No More Unrestricted Internet At Work 797
Schlemphfer writes: "You can forget about using private email or surfing the web while at work if these bozos have their way. And judging by the Reuters article, it looks like they might. Basically what they're doing is trying to scare senior management into thinking that allowing employees unrestricted use of the net will cripple a company with viruses and lawsuits."
Yeah. (Score:1, Insightful)
What is the problem?? (Score:2, Insightful)
what's wrong with these guys... (Score:5, Insightful)
seriously though, i'd go crazy if i had to work 8 hours straight without any distractions...so, what if i shoot over to Hotmail to check my personal e-mail, or over to ESPN to check out the latest sports news, or even here to post my thoughts on the latest tech news topics...and that doesn't even count the numerous times i use the internet to look up java related things on Sun's website or trouble shoot my Websphere problems over at IBM...
what's the point of having all that information available at our finger tips if we can't use it...
Security in the workplace (Score:4, Insightful)
Certainly, there's room for an ebb and flow of security standards, but they're a limit to how oppressive they'll be, at least to the engineers. If things like web surfing have a few legitimate uses (eg. looking up technical documentation), there's no way it'll hampered much, because managers would quickly start complaining on behalf of their workers.
Foolish. (Score:4, Insightful)
I remember being in a school that had open internet access, then going to another school that had limited internet access and constantly being frustrated by the limitations imposed. I couldn't download the application I was working on and test it on a new machine, I couldn't go to a website talking about Middlesex county. There were a lot of legitimate things that I wished to do that I was blocked from, yet I could go to satanic websites, pro-life websites with all sorts of horrid imagery, and more.
Most attempts at controlling content end up being failures. Bring this to the attention of those seeking to control the information you recieve and you'll get a confused look, they'll pause and say "I don't know why you couldn't access that site. You should be able to."
I think it would be better to leave things open and dock the pay of any employee who violates "Guidelines". Let 'em hang themselves. Set up the "filters" not as filters that block the person but as flags that flag the IT staff regarding potential illegal use. The IT staff could then investiage and initiate a "three strikes" scenario. Strike one- warning, strike 2- docked pay, strike 3- no more internet access no way no how.
-Sara
Wasn't yours to begin with.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Due to viruses and other problems I've blocked any attachment capable of carrying a virus. Yes, it's sometimes a hassle but that's the way it is now. Management has requested we monitor the type of sites people visit just to make sure there isn't a big problem. So far they haven't requested user lists or specific sites. They won't until XXX sites start getting out of hand.
Viruses, security holes, and loss of productivity have caused these limits to be placed. Want to surf for fun, do it at home.
The folly of this BS (Score:3, Insightful)
This won't work for people who do more than automaton work. If you restrict net access or filter sites in any way, you risk employee burnout, employee morale, and employees' ability to research job-related stuff. If my company used filtering or blocked my internet access, I might not be able to get the information I need to do my job. What happens when I need to look for API documentation?
This is kind of like curing athlete's foot by amputating the patient's leg.
Yup. (Score:3, Insightful)
As the sole unix admin there, I mostly got to sit back and chuckle evilly, but half a week's lost productivity is no laughing matter when you're tallying up the balance sheets at the end of the month.
The bottom line here is that you are being paid to work, not to check your personal email, IM your friends, or post to Slashdot. If that seems unreasonable, start your own damn company.
Is this so bad? (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course their are exceptions...Not allowing developers access to the internet for research and such is suicide...But for many jobs this is perfectly valid.
Time to vent (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's take this quote right here which sums it up:
"The message is: 'I'm afraid you'll have to do it after hours at home, which is where you should be doing it in the first place,"' said Mikko Hypponen, manager of anti-virus research for Finish-based F-Secure Corp.
