using proxies to access them. On top of all that it comes with a spam filter, virus protection for desktops, and a mail archiving tool so the company can be compliant with the new e-mail archiving laws.
Amen to your policy. I started out in print design, and got my current skills ((X)HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, etc...) entirely through online tutorials and documentation. I write copy with the help of Reference.com, stop first at Wikipedia to learn the outline of any unfamiliar technology, and of course, keep up with tech news here. None of these sites were work-related when I worked in print, but they enabled me to move to web development.
And MySpace? I use it to keep up with old college friends. It's not directly productive, but it helps me avoid burnout. For those who use the full potential of the internet, restricting their access to it is like forbidding them from using a portion of their brain.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
As previously stated, the only way to truly block Myspace is by only allowing specific sites to be accessed. I am a high school student in a relatively large school system. My peers are complete Myspace addicts. No measure taken thus far has succeeded in preventing the general populace from accessing Myspace. It usually goes something like this: -Proxy being used to access Myspace gets blocked. -Bored nerd gets on Google. -New proxy is found, and has circulated the student population within 48 hours. My school system has even gone so far as to block any URL with the string "myspace" in it (including news articles on sites such as The Register). This only makes things slightly harder by requiring the use of a proxy that encrypts the URL (which also makes any kind of logging filter pointless, because you can't read the URL being visited). Google searches for any search with the string "proxy" in it have also been blocked, but again, it only requires a little more creativity. In essence, an AUP that you actually enforce is the only way you're going to discourage people from visiting Myspace and other social networking sites. A determined enough individual, especially one with a computer literate friend that knows how to set up and/or find web proxies.
I have no mod points, but I'm modding you up in spirit.
<soapbox>
I absolutely cannot stand it when employers filter content. The thing is, even if people are wasting too much time at work browsing MySpace (or the Internet in general), that is a management problem, not a technical one. If you take away their MySpace or whatever it is they're browsing, they're just going to move on and browse some other site. If you put a whitelist in place, they'll just find some other way to goof off. The problem isn't that the Internet is distracting, it's that the employee is easily distracted.
I work at a big company as a contractor. It just recently blocked access to the big Internet e-mail services (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc.) because it didn't like employees wasting time with their personal e-mail at work. Of course, being a contractor, it doesn't take into account that I use my personal e-mail to communicate with my contract agency about stuff that I'd rather not have stored on company e-mail servers. It's easy to say, "Well, you shouldn't use company resources for that type of stuff," but practically speaking, my ability to communicate effectively with my contract agency is essential to me doing a good job for them. It also totally ignores the fact that I keep personal stuff like vacations and such on my personal Gmail calendar to know when I should ask for time off, when my coworker's birthday is, and so on.
The company spends a fortune on content filtering. There's the hardware itself, the update service, the support contract, the personnel cost for the guy who maintains it, the internal support costs of handling trouble tickets related to it, the cost of Internet downtime due to it periodically failing, the cost of packaging the software end of it and deploying it to the workstations (so that you can't browse them at home on your laptop, of course!), and so on ad nauseum. Just as one example, some of our customers are casinos. So we can't just put a rule in that says, "block gambling sites," because our marketing and sales folks have to be able to access their sites. No, we have to have rules that say things like, "This group can access these sites, that group can access those sites, everyone else can't access any of the sites, ..."
Even in the extreme case of porn sites, the answer to controlling it is to make a company policy prohibiting browsing them, and if you catch someone doing it, fire them for it. If you try to block them all, you're just setting yourself up for someone saying something like, "Well, it wasn't blocked, so I thought it was okay to go there!" I've found that if you treat people like 12-year-olds, they tend to not disappoint you. When policies like this go into place, you're also going to have the contingent of people who deliberately goof off more as a form of passive-aggressive rebellion. It's just stupid, you're only causing more problems, and there's no need.
I know that some of you will probably reply, "But you have to filter content to avoid sexual harassment lawsuits!" No, you don't. As long as you make a company policy about it and you take the appropriate action when someone breaks that policy, you'll win any lawsuit that someone may file. The law does not require you to spend a fortune to be a babysitter, it only requires that you take reasonable action to prevent a hostile work environment. The reason we have content filtering in the first place is because managers, in general, are lazy and don't want to do it themselves. The people who would sue you for not content filtering will sue you anyway. The only important thing is whether or not you'll win. Besides, at my company, the cost of defending itself against such frivolous lawsuits is negligible compared to the cost of maintaining our content filtering services.
