Slashdot Mirror
Porn Surfing Rampant At US Science Foundation
schwit1 writes "The Washington Times reports, 'The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive they swamped the agency's inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars.' One senior executive at the National Science Foundation spent at least 331 days looking at pornography on his government computer, records show. The cost to taxpayers: up to $58,000. Why aren't they running a product like Websense?"
that the guy almost used a "think of the children" defense for his actions. now THAT's fucked up.
these young women are from poor countries and need to make money to help their parents
THL phish sticks
Did he spend 331 days, or did he check at some point every day he was at work?
Once we get past "surfed porn at work", the number of hours seems more relvent than the number of days.
The cost of the one senior executive's porn surfing was somewhere between $13,800 and $58,000.
It all started out as innocent research on "Black Holes" and "Uranus"...
Sounds like they need a better quality cacheing system, or get some of the pr0n served on a locally hosted CDN. Or stick it on their LAN fileservers. Let's get practical here!
National Sex Foundation
Why aren't they running a product like Websense?"
> The cost to taxpayers: up to $58,000. Why aren't they running a product like Websense?
Why isn't someone in charge telling the guy he's fired?
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
They were doing"research" on human reproductive habits...how males are "visual" compared to females...yea, that's it....now to put in for the multi-million dollar grant on this...
"PowerPoint Sucks!" Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense
First this is coming from the Washington Times. Its the newspaper equivalent of Fox News.
Second this was reported back in January 2009.
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=NSF+porn+surfing&scoring=a&hl=en&ned=us&um=1&sa=N&sugg=d&as_ldate=2000&as_hdate=2009&lnav=hist9
"But officer, it's research!"
Table-ized A.I.
To begin with, this is a senior executive, not some lowly password changer in the basement. The policy against surfing porn at work may apply to all equally, but as we all know, some are more equal than others. So it's hard to expect that this person would somehow be subject to the rules considering his position.
Second, what's wrong with surfing porn at work? Work is a stressful environment, and finding ways to relieve this stress is actually a productive endeavor. Many companies have put in "game rooms" with pool tables and other recreational apparatus to help employees work off some stress and be more productive at their jobs. If porn helped this senior exec relieve stress and be more productive, then it's a good deal for the agency.
If someone is somehow offended by the viewing of porn, I suggest they give proof that they were forced to view it with the boss. Otherwise, even if they viewed it incidentally, their is no evidence that this exec was using the porn in a harassing way. If the porn itself wasn't illegal, then what's the big deal?
"Why aren't they running a product like Websense?"
"One senior executive at the National Science Foundation spent at least 331 days looking at pornography on his government computer"
Rearrange the summary for all the answers
I guess they'd better create an internal division called the National Science Foundation Watchdog, or NSFW for short...
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
Well, this is reported by the Washington Times, so you know it's not biased in the least. OK, let's take a look.
The only substantive abuse claim here is a quote from the NSF's inspector general making a budget request to Congress. The Times article implies that "this dramatic increase," forcing fraud detection efforts to be reduced, refers to employees browsing porn.
But that's not the case, is it. If we read the Times article very carefully, we see that the very first graf references:
Subsequent references to "the problems," "this dramatic increase," and "the misconduct cases" are all really talking about employee misconduct as a whole, not porn surfing specifically.
Maybe that's why this article is big on rhetoric and small on actual cases. One lengthy case is detailed on the article's first page. How much did that case cost taxpayers? "Between $13,800 and $58,000." Out of the NSF's $6.49 billion budget. That's 0.0006%.
How often is "often"? Six times as often as before. Misconduct cases -- not porn specifically -- went from 3 in 2006, to 7 in 2007, to 10 in 2008. The Times hints repeatedly that this is a huge problem, but despite its lavish use of adjectives -- "pervasive," "swamped," "well-publicized" -- it has to report that the actual number of porn-related misconduct cases in 2008 was seven.
Slashdot's headline "Porn Surfing Rampant" is exactly the kind of exaggeration that the Washington Times was hoping secondary media would slap on this story. "Rampant" is just not true, there's no possible way seven cases in a year can be described that way.
If each case was as bad as the one "between $13,800 and $58,000" case that was identified, those seven cases probably cost 0.004% of the NSF's budget.
But the Times article gets worse, moving from exaggeration to outright lies. Later, its author Jim McElhatton writes:
That's a flat-out lie. The OIG told Congress it was diverted by "employee misconduct," not porn. Here, read the actual budget request. (Full quote below.)
There is one paragraph in a 7-page report that references employee misconduct, and nowhere are "porn cases" referenced. Surely some of the cost to the agency was specifically from porn-surfing misconduct. And some was not. How much? We still don't know.