Where does ANYONE get off thinking company resources are PERSONAL resources? How is this a limitation of ANYONE'S rights? Do you think you have the right to drive the company car across the country for a personal vacation? Do you think you have the right to use the company FedEx account to send Christmas presents to your sister in New York? Then how in the hell do you think you have the right to use company network resources to send personal email and use ICQ? Would your boss let you sit there and read the newest John Grisham novel when you should be working? Then why do you think you are allowed to read slashdot all day?
People need to grow up. When you are at work, you should work. If your company is NICE enough to let you use resources for personal use then fine but you do NOT have a right to do anything with something that isn't yours.
Christ I need a beer.
Re:Crippling. (Score:4, Insightful)
FUD FUD FUD!!!!!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
"As a result, companies are considering dramatically curtailing, or even abolishing completely the freedoms, on which employees have grown increasingly reliant over the past few years. "
Companies? What "companies"? The only firms named in the article are firewall and security companies that are spewing the fear used in this marketing spewing article.
No real management is going to take this seriously.
Re:Wasn't yours to begin with.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds fair. Now, of course, I'll just stop doing any sort of work outside the contracted time. Inspirational idea in the shower? Too bad. Clever way to save the company money thought up during the commute? Guess someone else will have to think it up during approved times.
This is part of the insane attitude that one's workers are one's worst enemies. Letting people do these little things is far from bad for business. It is most likely actually good as it creates an environment where people feel invested and where they have the wild concept that maybe their employer sees them as more than "production units".
But of course that assumes there's actually value in labor, and that's anathema to the modern capitalist.
Fairly weighing the risks (Score:2, Insightful)
I also don't understand the focus on racy and inflammatory stuff as the biggest risk to a company. The biggest risk to the company is not the Internet but the Intranet. It's often the case that in a single button click, one can get to the corporate secrets and with little more than a few more keystrokes one can output that info to a file and mail it to a party outside the company's walls. That risk outshines the risk of pornography in many cases.
And, finally, a lot of this seems a scapegoat for lazy/bad management. If your employees are productively yielding what they should, what difference does it make where they are surfing. And if they are not yielding what they should, why not address that issue?
Bozos? (Score:3, Insightful)
You're surfing the Internet on your employer's time
Your employer is paying the bill for the T3 (or whatever)
And you think you have the right to surf the Internet while at work? When you're on the company's time, you're supposed to be working...not bidding on crap on eBay.
Would someone please tell timothy what censorship is? This story doesn't even come close to the definition.
OK, OK, turn off the net access... (Score:3, Insightful)
...but please, please, please leave me a hole for Google's Usenet archive [google.com]. Almost every programming question I've ever had has been answered 100 times on Usenet.
It may not be a right, but a good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact of the matter is right now Americans are required to work way too much as is. Many jobs onyl allow you two weeks of vaction for several years after you start, and even then you might not get that "benefit" for a year after your start date. People getting burnt out at work happens all the time, and that hurts business in terms of productivity. Sure they enact short term solutions like fire the employees and hire new ones, but the new ones get burnt out faster trying to catch up. Allowing someone some time to spend checking up on their personal email and sending an ICQ to their wife is not to much to give up when it means your employees will be happier, and therefor more productive.
But I imagine the suits along with all the "you are paid to work" zealots on this site will only see the one dimension picture of lost email due to "personal" activities. At what point did we become slaves anyway?
The way it should be. (Score:5, Insightful)
Where I work (5000+ people company), this is what we do:
Honestly, I think that is about the best you can do. IT needs the internet extensively; other departments not so much. Hell, my boss has said to me on more than one occasion that if
I must say that I don't think its a good idea to totally remove internet access though for entire departments. I mean, if you work 8-5, that's the largest portion of your day spent at the office. You do have a life outside of work, and sometimes you have to do something online during those hours. Same goes for the phone, you are going to need it for a personal call every now & again. Of course, if you abuse the privileges, then you should have them revoked, plain & simple. But basic access should be allowed, after proper training, etc. However, giving everyone in the company unrestricted access is just flat-out stupid.
Reactionary Drivel... (Score:4, Insightful)
Gads, a tad bit reactionary, aren't we???