Content filtering is no substitute f
The only real way to do it is to proxy all outbound http/s. Then you can selectively block by domain names and so on. And the reason you have to proxy is so that the browser have to use *your* proxy rather than an offsite proxy.
Why not just block out the MySpace domains and try to get MySpace Bypass too? If they're sophisticated enough that they resort to doing a lookup for the IPs and things like that, they're probably not the sort of employee who would be using MySpace anyway. Chances are, if they are blogging, it's on their own server anyway.
Sniff passwords for anyone that logs into Myspace then sabotage their accounts. Declare this policy a couple of days before it takes effect.
Software patents delenda est.
If the are forced to go through something like Privoxy you could put a rule in there blocking all URLs that end in myspace.com. It wouldn't matter if they were SSL connections or not as Privoxy would still snag the DNS. How many users are going to go to the trouble to lookup the IP addresses of myspace in order to circumvent this ?
This is exactly the reason I started smoking.
I was in the US Air Force at the time... and sitting idle in our office was a sure way to be given some mundane task to perform... so one had to look busy, or be outside having a smoke break.
In my office, the average smoke break was somewhere near 1 hour as our job was hurry up and wait. (ground computer maintenance for an aircraft based radar platform called AWACS). We could see the planes land, and the crew head in for debrief, from the "smoke pit"... so we were always there when real work needed doing.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Run an internal DNS server and create a "Forward lookup zone" for Myspace. Create a new Host record for the zone and give it a bogus address that doesn't go anywhere. Or do set it up like I do and have it point to a page on my webserver that explains why Myspace isn't allowed.
I had an employer ask me to do this for them as well. Since it was a Windows AD environment, I just set the internal DNS server to point myspace.com to 127.0.0.1 and set DHCP to hand out only the internal DNS server, which is what you want in an AD environment anyways. Obviously, it'd be fairly easy to circumvent (manually plug in an ISP's DNS server - problem solved), but it kind of ties into that "fence" idea mentioned in an earlier reply here, in that, for someone to figure out why Myspace wasn't working, they'd need to troubleshoot it, at which point they'd discover where Myspace was pointing and realize, "Hmm, someone probably intentionally did that."
I will point out that this was for a smallish company (25 people), not a school or anywhere else where the end-user can basically be assumed to be at least somewhat malicious. But, it does get the job done if you're in a hurry.
... better block Slashdot while you're at it.
I was asked to do this, too. The network had its own DNS server, so I redirected myspace.com to the company's own intranet website.
It was a dirty hack, and wouldn't be too hard for a technically-inclined user to work around, but they didn't need an airtight blockage. They just needed the misbehaving employees to know that management saw a problem, that the gentle measures taken before that had not produced the desired corrections, and that much blunter enforcement instruments were available.
It got the message across loud and clear.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Surfcontrol is so painfully easy to circumvent though, there are anonymizing proxies that pop up all the time and you can block them one at a time as they pop up but it will become a losing battle.
My previous company used a filter. Gmail was blocked, then it wasn't. Google portal was blocked for a while too. Slashdot was blocked at one point. Several others that I regularly visited would be blocked one day and not the next as well. I was never brave enough to try a porn site, but I wouldn't be shocked to find they weren't blocked because some upper crust management wanted access to them. The best part was when sites like google, yahoo, MSDN and others got blocked. That made my job so much fun when necessary resources fell victim to the maintenance of a web filtering system (I think they used websense).
hire Terry Tate: Office Quarterback!
So umm, you got any job openings?
My meathod of choice to get arround filtering, and rather interesting, is to set up my home PC as a SOCKS5 proxy and rout all traffic through it, never once did I find a filter that did packet analysis to the point where it would block that(to much work to determine URLs for SOCKS proxies vs html body text maybe?). Of course you could always use someone else's proxy, but I always found that to be rather slow and not the uptime i wanted so i set up my own. People always find ways to be one step ahead of filtering, this is why it will never truly work, same idea holds true for DRM, you cant give limited access and expect people to just accept it.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
Fire people that aren't doing their job.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
You don't need to be quite so heavy-handed about it.