Look, any major institution, private or public, that employs a large number of people and gives them access to the internet, is going to have a few employees who abuse that access. It's ridiculous to think otherwise. Employees are capable of wasting time in a wide variety of creative ways. I daresay some employees in the private sector are wasting time reading Slashdot right at this very moment when they are nominally getting paid to do other things.
Republicans aren't fans of science; we know that. Smearing the NSF in the media by associating their name with porn for a news cycle is a fun yuk I suppose, but for conservatives it's another shot fired in the culture war. I find it depressing. There's actual news out there; this is at best People magazine type crap.
And it's ironic that this gets spread over the internet that the NSF helped create, and the story is brought to you thanks to the Freedom of Information Act that was passed by Democrats over the objections of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Scalia.
Finally, as someone who 10 years ago was writing stories for Slashdot
Preach something, do something different. This is just one area out of hundreds where the government do that, I don't see anything new here.
Do you D?
Can we have some context please? What was the Senior Exec Job? I mean, this is the NSF, so theoretically, it could have been research.
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
We all know if you count your 'visits' by the day it seems to have big implications. But lets be realistic here. We all know you only visit for between 2-5 minutes.
Erring on the high side... 5 x 331 = 1655 minutes = 27.6 hours. And if we consider it work days, (about 8 hours), then that's actually hardly over 3 days.
Exaggerate much? Oh, but we wanted the headlines so so bad; we had to make it look big! (sarcasm)
----------
And right now, somewhere, people are reading this and frowining-- all the while having recently masturbated at work. Yes, everyone's shit still stinks. Yes, we all tug it. I wonder how much human time has been wasted worrying about this petty garble; consider the average time it takes to read and the average number of slashdot headline readers and I bet we're well over 27.6 hours!
I wouldn't recommend Websense to anyone. They have a long history of stealth web robots which intentionally disobey the robots.txt standard.
A) this is no different then what people do in some private companies
B) That had to dig to find one extreme example
C) They didn't define porn in this context. Is it just a random hit? I ahve hit porn site accidently while looking up job related sites. Hopefull if the record is reviewed that also not when I left the site. Which would be immediatly.
D) Yes, this is not good, but there is no real indication of how bad it is. They make it SOUND bad, but there aren't based on any baseline.
Of course then give an example of a guy and how much he did and then said he wasn't detected. If he wasn't detected then how would they know how much online activity they had?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I know one of my friends told her supervisor of porn she found on her "hand me down computer" that came from the new director of a major metropolitan museum. There was no investigation, no action taken, no nothing.
Did he think researching the science of the female body was part of his job? I wonder how much hands-on lab research he did.
Did he spend 331 days at the NSF, and looked at porn for a few minutes a day? Or did he spend 331 * 8 hours looking at porn. The former, I can understand. Looking at porn isn't really that different from checking facebook or reading slashdot. You can't do intelligent work 8 hours straight, you need some breaks to let your subconscious mind sort things out.
If he spent 331*8 hours, then it's absolutely inexcusable. Don't these people have supervisors who check to see how much work they're getting done? The real sad bit is that the right wing is going to use this to cut funding to work that's really needs to be done.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The topic of the year-long research project conducted by the workers is "The effect of sustained Internet pornography on the libido of the typical office worker".
All will be clarified by a press release later in the week.
For fiftyeight grand the taxpayers could bought him services of an enjoyable prostitute for that same year. Or he could have bought his wife something really nice.
Pardon the slight scent of male chauvinism. Ordinarily, I would refrain from such comments, but the fact is it is true!
Sounds like a good use of my money. Can we get the NEA a grant to produce porn? no really.
Once at work I typed one letter wrong in the URL, and suddenly dozens of pop-up windows with raging porn spewed all over the screen. After about 3 seconds of panicky futile keyboard work, I hit the monitor off-switch and pressed the reboot button. This was just after the dot-com meltdown, so the risk of losing a job scared the Bujezis outta me. It's the same feeling one gets when one just barely avoids a car accident.
Table-ized A.I.
Government does everything better then the private sector.
What is it about porn that provokes such an outrage?
If I was a manager in that organisation, I'd be putting the porn-surfing under the larger categories of "non-work activity" and "non-work-related use of NSF resources" and disciplinging employees on that basis.
If employees did ridiculous amounts of porn-surfing, I'd be addressing matters of how they feel about their job, and whether they had a psychological issue that drove their porn addiction; at their next review I'd prescribe a course of counselling as an assessable item of job performance.
If someone is so heavily pulled to porn, something is badly off-track in his/her life. S/he might otherwise be an excellent worker, but needing to be brought into line and pushed in a direction of emotional/psychological healing.
What I'd like to ask is - why is it a scandal if employees wasted company resources accessing porn, but not if they waste similar resources accessing (say) medieval re-enactment sites and forums?