First, any company that doesn't take, at least, modest precautions in blocking certain types of e-mail attachments, or abusive downloadable web content is foolish, and, IMHO, acting negligently towards their own fiduciary responsibility, or toward their Internet neighbors.
I've been long sickened by the number of automated attacks that my IDS picks up. How long has CodeRed and Nimda been around??? Too many of these are comprimised hosts supported by corporate networks of some sort.
Second, there's little "right" involved in your use of corporate assets such as personal computers and networks. It's a kindergarten mentality to expect a company to be required to provide you with resources to order the latest teen-pop drivel, or whatever it is you just _have_ to buy during work hours.
That said, I (and many of those within my company) couldn't do our jobs as developers without net access. Any company which starts arbitrarily blocking access to the Internet without properly judging the necessary impact to their workers is also foolish.
If your company manufactures pencils, then OK, they can probably get away without providing unrestricted access to the Internet without any negative impact on their workforce. On the other hand, if your company develops software, etc... the impact would be substantial.
It's all a matter of degree, and like most things on this planet, the right solution lies in moderation.
Was this REALLY worth a Slashdot news item? I do not see how this is news in that a) it's not anything new, or hasn't been bandied about ad nausem; and b) common sense tells me that the submission itself is borderline troll. Seriously, timothy, did you think this was news???
It'd be nice to be able to moderate story submissions in addition to comments.
Duh, quit using Outlook (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest developments are around email prevention, experts say. Elaborate content filtering software, which can run upwards of $30,000 to install, can block all but the tamest incoming emails, and most attachments, said Trend Micro's Genes.
Corporations, particularly those that were stung hard by the wave of virus and worm attacks during the past two years, are considering it a top priority.
Here's a free clue: QUIT USING MICROSOFT SOFTWARE.
Sheesh, how stupid can you be? And what a stupid solution to the problem, cutting your nose off to spite your face.
Seriously, damned near all the email viruses are targeted directly at Outlook. So the solution is to ban email? Why not just, ya know, not use Outlook?
Myopic. Utterly myopic.
Re:Wasn't yours to begin with.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, "lost productivity" isn't really an IT or technology issue. ("Let's get rid of the coffee machine and water cooler. Too many people standign around when they should be working!") But it should be pretty obvious to the dumbest PHB that unrestricted Web access makes people stay in the office longer --- and unlike foosball tables or a refrigerator full of beer, it doesn't cost much. Note that I'm only referring to WEB access here: Morpheus and Kazaa can bring a network to a halt, and I wish my company would do more to block spam. (I get far more at work than at home, thanks to our Webmasters sticking prominent "mailto" links on the company site.)
Re:Time to vent (Score:2, Insightful)
Key words: when you should be working
What about the times when you're sitting at work with nothing to do, but still have to be there just in case something goes wrong? Or maybe you're waiting for a large build or test to finish and can't leave work until it does. In such situations it is certainly better to allow the employee(s) to amuse themselves a little and keep their morale high. I certainly would have quit my last job if I had been forced to sit and stare at a wall whenever I didn't have something to do.
If your company is NICE enough to let you use resources for personal use then fine but you do NOT have a right to do anything with something that isn't yours.
I do agree with you here, though. The company has every right to prevent you from using their resources for personal stuff. They're paying for the bandwidth, hardware, software, and even your time. Still, I feel that in most cases it is in everyone's best interests to allow employees a little room. I know that I work a lot better when I'm allowed a little time to relax. Don't you?
Re:Wasn't yours to begin with.... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is part of the insane attitude that one's workers are one's worst enemies. Letting people do these little things is far from bad for business. It is most likely actually good as it creates an environment where people feel invested and where they have the wild concept that maybe their employer sees them as more than "production units".