Put Linux, Flash, Java, VLC and assorted codecs on a few machines in the canteen. Make it known that those machines, and no others, are to be used for accessing non-work-related sites. Then have the IT department invoice employees for computer repairs necessitated as a consequence of visiting any NWR sites on their workstations.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Okay this is a no-brainer but of course there is an easy and convenient
way to put a stop to Myspace. If your employees are a dime a dozen then
simply audit employees web usage and then fire those who continue to visit Myspace.
Now of course if you for some reason value your employee because they're
from a hard to get group that actually does real work at the low wages or
petty salaries you're paying and you'd still like to keep them, then perhaps
you will just have to ignore the fact that they're "wasting" some of the
precious time for which you pay so little.
And on the other hand you value your employees and want to keep them and
you're paying them decent salaries then why don't you just ask them to keep it down?
For the most part these folks tend to listen.
Make a MySpace Phishing site, capture people's logins, reek havoc on their account!
Maybe taunt them mercilessly asking why Backstreet Boys is their guilty pleasure, why they like Chinese Food over Mexican, how they're too scared to try homo/bi-sexuality but secretly want to, and why Chuck Norris #18234 is one of their featured friends.
Then you also have a nice list of who has been using MySpace. Watch those people like a hawk, and at the first sign of trouble, out the door they go!
Why don't you just filter anything that has *myspace* in the URL? I've seen this work before and while it can occasionally cause problems, it generally works.
Unpleasantries.
We filter heavily. Not any technical sites, but games, shopping, many message boards, and sex of course. Some blocked sites can be accessed using 1/2 hour discretionary time. Not the sex sites of course, but shopping and such-like. This is mandated statewide, and not up to the individual IT departments.
I work for Child, Youth and Family Development. We oversee the foster programs, youth activities, and detention centers. Even with all the filtering, we are investigating several net abuse cases per week. We have about 2,500 employees statewide. Most of the abuse cases are from the detention center guards.
All in all, I agree with filtering in this case. This is the state, and we are browsing on your dollar. Many state employees feel no compunction ripping off the tax payer through laziness or outright theft. I'm not one of them.
What do you all think? If you had a chance to vote on a ballot initiative (assuming your state is not one of those still stuck in the stone age and actually has ballot initiatives) mandating filtering for all state employees in your state, would you vote for or against?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Working for a .com, my company had a problem with people always checking fuckedcompany to see if we were on it, so the CTO resolved fuckedcompany.com to 127.0.0.1.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
The Jimmy James school of management.
Locks only keep honest people honest.
If you block MySpace succesfully, the people who visit MySpace during their work time will just find another way to waste time and expose the company's computers to spyware/etc. risks. It's a losing battle. Think of it as DRM for your employee's time.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/products/web-f ilter-overview.php
Works quite well for me!
There are only two steps in the gathering of ultimate knowledge. Open your eyes and, RTFM!
Funny you should compare these. I've spent a few years working with general contractors and if there is one thing they're good at, its not working a full day. Sure you have those dedicated few that still believe in an honest days work equalling an honest days pay but i've had a hard enough time keeping people on site, stopping them from coming in drunk, stoned, missing work all together or complaining it may rain next week.
Every "vertical" market, whether its labeled blue colar or white has its own moral ambiguity and issues as it relates to work and work ethics. I don't see many "blue collars" that care about checking email, they're stopping at the bar to watch a race or check on the game. (and there are white collars that do that as well)
I think you miss the notion that there is a lot more in common between the two work forces than you care to admit. I've worked both and while they're different, they're both physically and mentally challenging in there own ways and they both have there ups and downs and distractions to contend with.
I would recommend against even trying to completely block it for employees. Having a policy to deal with major offenders is better than creating such a restrictive environment.