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
senior executive says I want full web or I can find a new IT GUY
and on page 2 it says "foundation's inspector general closed 10 employee misconduct investigations last year, up from just three in 2006. "
Ten staff were caught, out of a total of 1200. That's "all pervasive"? It's less than 1%. That "swamped" the investigators?
Investigate how productive these investigators are, that sounds more like the story.
And what the hell does that phrase "senior executive who spent at least 331 days looking at pornography" mean? He spent 8 hours a day for a almost a year looking at porn? Or does it actually mean he looked at porn at least once on 331 days? Some people take a smoke break, others take a coffee break, maybe he took porn breaks. How much time did he actually waste, and is that the issue or is it "PORN"? He's an adult, everyone in the office is an adult, and if anyone had been disturbed by his habit, I'm sure we would have heard all about it.
And on page three: The report caught the attention of Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee... Right, this story was sourced from the "ranking Republican" on the committee. So we can be sure he has no agenda to embarrass the government by turning this trivial misconduct of a dozen staff into a "scandal".
and went to python dot com instead of python dot org. We had an engineer make that mistake once. He could not hit the 'back' button fast enough.
I read the first three words and that was enough for me. I'm glad you took the time to specifically point out the flaws in this particular story for those who aren't familiar with the complete lack of journalistic integrity at that paper and may have otherwise taken the article seriously.
From my point of view, it may as well be "The Onion reports..." with the only difference that it isn't intended to be haha funny but actually trying to fool you instead.
It's completely beyond my comprehension why anyone would think it's ok to surf for porn at work. Clearly common sense is no longer a factor in hiring.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
There's been a rash of reporter-based "auditing" of left-leaning organizations of late. Perhaps the left-leaning news and blogging organizations should "audit" Halliburton, Blackwater, etc. Fight fire with fire. Some will argue, however, that this would "drag the left down to the same low level".
Table-ized A.I.
of boobs.
Why should they count cost to taxpayer for porn surfing only. Why non slashdotting, googling, binging etc? From the cost perspective, these are more expensive than porn.
"But that's just a pink slime-worm entering a small cave. I filmed it at...the Argentinian mountains."
Table-ized A.I.
you all lose
as in, all the comments below not so much defending the porn surfer, but providing him with a surfeit of excuses as to why its not so bad, understandable, blown out of proportion, etc
which, of course, only further serves anyone who would wish to use this event against the NSF. there are genuine forces of ignorance in american politcs, anti-science forces. and you do not want this event to be used against the NSF. the NSF has a valuable mission, you don't want to discredit it. your overriding concern here should be protecting the NSF
that a lot of you should instead conclude the issue here is the explanation of the man's behavior only means you don't understand how this appears to those who don't know anything about the NSF, aren't invested in anything, and are simply offended at what they guy did. that this disgust and anger should be channeled by some into say, defunding the MSF sounds alright with them: "sounds like the MSF is full of a bunch of porn surfing lay-abouts"
the overriding concern for you here should be the protection of the NSF. for that reason, you should support the quick and quiet dismissal of the porn surfing doogus, and move on
explaining, excusing, mitigating his behavior in any way... that only misses the real game going on here
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Maybe his daily 10 minutes masturbation session made him more productive?
Or maybe he didn't feel the urge to harrass his secretary afterwards?
All jokes aside, the calculation on how much tax-payers money was "lost" on this is dodgy at best.
Whole businesses and university spin-offs make a living on applying for those grants, I'm guessing that's not all money well spend either.
Well seeing as it was 331 days. and there's 365 days in a year that means he searched porn everyday at work minus vacation and sick days. Quality....
Why aren't they running a product like Websense?
A much better question is, why aren't they firing this obviously incompetent person from his job?
If you do not perform your job duties and surf porn instead of working, you deserve to get fired. And don't get me that "addiction is a disease" crap - if it is an addiction problem, put him in a twelve-step program, write him off as sick for 2 years, and put someone else in charge. Small lapses are tolerable, but in this case it's simply doing something he *really* shouldn't, by society's and the organizations standards, be doing. And that means it'll backfire.
systemd is not an init system. It's a GNU replacement.
Astronomer Porn.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
.. maybe he spends the last 5 minutes of his day (off work perhaps) wanking off because his woman back home doesn't let him have porn movies in the house. poor guy, really feel for him.
posting anonymous because of american view on sex is pretty much deny everything :D
Investigators put the cost to taxpayers of the senior official's porn surfing at between $13,800 and about $58,000.
Naturally, the bulk of that cost was eaten by the cost of the investigation. If one employee, with salaries and benefits and admin overhead, totaling 100K estimated that he spent between 13.8% and 58% of his time monitoring this guy's internet connection, then this one guys appetite for porn cost the NSF 13800--58000.