As I read the article, the point isn't "Joe smith just spent 10.3 minutes reading slashdot when he could have been working".. It has more to do with "Joe Smith just downloaded a pirated version of Photoshop to run on a company owned PC". Your doing some online shopping or checking your Hotmail (possibly) hurts your productivity, but NOT the productivity of others. Now imagine you're pulling up porn in your cube and Cindy M. Biblethumper happens to walk by... Or when you open your outlook and unleash the latest win32 virus on the network. This cost the company serious money above providing net access.
We're reached this point at my company. As the network admin I've taken to explicitly blocking any e-mail with a .exe, .vbs, or any one of a 100 different virus-carrying file-types across. I still allow .gif's, .zip's, .doc's, etc, but scan them before delivery. If they get upset because they can't receive dancingbaby.exe from their cousin in Toronto, that's too bad.. Let them download it home their home computer and infect it.
The same thing is happening with spam. For 5 years now our policy has been "we can't do anything about it", because we didn't want to be responsible for attemping to filter the incoming e-mail stream. It has reached the point that our CEO is receiving 15 - 30 porn spams a day and has had enough. We have to pay the costs while he's travelling in europe and dialed in to our 800 number at 28.8 downloading this shit. We're about to deploy spamassassin [taint.org] site-wide, and if it happens to catch someone's birthday card from his step-mother, that's too bad.
Shayne
Re:The way it should be. (Score:2, Insightful)
it is about control... (Score:4, Insightful)
A draconian attitude regarding squeezing every last second of work out of an employee is pointless! all it does is breed resentment in the employees. when I was working in an environment where 5pm counterstrike matches were commonplace, we tended to do more work after the match. however, the work was interesting enough we did not mind.
the moment the management is against the workers is the moment production starts to fall. everyone should be working toward the goal.
also I highly doubt that ANYONE here could go 8 hours without a slashdot fix. dream on.
Re:Wasn't yours to begin with.... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the reason we're the #2 consulting company and you have to block
Re:what's wrong with these guys... (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, that sounds so secure! Ohter than the fact that you're not doing the work that's probably expected of you, I don't think employees in any large company can be trusted to not find themselves a virus.
Re:what's wrong with these guys... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ideally, employees should be gauged on performance items: do they do the work they're given, does their work reflect a high level of quality, does the employee both fill their job description and give that extra 10% (participating in meetings, giving a shit about the product, etc) you expect from employees, etc.
Things like monitoring web access are on the other end of that. This is more on the level of companies that rate their employees by how many hours a week they spend at their desk or who eats lunch in the office. These things are quantifiable, but in the end are a lot less meaningful (for example, at my last job there were people who'd spend 14 hours a day at work, but who couldn't make a deadline to save their souls).
But hey, it's tough find good managers. And even when you find them, they tend to be expensive. It's much cheaper to hire people with degrees in business from state colleges and experience bossing their dog around. I'm looking at you, Nadir.
Re:It's about control... (Score:3, Insightful)
In my office, where we develop in Java, the local proxy server blocks site like www.junit.org or Google (usenet) groups. I guess they want to make sure that the programmers don't cheat and use already prepared answers... :-)
There are so many ways around this - I'll just take my laptop to the part and jack-in the open wireless network that's running there...
Or better yet, I'll go to the bathroom and bring a book.
Re:Yup. (Score:5, Insightful)
But that point aside, that's fine I'm getting paid to work, 40 hours a week. The main reason I can work 60-70 hours is because I can deal with my real life issues while at work quickly and easily through net use. Not to mention that my work is greatly facilitated by the fact that if I need software or information I can quickly and easily obtain it from my desktop.
I see your point, but (tech) companies thrive on a particular type of employee, who if he can't read
We're not the only career that needs the Internet! (Score:2, Insightful)
What about lawyers, most legal research is done online nowadays - they have just as good reasons as IT staff to want unlimited access to information!
Also journalists, scientists, etc. We should remember that it wasn't some poxy pr0n collecting nerd who invented the WWW, it was a physicist trying to improve communication with his fellow peers!