Firstly, the virus/adware problem the employer is worried about would be better solved by making sure the machines have up-to-date virus definitions, that the browser is configured properly: disabled Active-X, blocking popups, to not be Internet Explorer... the usual suggestions. Make sure their IT people are keeping the machines in order, and that the employees can't disable or otherwise futz up the antivirus software. And secondly:--
This makes me think of what happens when a government tries to outlaw something they know that people want: all it ends up doing is creating a new black market and more crime; beyond the tautology of new law = new lawbreakers, you end up with people doing all sorts of bad things they otherwise wouldn't have to do, just in order to get around a law that shouldn't've been passed in the first place. You start out by outlawing something you think people ought not have, and pretty soon you find yourself spending $40 billion a year with no end in sight, just to use one example.
So right now they've employees wasting a little time each day on MySpace. Do you want to create a situation where instead some of these employees waste an hour or two trying to come up with creative ways to evade proxies and firewalls? Or where an employee ends up infecting his computer with all sorts of malware because of some shady site he came across while trying to find, say, open proxy lists? Or he ends up accidentally divulging a whole bunch of private data by setting his browser to use an open proxy, not realizing all his HTTP traffic is now being routed through who-knows-what in Russia? And how much productivity will be lost when some employee gets fired over 15min of slacking off and it takes the company two weeks to find a replacement candidate?
And consider the morale impact -- and thus productivity impact -- when you start getting employees grumbling about being treated like prisoners at their workplace.
I'd recommend that the employer A) not worry about the employees who spend a few minutes a day browsing MySpace, and B) only come down on the people having major productivity issues because they're spending half their day slacking off, or the people who've caused severe security problems by getting their computers breached by malware.
Liberty in your lifetime
I spent some time trying to effectively block MySpace from our organisation. Firstly, how to detect MySpace being accessed - obviously one blocks 'myspace.com' but then finds that people are still using it. Use SARG to analyse the Squid logs and look in the top sites accessed - you will see google images, YouTube and whatever proxy they are using for MySpace listed in your most accessed sites. One starts banning proxies (tip: try monitoring web accesses for phproxy and you will be amazed at what you find) but ultimately realises that one is fighting a losing battle as for every proxy one blocks, two more will spring up.
The absolute best way I have found of banning MySpace no matter what proxy is used is to block it's content using DansGuardian - look in the HTML of MySpace pages and find strings that appear in every MySpace page, but not in others. Put the strings into DansGuardian's banned phrase lists, and voila - blocked no matter what proxy is used.
Obviously this will not work for SSL encrypting proxies, however only a lunatic would allow a free SSL proxy meaning that SSL proxies are usually pay services, and are easy to spot if you look in your logs. Use SARG regularly to monitor access and you will easily see how your users are finding a way to it if they manage that in the future. Also set up a block page where your users can ask for sites to be unblocked - when the regular 'PLZ UNBLOCK MYSPAZ KTHXBY' messages stop arriving, be suspicious and look for how they are getting to it and take appropriate action.
Did I mention I am Evil®?
I have a DNS record for the myspace.com, which directs all queries to an internal IP address, which my apache web server answers with an ever rotating, badly written excuse of a massive internal myspace calamity. No one buys it, but no one gets to myspace from my network either. Just have your DNS server answer queries for myspace.com and anything under it as if it has authority to do so, do whatever ya want at that point. Just make sure you force your users to use your DNS server, lest they start using one from your ISP and get right around this. I suppose you could work around it by accessing myspace in a way other than myspace.com, but I would venture a guess that for every myspace user that knows how to do that, there are two hundred who don't.
You notice any trends, start seeing lots of people going to www.gettomyspaceatwork.com, do the same thing for that.
What would be cool is a route list of social networking sites IP addresses, advertised like route servers advertise BGP bogons. Null route it at the IP level, and not have to maintain the bastard by hand for every time one of them gets a new allocation of addresses from ARIN.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
First, we have limited bandwidth. People watching YouTube would seriously impact productivity. Second, the state being as it is, trying to discipline people for excessive usage would cost more than simply blocking access. Third, we deal with children. Having counselors downloading porn would look... bad. Fourth, we do not allow people to bring in novels to read during work hours, why should they be able to browse the web? Fifth, some of our employees were at one point in time our clients. They are still kids, and not very well socialized kids. They need boundaries.