I think the NSF needs honest accountants, but employing one would probably add the porn bill.
A bunch of secret agents that are getting laid or a bunch of science geeks with lab coats and pocket protectors? I mean come on!
"Why aren't they running a product like Websense?"
Why install garbage which will inevitably interfere with someone doing their actual job at some point when the real question is: how could someone do *nothing* for 331 days and not be noticed? There's a million ways to goof off both online and offline, and blocking porn sites is barely the tip of the iceberg.
If, as others have noted, he was just checking porn sites once a day for 331 days of the year then it's the same as any random 'take a small break' activity as long as his office etc is arranged such that others can't see it (which could potentially make someone feel like they're in a harassing or hostile work environment which is a) not nice, and b) illegal in the US). And again, installing some pointless and potentially intrusive nonsense like websense is gross overkill.
I would just like to make one clarification though:
Republicans aren't fans of science; we know that.
I don't think that statement is accurate. I think it is true that generally Republicans/Conservatives frown on federally funded science, because they don't believe that it is a legitimate function of government, but I don't think it is fair to say they don't like science.
That's sort of like saying all liberals hug trees.
And for the record, I'm a Libertarian, not Republican.
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
Was it really porn that they were viewing? Maybe they should post the URLs (and users/passwords) so we can judge for ourselves.
yes indeed! why arent they running Websense(c) high security anti porno software! why, with Websense(c) we know our workers are 900% more productive than without Websense(c) which would be disastrous and result in the suicide of our CEO.
these super duper logs indicate some users are visiting naked porno anti productive sites up to three ho-jillion times a day and the visits most certainly are not due to mal-ware or viruses but naughty and unproductive anti-work workers.
yes, this article proves and guarantees perfectly that even lofty science foundations with their super scientists need the super productive hyper secure Websense(c) software to make sure that ultra-productivity(c) is maintained with the unwieldy internet voodoo that is piped into their business research place.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I want MORE government & HIGHER TAXES!!. HA!
probably a lot more than $58,000.
Online job applications at the NSF are up sharply.
It doesn't need blocking software, like Websense.
It needs publicizing software. A big screen on the ceiling that shows rotates through pictures of what everybody is looking at, just blurred enough to make text unreadable. Make sure the employee's name is big and bold, though. Embarrassment is a better deterrent than censorship.
Pornography is NOT dangerous Pornography websites ARE dangerous this thread is now over :)
So the gist of the article is that the NSF inspector general has enough resources to either investigate science grant fraud OR "abuse" of its internal network.
Personally, I feel that grant fraud is a far more serious issue than whether or not the employees are looking at naked boobies on company time.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
NSFW, amiright?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
that'll teach me to ignore the preview...
If he spent 331 days in a year surfing for porn, then he spent all but 31 days at work, meaning a ~6.5 day work week.
A government employee working weekends?!? That's the real shocker!
If he spent 331 workdays browsing porn, he seriously needs to renegotiate his position, because he's getting screwed over holiday-wise.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
First off I am too lazy to create account not a coward. I feel sorry for this guy(are we sure it is a guy). Who works 331 days a year and counting holidays that means one day a week off every other week with no vacation or sick days or seven days a week with a vacation and a few sick days. No wonder this person needs to "get off" at work. I wonder what kind of hours this jerk (intended) works. He probably lives at the lab and has no home. We should find this dedicated worker and honor him before he works to death. I could go on.
"the other guy did something wrong, so i can excuse the guy i like doing wrong"
no, you throw mr. argentine appalachian trail and mr. bathroom stall sex out on their asses, AND you throw mr. porn surfing at work out on his ass
that's the only logically coherent approach. your apporach, excusing bad elsewhere because you see bad somewhere from people you don't like is serious moral and logical fail
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I recommend keeping porn on a local server to reduce the bandwidth used on their net connection.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Give us a break: "Spent 331 days looking at porn"! This isn't the fault of the summary, the article itself has the same silliness. I am certain that the executive in question didn't *spend* 331 days looking at porn, but rather that there were 331 days *when* he looked at porn. Not sure the time interval, but even assuming a year, sure he looked at some porn every day. So what?!
If the guy (or any employee) isn't performing is job duties, worry about that. But that's a matter of specifying duties, not of stupid prurience about pornography. It's no better if he's looking at Facebook, or Slashdot, or a vacation planning site, or (god forbid) Fox News... nor even if he's just spending all day sharpening pencils.
I actually mostly agree that porn seems banal and boring, and fairly pointless. But unless employees expose other employees to what they're looking at unwillingly, it makes no differences whatsoever *what* someone is wasting time on. And it's not obvious that looking at porn actually means wasting time. In the real world, humans can't concentrate on work for 10 hours a day without interruption, or at least a lot of otherwise excellent employees can't. Taking little breaks to distract oneself "during work time" is just the human condition and part of our mental limits.