Re:Yup. (Score:4, Insightful)
" While I agree that Admins need to keep on top of patches, Nimda can still spread even with patched servers. It self-propagates through Outlook "
If you're using Outlook, you deserve all you get.
I am the web orientated guy out of a two man IT server admin team. Frankly, I think time would be much better spent upgrading company policy and used programs such that a simple virus such as Nimda CANNOT propergate.
No, not everyone can move away from Windows, but you can't tell me anyone needs to use Outlook or Internet Explorer, or any of the other arse security-bug ridden apps MS releases.
Rather than paying for Microsoft's mistakes with employee moral and wasting IT's time, simply think before making any software purchasing decisions.
Re:Wasn't yours to begin with.... (Score:3, Insightful)
This "productivity loss" is a bunch of horse shit anyway. People with a strong work ethic will do the job regardless, and people without won't. You're not going to turn a bad employee into a good one by removing net access.
Re:It's about control... (Score:2, Insightful)
Wierd...
#1 Worm entry vector? Hotmail! (Score:3, Insightful)
Employee access to external POP3 services is prohibited, both by policy and firewall rules.
Where viruses and worms (Nimda, Code Red, etc) have made it into the company, we've almost universally tracked the vector down to a 'Free Email' service, primarily Hotmail and Yahoo! mail.
We are considering blocking all such services, or at least forcing all traffic to and from these services through the antivirus system, and suffer the latency and associated user complaints.
Again, we cannot force all web traffic through a scanner, as there is strong opposition from various divisions to any change that would slow down web access.
Re:It's about control... (Score:4, Insightful)
Plus the phones listen off of port 80, so watch out for DDOS attacks on those as well.
Laptop users (Score:4, Insightful)
With increasing numbers of portable devices, and wireless networking, including 3G phones, it's going to be harder and harder to plug all the gaps. Instead of listening to the sales pitch of the anti-virus and firewall manufacturers, we should use some commonsense: ditch products like Outlook.
Re:I remember when this was news (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The way it should be. (Score:2, Insightful)
Uh huh. I don't know the fantasy land you live in but the developers I've met and worked with aren't aware that there are things like "motherboards" in computers and wouldn't know a virus if it popped up an alert box saying "I'm a virus!". That's not their job, they're good at optimizing algorithms, not managing computers. Maybe you should just install a virus checker on everyone's machine.
Oh yeah, MSN's Game Zone is a lot worse than sitting around polishing her nails waiting for the phone to ring. If she gets her job done, what does it matter?
Can't argue with you too much on this one, but censorware can be overly zealous for sites people need to access. I think
Good idea, but I don't see how that is pertinent to a discussion on curtailing recreational internet usage.
Oh yeah, because IT knows all the cool people on IM and everyone else is lame. Another poster said that IT people need to stay in touch with other IT people, did you ever think that marketing people might benefit from discussing their trade with other marketing people? Or because you know how to make a routing table you are somehow more entitled to talk to people via those routing tables? Or because you know what lossy compression is you're entitled to listen to mp3s downloaded via p2p?
As for you keeping up on
Christ, IT is there to fucking support the company, not chain it down.
Re:Foolish. (Score:4, Insightful)
Screw notifying the IT guys. That's an HR job. I want no part of it. Let the guys that chose "business" and drank too much in college be hated and vilified. I'd like to be able to eat lunch with the people I work with and not have them be careful about what they tell me. When they come back with 4 hand grenades and an uzi, I'd rather not be the face of the Oppressor.
Internet access is a *symptom* of the real problem (Score:4, Insightful)
That means it's a problem their managers need to address; not something for the IT department. If someone is surfing six hours a day, then it's the manager's fault that they're not properly supervising them and giving them tasks or disciplining them for not getting their work done.
That said, a company would have to be foolish not to employ some basic filtering measures(porno, gambling, gaming sites, file sharing services, e-mail attachments) to keep network traffic and the more obvious time wasters in check.