Blocking access to unnecessary sites saves money by keeping our limited bandwidth free and helping to ensure that employees don't waste time.
How does the number of abuse cases we investigate per week compared to our number of employees tell you anything at all about whether we are wasting money or not? Did I mention what type of abuse cases were involved? Do you even know how we operate and what sorts of special conditions might apply to an agency such as ours?
Finally, why are you so angry? You're not that guy who has a beef against all child protection agencies everywhere because one took his kids away, are you?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Validate your client's concerns about viruses, but make sure that your client realizes that an outright block on sites like MySpace is equivilent to treating employees like children. Content blocks also create problems from real work because they end up creating a huge mess of red tape when someone really needs to use a blocked site.
No, I will not work for your startup
>resolved fuckedcompany.com to 127.0.0.1.
So, he admitted this was a fuckedcompany then? That's the first step to fixing the problem =-)
You never drug test? Wanna hire me, man?
>Other than becoming rather invasive (like installing Squid with customized screening setups) is there a way to effectively block
/. or anything, because that is what I agreed to do when they started depositing monthly paychecks into my checking account. Now if someone chooses to call me "unproductive" because I am on slashdot in the meantime in spite of a job well done - well, that is entirely their problem.
>MySpace from being accessed at a business?
If the job gets done, well and on time - then stop bitching about people surfing. Being productive for 8 hrs straight (short of 1 hr for lunch) is a utopia many employers dream of, especially if it has to do with doing the same task(concept) repetitively. You never get a different result by doing the same thing, so naturally, you will eventually get bored, whether you're a programmer, analyst, whatever....
If someone, on the other hand, provably surfs the net (check your company's network logs, you do have them, no?) so much so that his performance is consistently impeded by his, at this point, internet addiction - then apply your company's disciplinary policy appropriately (you do have policies too, no?).
Blanket statements like "web surfing impedes productivity" and designing unrefined policies around such statements can only discourage/anatgonize productive employees who are able to surf as well as work productively, if they happen to ever get caught in the HR policies net. Most office space/white collar computer-related type of work can get incredibly boring. Whether management likes to look good by appearing curt and managerial and reprimanding everyone for anything slightly in violation of the policy, or be relaxed and only deal with problems as they arise instead of being dickheaded about it, will set the tone, overall mood and atmosphere of the company you work for.
Instant example - I'm writing this between bouts of programming a GE Fanuc PLC with Ladder Logic - something I had to learn on the job, and have only done in a single class in college. Once you get the gist of Ladder Logic programming - it becomes a mind-numbingly boring task having to write LL functions that process input, apply the function and produce output. I'm gonna get what I need to get done regardless of whether I surf, reply to
Not making these employee/manager behavioral distinctions leads to two extremes - the sweatshop and the ideal company... Depending on your lucky stars, you are somewhere inbetween, hopefully more toward the ideal company than not.
G'day.
'A lie if repeated often enough, becomes the truth.' - Goebbels
Good luck trying to block it. I work in several K-12 schools. Access to myspace is a big problem, not because students waste time, but because of some of the content and the possibility they can use myspace to bully/threaten each other.
If you block myspace.com, be prepared to block every single anonymous proxy out there, new ones pop up every day, it's pretty much a never-ending battle. Commercial content filters help, but still can't keep up.
You're probably much better off with the embarrassment system. Log web access by whatever method, then post a weekly list of time on myspace/friendster/match.com or whatever. You probably shouldn't identify people by name, but people will quickly realize you know every web site they go to, and so does their boss.
Blocking myspace from say, 9:20 on (assuming the office "opens" at nine) and unblocking it in the last hour of the day, so people can check their messages, maybe arrange a date after work, or get a group of coworkers together for drinks? Maybe just leave it open all day on Fridays, because nothing really ever gets done then anyways :) Comprimise, compromise.
moox. for a new generation.
>Think of it as DRM for your employee's time.
That's one of the best analogies I've heard on Slashdot. ty
It comes under the heading of, the reason the rules treat you like a child is because there are idiots who insist on acting like them.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
You could probably sue the USAF for any smoking related illnesses you get. ;)
Grab a sniffer, have some fun.
what about a remote server/site/whatever that has this "squid" and will help to block myspace. i am technically retarded, so i have no idea if this is even a viable idea.