Buy Text Processing in Python
Sex is the main thing we sexually reproducing lifeforms are interested in. And porn gives us good feelings. Especially after a whole day of interesting but dust-dry science talk.
Really: News at 11. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
"The Washington Times tries to be objective."
God I hope you're joking--otherwise, wow. That's all I can say, especially responding to the excellent post by Jamie pointing out most of the flaws in this particular article including shameless half-truths and lies. Glenn Beck is as objective as the Washington Times.
It's not as simple as why they aren't running Websense, although I do see the O.P.'s point. The General Accounting Office actually has a filtering system that's in place for all federal agencies that choose to use it. Why NSF doesn't is a mystery. It's why, sadly, I cannot access catholichighschoolgirlsintrouble.com
It's always big when I look at porn...
Maybe they were all bored and frustrated with the Bush administration's modus operandi of ignoring scientific research?
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
So this was NSF Work?
porn is NSFNSF?
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
inevitably interfere with someone doing their actual job
I can attest to that. I regularly have to work around websense at work to get my job done. Most of the web use I do for work is through a backdoor. I only end up using the company network for things like reading slashdot. Seems kind of backwards. It's a big enough company that getting it turned off or getting proper access is difficult.
Websense and similar products are organizations trying to use technical measures instead of dealing with the actual problem. Employees misbehave, you have to deal with it instead of putting up random roadblocks and pretending it doesn't happen.
That is a lot of spooge.
As long as watching porn doesn't impact your work or offend colleagues, then why should it be considered any worse than surfing YouTube, Facebook, or even Slashdot?
Question automatically being: and how would you know you're not offending anyone?. That question alone is enough for me to state that I think pr0n should be banned from the office period. For all you know you are offending people but also giving them a huge dilemma with the question "Should I come forward or not?".
Just for the record; I have experienced such a situation myself and do know what I'm talking about, I'm not some hypocrite whining "no pr0n" while secretly being the biggest surfer himself. I'm a big fan of the Neon Genesis Evangelion series, enough to keep a few backgrounds. One of them, you can see an example here (NSFW!), is a pictures one of the main characters ("Rei Ayanami", 2nd from the top) now in the form of Lillith busy in the process of, as I like to describe, "reshaping the world". You'll notice that she's nude. I really love that picture, its also being used at the back of the original sound track CD. Its not just because of the naked girl, its also because of the whole story behind that scene, the way its being drawn, the almost expressionless face and yes; I do admit that her body also is a factor in the beauty of this picture. At least IMO.
And so here I was using this picture (amongst others, KDE multiple desktop) at the dorm where I lived with other students. It took one several months to tell me that he didn't feel comfortable at all when that background would show on my PC. Sure; this is not fully comparable since this is sort of a "home situation" but still. You can't just state that "as long as it doesn't offend people" because in most cases you wouldn't even know it.
I sure didn't and eventually used the particular wallpaper, and desktop section, when that specific guy wasn't around. IMO things are a bit different when the whole situation is "home based" but at the office? No way, I think thats not a very social thing to do.
AHHAHAHHA!! I love it! Turns out they are normal people after all. Get off their backs already. "The internet is for PORN! The internet is for PORN! Just grab your dick and double click for PRON, PORN, PORN!!"
The article is crap. I'm not disputing that.
However, how do you know that they didn't determine 331 days by actually adding up all the minutes? Perhaps they actually determined that he spent a total of about 476,000 minutes at this, and they calculated that to be 331 days.
I was responsible for reviewing proxy logs (squidproxy). One day I noted our Chief of Staff was visiting hookup sites and then looking for hotels and motels. He had a predilection for big, black, beautiful women btw.
I bring it to the IT Director. I'm told we do nothing about it. So I told the director it was pointless to monitor the proxy logs if we weren't going to apply the policy across all staff.
The other systems guy started watching the logs and noticed the same pattern. He brings it to the IT Director and gets the same response and says the same thing.
Squidproxy is fine for blacklisting but DansGuardian is awesome. While Squidproxy watches sites, DansGuardian watches content. That nipped the problem in the bud or so we thought. Admin and IT were exempted from DansGuardian. So we never looked at a proxy log again.
remember that time when we didn't wank for a week, for charity?
we virtually folded...
Your backdoor activity should _really_ not be mentioned in a porn story.
52 weeks * 5 work-days a week is quite a bit less than 331.
Are we just talking pulling pictures off of a porn site without checking why?
I know that one of the most popular online news papers in Denmark, not only links to a Danish porn site, but pulls in (safe for work) banners from that domain as well. And if you are then using a browser that spiders at least one link level deep, you'd automatically be seen as browsing for porn, just because you're checking up on headlines.