However, if an employee is doing all their work and checking Yahoo Mail or ESPN.com, what is the harm? It keeps them happy and the company's work is getting done.
Re:!FUD !FUD !FUD (Score:2, Insightful)
I think you've been watching too much of "The Man Show." Flipping through my employee handbook reveals that the law defines harassment (sexual or otherwise) as creating an uncomfortable or hostile environment. It has nothing to do with physical assault.
And the fact is, that in any business environment, your "human nature" argument is shit. When you're at work, everyone has to draw a line and have some consideration for the tastes of others...the fact that you may have no taste or sensibility does not preclude others from having it.
Heck, even as a male, I would be very unsettled dealing with any idiot that put pr0n wallpaper on their screen.
i hope i never become like you people ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... what it is like to have your spririt broken like that??? to have resigned that 8 hours of your life a day - AN ENTIRE THIRD - of it is surrendered so completely to someone else just because they give you some money for it. has your life become so shallow and money obsessed that you are prepared to resign the greater part of your waking day to someone else just for money?
i am working in a job i like (computer programmer), and its something that i will even do at home after hours on a different level (i write commercial apps at work, and i fiddle with games/graphics programming at home)
... sure, when one of the plebs in support double clicks on a
... and on the flipside, if i think of something outside of work - when im not *GASP* actually getting paid for it - that is useful or may relate to my work, i may still actually spend a bit or a lot of time (whatever may be required) working it over or writing it down or something AND I DONT ASK FOR MONEY THE NEXT MORNING
... i just hope to that i never EVER become as depressing and inert as half the ppl who have replied to this posting
Re:They take it seriously where I work!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
If my company took away net access, would I continue to work, well yeah, would I be any more productive definitely not. Would I be looking for a new job, count on it.
Re:It's about control... (Score:2, Insightful)
But the cost of moving to Sun hardware (no Solaris on x86 please), getting Solaris versions of apps we run or rolling our own, staff retraining, etc... we simply can't afford it. What do you do when your desktop users need to access the accounting package client? CRM package? Etc. We tried Wine and such, but with little success. We've tried piloting 2 Linux desktops as well, with the most technically inclined users we had, but they weren't productive.
It's not like we moved to windows anyways, it was there when I got there. If VMS or AIX was there, I wouldn't of touched it, trust me. But it was a small place running Small Business Server 4.0 on NT4 and management had little interest on migrating things to a new platform.
Trust me, we woulnd't replace our accounting package and EDI solution with plain old anything (we're running MAS200 and QualEDI), we need that bulletproof support in case things ever do go awry.
We've automated much of the Win maintenance with a lot of custom scripts and simple AT jobs. It's not very difficult truthfully to run a pretty secure shop. I've run Linux for years and Solaris in more recent times, with a bit of AIX, and I found the time invested in all to be roughly the same. Just keep up on the lists and news and use common sense and practices.
-----
What "they" care about and what matters (Score:3, Insightful)
Well they do.
On a recent interview, I decided I did NOT want to work for the company I was speaking to. (They had mentioned that TCP/IP was owned by MS b/c (I swear this is true) to implement it you had to "Right click on Network Neighborhood, choose Protocols, choose Microsoft....") I asked them why they were switching from CC Mail to Outlook and not to Lotus Notes which is a more "natural" move.
The IT Manager (not the TCP/IP lady) said basically this:
"Our users want Outlook. They used it elsewhere. It works really well with Office. It does a lot of things right. Yeah Lotus is more secure but it is ugly and it is harder to administer [I disagree]. Plus you need a developer to take advantage of the program. Outlook does everything Notes does before you get a developer involved anf it does it a lot easier."
So what the IT Manager was saying was; Everyone uses it, it's easy.
He's pretty much right.
All the folks that yell and scream: BUT *NIX IS BETTER, you're all correct. In the late 70s early 80s all the people that yelled BUT BETA IS BETTER were right too.
