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."
Back to the Future (Score:2, Interesting)
In the 19th and early 20th century, at the heart of the industrial revolution, working conditions were appalling. There were no government restrictions on what employers could require from employees.
As a result of the socialist labour movements, both through their political arms and through strikes and other actions, work place reforms were put in place.
Age limits were raised, limitations on salary cutting was introduced and dangerous machinery was forced to be made safer.
Now, at the beginning of the 21C, we have forgotten those gains and how they were made. We have forgotten that employers must be kept in check by organized employees.
If you stand alone, they will monitor every aspect of your lives, from email to web surfing, to drug use. The actions in this article are only the beginning.
Remember that old saying, which is now so relevant - in Union is Strength.
Not very logical (Score:1, Interesting)
Take away my abilities to do those things, and I will become more "letter of the law". I only HAVE to work 35-40 hours.
Re:Yup. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Yeah. (Score:4, Interesting)
Additionally, the occasional personal use tends to reduce the number of personal phone calls coming in dramaticly, so as long as it isn't excessive, we tend to let it slide.
Re:What is the problem?? (Score:2, Interesting)
They take it seriously where I work!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Where I work, we completely cut off access to the Internet from nine to noon, and one to five. In other words, if you want to do anything on the Internet, you can't do it during regular business hours (except during lunch). In our case the purpose was not security or reducing liability, but to increase the productivity of our coders. Management wasn't too happy with the amount of time programmers spent web surfing and IRCing.
Some coders complained they needed to use the Web for reference and research purposes, so we set up a single computer with 24 hour Internet access in a very public area where everyone could see whether or not you doing something work related. Surprisingly, it doesn't see much use.
This whole policy was none too popular (as you might imagine) when it was first implemented a few months ago. But by every objective measure, productivity is very markedly improved, bugs are fewer, we're getting things done within a reasonable time frame for a change. It still isn't a popular policy, but even the programmers who most resent the policy have had to admit (grudgingly) that it works.
How about banishing Outlook? (Score:2, Interesting)
Never mind...
Re:Foolish. (Score:2, Interesting)
There was one employee that was spending his free time downloading and accessing muchos pornos from his company terminal. He was warned once, and when he did it again. He was fired.
Needless to say, we all purged our bookmarks after the incident.
You'll always have access (Score:5, Interesting)
Here at my company, as a sysadmin, I've been suggesting a policy of completely unfiltered web access *and* completely unfiltered proxy log access.
From the CEO all the way down to the temps.
(Except for *me* of course...)
We already filter out dangerous attachments from email and have good virus software. We really don't have a problem in that respect.
The thing is, once you take something like this away from your staff, you are saying "We don't trust you. We think you're slacking."
In my office, people work damn hard and are pretty happy in their work. We have a good atmosphere and no real division between workers and management. Once a company starts doing this kind of thing, the mood changes and people get resentful.
How many people in how many companies have said "This place really started to go downhill when they took away the free soft drinks..."?
Just my 2 yen,
Jim in Tokyo
THIS WILL GET ME LAID OFF (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't see this working (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The way it should be. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seen IT departments that have ONLY HTTP access through a proxy. I was once stationed at a consultant through my full time employer as such a place and when I neeeded to do a text dump of a DB I couldn't even FTP it back to our site because -nobody- in the building could do an FTP transfer. Solution: NFS mount the Unix partition that had the
IT may abuse it from time to time, but take it away and you pull a huge resource from the good workers.
Re:Bozos? Gimme a break! (Score:1, Interesting)
The people posting in support of removing net access should stop assuming that everyone works in a meat packing factory or in a sweatshop stitching pants for $1.25 an hour.
If you want to decrease my productivity then remove my net access, but don't act surprised when I eventually quit to work for an employer with a more friendly internet policy.
Re:What is the problem?? (Score:3, Interesting)
It is mighty handy for somebody running tech support to know about the latest computer virii before it hits the customer base, or even the networks servers, if it is a virus that does not propagate by e-mail but rather by exploiting a server vulnerability.
They Watch You At Home, Too (Score:4, Interesting)
Not a case of rights, but still important. (Score:3, Interesting)
From the standpoint of security and/or legal responsibility, of course a company needs to restrict Internet access. No filter is perfect, but as long as it blocks out most of the obvious porn, gambling, "hacker" (speaking colloquially), racist, etc. sites it should at least make it abundantly clear that an employee is trying very hard to circumvent the rules. But then again, there should already be policies on the books dealing with those things, Internet or no Internet.
On the other hand, from a standpoint of productivity, a company should be very wary of restricting Internet access. I don't buy the argument that if an employee isn't surfing the Internet for X hours per day that all of a sudden, he will be productive for X more hours per day. There is a limit to how productive someone is going to be -- if you take away the Internet, some other "time waster" will rise in its place. Do you really think everyone who has a Palm just uses it for phone numbers and schedules? Do you think that just because someone is at their desk concentrating intently that they aren't working on a crossword puzzle? Do you think that every phone call made is for business? How about good old-fashioned staring into space?
An employee is productive if he or she performs to expectations, period. Companies should have an interest in getting rid of (or better yet, finding a way to motivate) unproductive employees anyway -- but it shouldn't involve cutting off the Internet from employees who are already pulling at least their own share of the weight, if not more. If my company wants to call me on the carpet for reading Slashdot or sending an e-mail to my girlfriend to see how her Monday is going after being sick with the flu all weekend, fine. I will be more than glad to show them the half-dozen individual and team achievement awards that senior management has given to me in the last three years, agree sarcastically that the Internet has indeed made me a lousy employee, and otherwise be as amicable as Galileo before the Inquisition. I will also be sure never to work more than 40 hours per week, observe Internet usage policies religiously, and perform utterly mediocre work for the length of time it takes to find a job for a competitor who understands that achievement is the bottom line.
stranger and stranger still (Score:3, Interesting)
Asside. If your company "firewall" is anything like mine, your users, aka peers, can send anything they want at a ".zip" or anything that is not one of the banned names so frightening to M$ Admins.