Or they could just hire competent IT personnel.
I noticed that it only started to happen this year... Stimulus at work!
"2-5 minutes"
Hopefully you weren't referring to the time it takes to "finish".
"between $13,800 and $58,000" he wasn't just surfing but paying some sites with government credit cards. Deduct a bit before climbing on your tall horses, cocksucker.
At the top of the page:
Related Stories
Firehose Porn Surfing Rampant at US Science Foundation
What the hell is firehose porn?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
While we're at it, where did those dollar amounts come from?
- Was the NSF paying the credit card bills for porn sites? I doubt that.
- Was it added bandwidth cost? On an NSF internet feed? I doubt that, too.
- Was it supposed cost of the workers' time? Salaried white collar workers are not paid hourly, or overtime if they stay later because of time spent porn-surfing. Three strikes.
So either the dollar amounts are coming from some "misconduct" OTHER than porn surfing or there's something else fishy going on.
Also:
How do they know the guy was actually porn surfing? I know at the company where I'm working the nannyware gets all bent when I follow links to certain ISPs. For instance:
- When I'm trying to follow up a whistle-blower news report and the whistleblower posted a video on a site that's sufficiently open that OTHER people have posted X-rated videos or malware on it and so the nannyware has it on the list. Or:
- When I follow an archived link to a site that's gone and the sitename has been snatched by a domain squatter who also does porn sites, or
- When I typo a URL and there's a typosquatter with a porn site,
to name just three that I recall.
I don't usually follow this stuff up - since it would require an outside feed to check what the heck the site is really about plus a lot of internal red tape. But if you looked at the nannyware logs and assumed I meant to go after whatever the nannyware THOUGHT those sites were about you'd think I was regularly surfing for porn and malware.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
At least the gov't employees are not wasting time reading /. Thank god for that.
Case #2: You're government. You don't care about being productive, as you don't receive money by serving the public. You simply steal it from the public. With no profit motive, the overriding reason for being productive (at least for 99.9999% of the population) is missing, and no one much cares if you're "working" or surfing for porn. At least until it becomes an online scandal; then the taxpayers momentarily wonder why they're being willing victims.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
so the person was coming in on weekends and surfing some porn on those days too? Again, it's the number of hours that matters, not the number of days.
FACT: NSF did implement a site filtering tool (Blue Coat WebFilter) in 2008. This story is old news, the employees involved were fired or disciplined.
The Washington Times is just exploiting this for sensationalism and political points.
Thanks a lot, big brain. (K. Vonnegut, "Galapagos")
There are probably lots of "code of conduct" items in place to warn against this behavior. The code of conduct has a way of breaking down (either through lack of enforcement or scrutiny) when it comes to higher "ranks". The work force is a reflection of the leadership.
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
The cost to taxpayers: up to $58,000
Of course people always make the mistake that they would have been working anyways. In many cases that isn't the truth. I know when I code, there are days where I simply can't code well, and other days I can code like crazy and make great code. So if they wouldn't be doing any real work to begin with, there is no real loss. Plus, how is it any different than things like coffee, doughnuts, etc.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
One senior executive at the National Science Foundation spent at least 331 days looking at pornography on his government computer, records show. What a wanker!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
"I don't understand why I can't play the same game 'conservatives' do."
do you want to beat conservatives?
or do you want to be a conservative?
a frequent criticism of conservative thought after 9/11 is that you don't beat terrorism by giving up our rights and freedoms, that is, you don't beat terrorism by giving up that which makes us better than terrorists
i'm sure you can understand that. so why can't you understand that you don't beat conservatives by acting like them?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'd like to monitor my child's laptop and need something that will perform the same functions as Net Nanny, Spector, etc; especially the monitoring of websites visited, screenshots, and monitoring from my desktop. I haven't been able to find anything but open source keyloggers, which while it would help monitor what my kid is typing, it's simply not enough. Any suggestions are appreciated! -HEX-
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
Our workers there are jammed 2-3 to a cube, the only way you have the ability to do that there and not get caught is have your own office, which is management. Who knows, maybe this will get us more business :-)
This should be easy to control in fact, the porn sites are full of malware and viruses which endangers the network to say the least.
Bodily fluids are generally viewed as unclean, regardless of which orifice they happen to emerge from.
Viewing porn generally brings up a mental picture of somebody engaging in more than just viewing, thus involving bodily fluids.
Assumedly people wash their hands between engaging in such activities at home and coming to work, however there is the stigma of shaking the hand of somebody who's been surfing pr0n at work all day. For IT people there's also the factor of having to touch others' keyboards semi-regularly to fix computer issues.