So if the same people who shrug their shoulders at insecurity and poor design are certainly going to belive that cutting down USENET, surfing and private email will "protect" them.
I personally blocked Hotmail, Yahoo!, & MSNMail for about 2 months at a site. To tell you the truth I couldn't take all the effing viruses either. And you know what? It stopped the viruses. I mean dead. 25/week --> 0/week
We here at
Are *NIXes better? Duh. Is PINE safer? Duh. Now tell Jane Secretary that she has to jump through hoops to send email from her bosses account...
The IT Manager just wanted happy users and was willing to hire a few more Admins to take care of the mess. He knew the score.
And
And why precisely on your company's computer, on your company's network, over your company's T do you feel you have any right to do anything they don't want you to? (Hey if you own stock raise Hell, I'm with you there!)
Re:Wasn't yours to begin with.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Can you say "swiss cheese security"?
Ms is abominable in every way imaginable and is a criminal corporation. They are the Public Enemy Number One of the 'net and of the so-called "free market". They are essentially anti-capitalist in their aspiration to "extend and embrace" (read: control everything).
Get a clue. Buy a vowel. Take a hike.
"These Bozos" (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Bozos? (Score:3, Insightful)
And you think you have the right to surf the Internet while at work?
If the organization in question is big enough for a T3, then it is big enough to pay thousands for telephone service, coffee service, housekeeping, office furniture, and the ongoing costs associated with an ascetically pleasing facility and property. None of these costs directly relate to productivity, but are considered to be comforts that a civilized business provides to its employees. At some level, there is an awareness that if you are going to engage the services of humans in the course of your business, you must provide certain comforts that serve no purpose except to please the humans.
The reality is that taking away web browsing in today's world is like taking all the phones or discontinuing company provided toilet paper. It has become a necessary human comfort to be able to check the weather or see your kids on the daycare webcam.
Besides, in my extensive experience, the network abuses and virus problems almost always come from users on the top floor.
Companies have rights too (Score:3, Insightful)
While I think they shouldn't have the right to snoop on your private documents or e-mails just because you're in their building, that doesn't mean they can't restrict certain types of uses.
A wise company has a distributed system, whereby users login with different usernames/passwords for "leisure activity" and for "work activity". The company should separate the "leisure" and "work" logins and files separately, on separate hard-drives.
A good idea is to give unrestricted access on the "leisure" system, but allocate less resources to them. There's no reason why they need to be operating at 2GHz with 1GB RAM for leisure. Btw, sorry, the workplace is not for playing Quake or Descent 3.
Furthermore, privacy policies should be different on the leisure and work accounts/systems. There should be no privacy on your "work" account, but only on your "leisure" account. The company should also assign different e-mails for "leisure" and "work" accounts for each person; if you want privacy, you'll only use your "business" e-mail for work.
Though an individual's activities would not be monitored on the "leisure" system, the time spent on the "leisure" and "work" accounts would be monitored and compared; obviously, companies don't want to keep someone on the paycheck who spends 4 out of 8 hours a day on leisure.
The key thing here is for employees to realize that they don't have the RIGHT to use their company's resources for their own personal matters.
It, however, is also not acceptable for companies to go back on previously agreed-upon privacy rules in regards to their employees. Companies also shouldn't go on a power trip, as that is likely to alienate employees.
Re:It's about control... (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny, I did it with $0, plus about a few hours of my time.
We haven't either since I installed the virus scanner on the mail server (again, a $0 price tag, plus an hour of time).
I think the whole premise of the article is to find non-"worker efficiency" justifications for imposing nazi-like restrictions on Internet usage at work. The technical/security rationale is flawed, and preventing workers from spending personal time on the web or email is only likely to make them miserable, not more productive.
Jason.
am i missing something (Score:2, Insightful)
Productivity and Internet Access (Score:4, Insightful)
An aspect that I haven't seen brought up, however, is the productivity that comes from keeping salaried employees at work. Being able to handle personal business online and not having to take long lunches or leave early before the stores/banks/etc. close is a benefit to employees, employers and even the environment.