Do you know how absurdly easy it is to block those proxies? Just block the hex equivalent to http:/// and *bam*...
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
"reek havoc on their account!"
Sounds illegal to me.
So let me get this straight. You want people to follow the rules by not going to MySpace et al but have no problem NOT following society's rule by destroying or illegally entering a computer system account that belongs to someone else. Hmmm. Have you applied for a cop's job?
I can vouch for that, I know a good amount of Marines that started smoking (and chewing) just because it was something to do when all the hurry up and wait is going on.
My employer is a state department of transportation.
All crew office and facilities traffic are routed and filtered in the capitol per the legislation. they are locked down, they cant go anywhere. Because of the limits, most if not all the crew offices have DSL service, and one or two machines that the State IT department dont know about(READ: someones unpatched five year old emachine). The two networks dont touch, but everyone has a thumb-drive.
In the case of one project, they had a T1 connection written into the special provisions of the contract; meaning, for four years, the general contractor would pay for all expenses related to that line. And the DOT could withhold payment if there was an excessive outage.
The crew managers have decided collectively that the state policy was too restrictive, so they went around it.
My point is: there is always a way around.
I can't afford to spend a afternoon sobbbing, so I solved this differently. Everyone wears a mandatory collar with half a kg of semtex with the detonator linked wirelessly with our DNS server. Each time someone tries to look up an URL containing the word Myspace, a random collar gets detonated. The thread of having to clean the blood from the floor, walls, ceiling and anything else in the office is a real good deterent.
If you really want stop employees from accessing MySpace, or those evil sites like that dotted slash thingy, then there is a real easy way...
Hit them in the head with an aluminum baseball bat. I find that although I like the feel of a classic wooden bat, aluminum is much easier on the wrists during a long session of 'Employee Coaching'
Oh, I should have explained - I'm management so an afternoon sobbing actually raises my productivity.
Become "invasive".
- Install Squid with customized screening setups.
- Adopt an Acceptable Use Policy that states that going to MySpace can lead to eventual dismissal.
P
Dialectician. Archology.
At my work, we have domain-name filtering, which means any domain with NSFW text in it, is blocked.
This includes all domains which ARE actually work-related but happen to have some word in it that is blocked.
Basically, I can't use the internet for any ASSistance.
Ironically, any porn site which doesn't have these words in the domain, is perfectly accessible.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Are you hiring?
... ..are you, though?
Oh wait, someone already asked that...
First off, if your client has a problem with its employees going on myspace all day, then they need to watch their staff. Secondly, most people are not very computer/internet savy so when they see it blocked using a simple method such as keyword filtering, they will stop. Put a little message in there that says "An email has been dispatched to your supervisor reporting this attempt to access a forbidden page". Most people see that and no longer will try. Lastly, you may have to watch their use. I used a simple netgear router on one clients network and block any domain with myspace in it. Simple solution and keeps most people out of the site. More advanced networks, you can watch ther users traffic and visits with Windows Server 2003 and see if they are getting around it using other sites, and just continually block them.
Bryan
Honestly, this is the only way to go. Most users don't know crap about DNS, and won't know how to bypass it.
I'd add though, that you should be able to add some simple alert functionality that tells you when someone has indeed by-passed your standard DNS settings.
That's the time to have a chat with that individual. This will probably force them to go with an ssh tunnel elsewhere. In which case you want to make certain that they stick around, as they are probably one of the most technically competent persons in the company.
You can also do fun things like manipulate the pages themselves. There was a slashdot article a while back where somebody was reversing all the images on the destination pages.
The easiest way might be made a page that looks official and says "Due to technical difficulties, this myspace page is unavailable" that pops up 99% of the time (with the 1% to let people think the problem is myspace and not your servers).
My company has a free product called Untangle that helps you deal with things like this. Give it a try.
http://www.untangle.com/download
It is not worth it. If the last one is not beyond the realm of comprehension for you, how could the other options even be options?
cat >> /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 myspace.com
As for the proxies, there isn't much you can do except slap people and say "No!"