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Do IT Pros Abuse Their Power?
An anonymous reader writes "I have noticed that many airports and hospitals I've visited have some kind of internet usage policy in place. Some use software similar to Websense, which effectively blocks sites based on blacklisting them by category. A commonly used blacklist prevents users from accessing 'forums or discussion boards,' yet I find that often these networks allow users to access sites like Fark, Slashdot, Digg and other message boards that appeal to the technical culture one might find in the IT world. In your experience, do IT administrators abuse their supervisory powers? Has there ever been a backlash from users or management for doing so?"
Greetings and Salutations.
Perhaps the better questions are "why ARE some websites blocked? and WHO makes that decision?" I administer web access for a client or two, and, the decision to block given websites comes from upper level management, usually NOT the IT command structure. In a business, there is an almost paranoid fear that the employees are sitting around surfing the Net instead of doing work to make money for the company. Any blocking seems focused at keeping that from happening.
Alternatively, I go and sit at Panera Bread (a great place for good pastries, and excellent, light lunch sandwiches and such by the by...) on occasion, and have found a few websites that would not come up because they were blocked. However, it appeared that this was because the company providing the blocking had mis-catagorized them, and, once I sent a note in about the site, they ended up being unblocked. But then, If I were going to surf porn sites I would NOT be doing it in a public place like that....
So, I suppose there are cases where IT admins abuse their powers and block sites that should be available...but I have not run into them. Amazingly enough BOFHs are human too, and, some of them ARE little Herberts....control freaks and generally annoying people. The rest of us are all genial and fun folks with a slightly twisted sense of humor.
Regards
Dave Mundt
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
A BOFH might find it more fun to manipulate data from certain websites, rather than block sites.
;).
e.g. the BOFH substitutes some images, and/or inserts a rather loud audioclip.
Go figure out the details yourself.
Even if you use SSL, the BOFH probably controls what CA certs are installed in your browser
you can blame the fact that the websense ceo is the same guy who was ceo of Mcafee during the time when Mcafee was known to be a piece of shit software that wasn't complete or accurate. Is it any more surprising that he's equally badly mismanaging websense, and is selling to the same crowd with both basically?
The issue is a man named gene hodges , the guy is a horrible ceo (and cause for many tech issues relying on anything he is a part of) .
Do you allow DNS on your network? OpenVPN-over-UDP-over-IP-over-DNS isn't lightning fast but it does the job most of the time. It's a neat way to (ab)use commercial WiFi hotspots too. You can't stop a determined power user except maybe with a whitelist of a small set of whitelisted remote hosts.
In my experience the IT dept generally has rules for other people and rules for themselves. They "know what they are doing" while everybody else "can't be trusted". Their login for general usage is full administrator and bypasses websense, while I am barred from sites "listed as general business" (only sites pre-approved by IT are allowed, which they make very clear they do not do because they don't want people asking them all the time). Our email attachment limits are 2mb ("it takes up space on the server") and FTP is outright barred - even though one time it was the only way for a client to send me files IT wouldn't do it, so I went home and put it onto a USB stick.
They install whatever they like, including such productivity tools as BBC news sports tickers. Despite pretty much being able to do everything on their work-paid cell phone, not having to multi-task or whatever they have brand-new machines. When another member of staff requires a new PC, they get an IT staff's PC and IT get a new PC. Despite the general staff doing work where screen real estate is highly productive, their monitors are 15" and 17" while IT and managers have 19" (although they were quite savvy and gave the partners 21"; monitors are the new bigger desk and chair). In my job where we do quite a lot of printing, speed and quality are important, IT also have the best printer - yet it took a week for them to notice when I unplugged it one Friday night.
IT is all about convenience for IT. All our productivity stuff, which at any given moment 99% of staff is running at any given moment, is quite server intensive. They're all on the same server, while low-intensity stuff rarely used has three idle servers all to itself. I spend a significant portion of my time waiting for the server to respond. It's quite embarrassing when a client turns up asking for a simple copy of a report in a hurry and it takes me 10 minutes, they think I must have forgotten so they ask reception to call up and remind me they're late for their meeting. I pointed out once that the servers could be rebalanced to distribute the load but was told "that would be too much hassle".
All the procedures are laughable. Despite almost completely phasing paper filing out, all staff's basic logins can delete data files and all the backups are kept on a shelf on site. I could obliterate the lot in one minute of madness (probably induced by dealing with IT). It would take me longer to copy it all to a couple of USB sticks, but nobody would notice until they got the blackmail letters or it was on the news.
But let's not get all confused and think I'm bashing IT here. I can say pretty much the same thing about every single department. Like how the time it takes me to obtain new propellant pencil leads costs the firm 16x the price of the leads. If I kept one carton for work then stole the rest of the box it would be cheaper for the firm than following procedure.
As regards other managers, few have the slightest clue about IT. Those that do just work it to their advantage - they get preferential treatment so it makes them look good.
I think you missed something. He's saying those sites are not blocked.
Once when presenting a web based product to the senior management the IT people at a huge company tried to block the IP address of the server in the middle of the presentation. Without missing a beat I switched over to a copy of the product that was hosted on the laptop itself. The IT guy typed furiously and then interrupted and asked what port/ IP address I was using. I told him that I had switched from TCP to UDP as something was blocking the TCP packets. He typed even more furiously trying to figure out why blocking a single IP wouldn't also block UDP. I am not sure he ever figured out what went wrong. For weeks after the presentation the IT group threw up roadblock after roadblock. We weren't compatible with their PKI, etc (we didn't use anything that would work with PKI). Even though the top people(CEO, CFO, President, and the VP of Marketing) really wanted what we were offering they simply admitted that a battle with their IT department wasn't something they could handle at this time. This was not the first IT department that tried to crap all over our product for "Technical" reasons. Even if our product were to have sucked crap that was never the reason given. It was always "bandwidth" or something not relating at all to any possible problem that our product had. I think it all boils down to IT departments being driven by fear. If all goes well the IT department risks downsizing. If anything goes wrong the IT department gets the blame. Then to top it all off the typical IT head might be around 50 years old in the average large organization and they fear the new guy who just was hired who could single handedly bring the entire department out of the depths of Novell and into the 21st century. I would recommend that any large company regularly get an outside organization to audit their IT departments and make sure that the technologies and practices are up to a reasonable standard. Best to learn now that your backups suck instead of when the good data still exists. I would be willing to venture that most organizations have a head of IT who should be replaced by one of his far younger underlings.