Re:The way it should be. (Score:2, Insightful)
It's amazing the kind of brain-damaged stupidity that gets moderated up on slashdot sometimes.
So you're telling us that marketing doesn't need access to the Net for research, purchasing doesn't need access to the Net to surf vendor sites for the best prices... how many more examples do you need?
What it comes down to is an employee who has need to access information that's not at the jobsite who is locked out of the Net by the suits is a less productive employee for that reason. No matter what his job title is.
A company does have the right to monitor and control Internet usage subject to local laws. It is equally true that if similarly competent upper management wants to put their IT staff in gold lame Mickey Mouse uniforms complete with head and pay licensing fees to Disney for this, there's no law or regulation that forbids them from doing so, either. However, a company that wants good employees to be happy and productive isn't going to be locking down the Internet unless they want those employees to be spending their at home time job-surfing and updating resumes. Or waiting for the next economic upturn for this to happen. This should be fairly soon, the economy is already starting to expand by the conventional indicators.
Employers can take advantage of the current job market for all sorts of absurdities mandated by suits who haven't figured out quite what it is they're supposed to be managing.
As soon as the economy turns around,the locked down shops advocated by the drones around here are ONLY going to be manned by drones. These are the kind of people who will unquestionably follow orders right up to when they get their pink slips along with the rest of their fellow obedient servants and won't have any clue as to what happened.
Of course, the companies where the bulk of the workers do totally routinized things and never need outside information to get their jobs done won't have a problem with a workforce of drones, but how many new jobs and new companies have you seen like this the last few years?
The kind of old-style factory management who believe that the new technological tools created to empower their kind of management techniques legitimizes their using it as a substitute for motivation and observation (yes, you can legally monitor employee bathroom breaks. Does this mean you should?) are dinosaurs waiting for the next boom to take their companies into the tarpits when they find out what the words "employee turnover" mean to them.
The companies that thrive in the next boom will realize that these tools are just another kind of software snake oil, along with XP and IIs.
Re:The way it should be. (Score:2, Insightful)
In the case of the mail attachments it's pretty obvious why we did it and as for the p2p, the reasoning went something like "the company has no use for them and it *might* be illegal".
Occasionally we did usage reports and in a nice way told people that their extensive use of sites like playboy etc just *might* not be too productive in relation to their work. We did have issues with some employees not performing their work in favor of ICQ etc, but it was clearly a minor problem, and not ours to handle, but rather HR.
I think the way you describe probably is the best way to go, coupled with clear and well communicated policies on acceptable usage.
However I think that if you begin to block for example p2p-apps you should block them for all and not apply a different ruleset on select people like IT and sysadmins.
Being a sysadmin gives you lot of power, but also raises the ethical level you have too live by... at least in my opinion.
Being a BOFH sure might be fun, but it's not exactly right
Re:It's about control... (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey, I'm not in the corporate world right now, but what you say rings true to me. I know the company that cuts off my email and web access is losing an employee.
It was all over the LOC post the other day: productivity isn't measured in code produced, hours at the desk or anything else like that. The internet is my encyclopedia, and if I don't have that not only and I unhappy, but I'm less productive.
So yeah, Right on. I agree.
Christopher
Re:technical solution to a people problem (Score:3, Insightful)
(a) in business terms, that's the cost of assigning someone to work full-time for 4 months on something. So consider that before you shell-out for the software: could your own people get a free solution running for less cost?
(b) just how much money do they expect businesses to save? You'd have to waste an awful lot of bandwidth before the cost reached £30,000
(c) Did anyone ever analyse the costs/benefits of this? How much work does a perl developer do without access to perl.com? How much work does any developer do if they have to stare at the program unril they leave, rather than being able to do something else while they think about it?
(d) How long are your people going to stay if they have to keep on working every spare moment, without any distractions? It makes you think of the human-farms in The Matrix.