Overall though, it's just a matter of visibility and courtesy. Viewing a truck forum or slashdot isn't always so visibly apparent from other web-browsing. Surfing pictures of full-on nudes with insertions that would baffle even a gynaecologist is quite visible and rather obvious in that it is very, very far from being work-related (unless one works in that industry, of course). My previous employer had quite a number of guys with way too much testosterone, and as it became apparent to my female co-workers would not so comfortable venturing past the varieties of inappropriate content towards the corner where I worked.
Further, there's no indication of when such activities were occurring. Maybe it never takes an entire hour to eat a sandwich during the lunch break? Maybe someone was staying very late to finish tedious paperwork and needed a break/distraction to keep from going into completely non-productive zombie mode? Did any of those individuals fail to meet their work obligations, and if not, what justification would there be to include their "wasted" salaries in the "cost" to the taxpayer (assuming that was part of the costs cited)?
Lots of crap to sift through, and still no diamonds found.
- T
Our tax dollars at work again...
In a former workplace, there was Dans Guardian installed (and we weren't informed; I'm not sure if that's legal). In Google search (filtering off; I always switch it off since I don't know their criteria), it turns out I was censored for looking information about "lithium aluminum hydride". The reason? Since this powerful but dangerous reductant is often used in natural products research, one gets results like periplanone A. This interesting compound has the biological role of being the cockroach sex hormone.
Sounds like the game they play in the movie "Waiting" I'm going to start it here.. too bad the filters mean the only porn we can look at is amishporn.com ... actually.. that's probably blocked too but I don't want to end up on the naughty list just for trying to find out.
I'm a porn actor that got fired for reading Slashdot at work you insensitive clod!
See, your math misses something. In any government workplace, and hint of anything related to sex will cause a sexual harassment allegation. That causes problems. Now, I know you don't think this way, and neither do any of your colleagues. However, to get promoted in the federal government, you have to e a threat, so that folks promote you to get rid of you, and sexual harassment complaints work brilliantly at this.
Oh by the way, for those of you who say "only 10 of 1200 is less then 1%" or "more then 20 hours is less then 4 days of work", that's only what got documented. We assume all newsies are retards, but much of the conversation here is just as retarded.
and through your actions, the causes and agendas of conservatism are advanced, and you don't even understand why
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
But because sex sells, the Western culture is getting increasingly positively schizophrenic about it
Now us Brits are pretty stuck up on it, but not in the league of our American cousins who set new standards for being uptight and moralistic that make Victorian England look balanced on the subject.
Meanwhile over the channel in France, Netherlands, Italy and lots of other countries there really isn't the same set of hang-ups. Sex is a normal thing and people who preach about it being immoral are laughed at. Hell Italy have elected a bloke who seems to come out of a Porn film, France elected a string of leader who were regularly unfaithful including their latest President who split with his wife pretty much straight after getting elected and married a super model.
Western culture is fine, the problem is that Mid-Western culture is increasingly spreading to the rest of the US.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Why?
The Internet is for Porn!
(Thank you, Avenue Q)
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Perhaps the real question should be if the porn surfing impacted his work negatively, why wasn't his performance addressed directly. If the surfing didn't impact his performance then why was some department allowed to waste the time, resources and money required to perform the witch hunt?
If fraud detection is a concern and chasing individuals based on their web-browsing habits is somehow getting in the way of that it seems like a better use of policy would be to discipline the person in charge who began the porn surfing witch-hunt for wasting important time and resources.
Quack, quack.
The problem with restricting access to public funded computers is that the public funds them, including the person using it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Hopefully, the reason they have abstained from doing anything as stupid as installing Websense, is because Websense sucks. (It blocks stuff that isn't porn, and it doesn't block porn. If someone wants around it, they can always get around it. You need to deal with the people, not the network.)
A more cynical answer would be that they aren't running it, because they can't afford it or something like that, and that they are under the mistaken impression that if only they could get it, their problems would be solved.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
A government employee using his work computer 331 days out of the year? Your average govvie only works 220 days annually, this guy deserves a medal for being chained to his laptop 50% more than his coworkers.
52 weeks + 2 day weekends = 104 days.
Looks like a serious workaholic, that guy works more than 6 days week ( and almost half of the time the whole week !!!) and takes no vacation!!!
That guy seriously needs a raise !!!
if it takes more than 5, you don't know yourself very well.
they couldn't be NSFW because with that much porn, there wasn't any actual work going on.
"The Washington Times reports, 'The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive they swamped the agency's inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars.' One senior executive at the National Science Foundation spent at least 331 days looking at Slashdot on his government computer, records show. The cost to taxpayers: up to $58,000. Why aren't they running a product like Websense?"
I hate to think how much money Slashdot has cost us collectively, over the years.... not to mention all the 'psych problems'
There's been a rash of reporter-based "auditing" of left-leaning organizations of late.
Do you mean left of the extreme right?, or those publications that promote the Communist Party of America?
In my opinion, Websense is counterproductive. At work, I spend a lot of time helping co-workers circumvent its idiotic limitations so they can do their jobs. The original explanation was the IT needed to limit bandwidth wasters like internet radio, video, and things like that. But in reality, the HR department turned it into a network nannying system. Yes, IT could have set it up better. In our case, most of the sites it blocks are business related. I call it Websenseless or Webnonsense.
Websense? Why should an organization have to pay for filtering software and services to protect people from themselves?
Why aren't they fired for not doing their jobs?
Not surprised...I run Websense (SurfControl) at my employer, a county "teaching" hospital in Southern California. Surfcontrol does a pretty good job, Yet I still have to clean up the rampant, continuous, daily porn access not blocked by SurfControl.. including my favorite..wait for it.. ...the Labor and Delivery department computers.
WTF!!
I call BS on this story. How could have spent 331 days at work when their are 104 days of weekend, 4 weeks of annual leave + sick leave? This comes to 134 - 141 days off in a year... The government generally gives a lot of time off for employees.
Unless he spent almost all his time at work...in which case all the porn was probably necessary to keep himself sane. Also I seriously doubt he spent all 8 hours in a day looking up porn, as this article hints at. Most likely this is just more anti-gvmt propaganda by the Washington times.
Actually I want the guys at the NFS doing their jobs... now on the other hand, if we can just get the guys in D.C. to spend their days watching porn, perhaps we can get some useful work done. Think of porn as the new check and balance...
So what did this guy do the rest of the time?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Why aren't they coming up with better, scientifically developed porn?
I can not believe how many hypocrites there are on slashdot. He was wasting agency money and time, I don't argue with that. Is porn worse that facebook or twitter? Hell no.
National
Science
Foundation
WTF
If the editor really wanted to get a headline he should have said 1337 minutes.
This is the Washington Times, not a real newspaper. I can't believe that none of the posts I'm seeing comment on that. Look at the other headlines on the page. "Europeans angry at Obama" "The resistance to defunding ACORN", blah, blah, blah. /. might as well start carrying stories direct from Fox "News" and get it over with.
This is a right wing tool so of course they warp or simply fake the stats. It's much easier to "find" a shocking situation if you can do so by just making it up.
Now I finally know what it'll take to put together a winning application package...just have to cut and paste some naughty pictures into my statement of purpose, and voila!
I'd imagine that you are correct, give people porn breaks like you'd give smoke breaks. But government agencies must keep the Christian wingnuts happy too. Btw, you realize these guys were almost surely appointed by Bush? lol!!!
p.s. I doubt the NSF work is particularly stressful, their main job is giving the money congress gives them to university researchers. I guess things get more stressful when they need to convince congress that university researchers need even more money, but they've massive help from university researchers. :)
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
And we all know that grad students stuck in the lab at 11:00 PM waiting for a run to finish never look at porn.
On an unrelated note, I had a habit of washing my hands immediately after using certain computers at school. You never know what "chemicals" might have gotten spilled on the keyboard. And I avoided looking at the browser history so I wouldn't accidentally discover some confidential intellectual property that my classmates were researching.
WebSense is the worst alternative. Censorship is a slippery slope. If the individual is doing something wrong, it's a management concern. Not a security problem. If he is accessing things management finds objectionable, give him more work. Keep doing this until the activity drops off. Management needs to address the issue directly by reminding the individual of acceptable use policy. nuff said.
Hope that guy didn't work for NSF's ORI.
Well, he's in the government, which means that the usual productivity measures don't apply.
Normally, a productivity measure looks for how much you get done when you're not reading Idle on Slashdot. Since the normal state of a government employee is to get nothing done, the productivity measure always shows zero, thus making it hard to determine if someone might be surfing pr0n at work.
When someone with a guvmint job is doing something, whatever is being done is likely to cause damage and problems, rather than anything productive. This is especially true in Washington, D.C. Thus, a proper measure would have to be looking for things getting screwed up. If nothing is screwed up, the employees must not be working, so someone needs to look into what they're doing.
After the investigation determines what they are doing, they should be encouraged to keep doing more of it, thus preventing things from becoming screwed up. Or just fire them and save money, but the government doesn't want to do that, either. If they fired the deadwood (is there some other kind in Washington?), then some of us might start asking the government why it needs so much of our money, and start entertaining the reasonable expectation that it stops taking so much of said money.
I don't agonize about it - why should I? The porn addicts don't agonize about making a hostile workplace for the people that have to work with them, or the people that were hurt in the porn they are wanking to, or about ripping off the taxpayer.
Just FYI, wankers! Think before you call tech support!