Incompetence breeding inconvenience for the rest of us. Nice work, meat heads. It's not going to bother me too much because my job gives me enough time at home to have a life. Some people will not be so lucky and your efforts, or lack thereof, will really burn them. Get your freaking act togeter or go away or expect your best people to pack up and leave.
Re:Let's be honest. (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, when I worked in Congress, one of our schedulers had a TV set up in her office to watch soaps.
Our Chief of Staff, who worked in the office across from her, didn't have a problem with it. Why?
Because she got her work done.
(That and the fact that it took 20-30 minutes to print off schedules from our crappy CMS.)
They will still come and get you, a vent. (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other end, the cable companies are now expressly forbiding "VPN". While you may think they are only after the retarded M$ full desktop bandwith hogger, what they really want is your money. The asses that block ports 25 and 80 will get around to 22 sooner or later, regardless of your actual badwith use. My cable company, Cox, just started to block port 21 on incoming ftp request. I'm not sure how they can distinguish that from the AOL client, but they did tonight and my mother got a "blocked by administrator" sign instead of pictures of my baby girl. So clever, they will soon be out of my $65/month I'm paying for a static IP. No the asses are not going to get the $50/month DHCP fee from me either. Snip, bye bye.
The internet is almost the coporate lap dog the entertainment companies, publishers and telcos wanted. If the feds kill wireless there will be no useful net left. I'm fed up with the spam, the adverts, the unilateral contracts, the credit card demands and the whole fuck you.
Cutting off your nose to spite your face (Score:2, Interesting)
Three of the companies restricted access alot. Ports would not even be opened on the firewalls if there was a business case, leading to quite senior people in IT and other departments using dialup accounts from their desktops. One company had such restrictive worldwide security guidelines that individual business units were getting T1 lines and not disclosing their existence when we did security audits (I worked for central IT)
The company I work for now and one other are very relaxed - the firewalls don't let much in but let pretty much anything out. Result, no one routes around the company firewalls/virus scanners/IDS sensors/caches we're not allowed to pass MP3's but that's about it.
Yes dialup can be prevented if the desktops are locked down, and the phones on users desks are digital, but 3G phones are coming, many with Bluetooth/IRDA, companies are better off being resonable now rather than losing visibity of what their employees are doing.
Re:Crippling. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yup. (Score:3, Interesting)
The salesman has less to do with the sale than the cashier at McDonalds.
Re:Changing the way people conceive of work (Score:3, Interesting)
Quick quiz: How many people in Japan commit suicide from working like dogs compared to North Americans? My guess would be a LOT more, from what I've heard. There's even a word for it; I forget what it is but it starts with a "K".
What about the Japanese idea that an employer owes the worker a lifelong job in exchange for loyalty? That seems way more fucked up to me than putting in 9-5 and expecting a cheque. Of course, the job for life deal isn't really panning out that much anymore, and neither are a lot of other feudal Japanese traditions.
I'll tell you one thing AC, I wouldn't want to be in Japan when the time comes for the Japanese way of life to change. History has shown that societal change in Japan is never gradual, subtle, peaceful, or bloodless.
Re:What is the problem?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, some of the management types didn't like it. But there are enough of them that understand where their profits come, so I haven't actually seen much real interference.
There was a funny case 6 or 7 years back, when a customer sent us the results of a benchmark of our product against several others. When asked why I hadn't run the benchmark myself, I pointed to a printed policy that prevented me from accessing the site that had the benchmark's source. I mentioned that I'd read about the test, but thought that if I downloaded it, I'd get into trouble for violating the policy. The policy changed real fast after that.
Management that restrict their techies from use of the Net are dummies who are just shooting their own company in the foot.
What's wrong with this picture? (Score:3, Interesting)
If your company starts adopting this policy, then it's one good reason for you to start working from 9am till 5pm every day. I don't think that they would prefer that to your current 14 hours that you regularely put on the job, even if your pcshows the slashdot web page every once in a while.
PPA, the girl next door.
This article is a bit dated... (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure we have access to commonplace sites like cnn.com, espn.com, and the like, but this is a very, very touchy situation. Traffic is monitored and regularly audited. The only way you know whether or not a site is restricted is by clicking a link and hoping to god you do see the dreaded WARNING!!! YOU HAVE VIOLATED COMPANY POLICY BY ENTERING THIS SITE! banner. Hell, I once got wacked by our firewall for a URL that happened to have "sex" in it. (ex. www.transexpress.com)
Needless to say, I rarely do much surfing during downtime at work for fear of a PHB confrontation on my internet habits.
They have already done this at my job...... (Score:2, Interesting)
The CEO said any checking of "non-company" email and any surfing "not work related" is grounds for firing. All the smart people have left now. (I have an interview tomorrow) They even have some lackey's sniffing the wire watching for http/pop3 traffic. They seriously think they can catch the last Unix admin.......
Of course they don't realize that my secure shell sessions are tunneling monster [monster.com] and slashdot [slashdot.org] back to my desktop.
I just read my email though mutt [mutt.org] on my home mail server [panicdump.org].
It really is sad though. They took a fun company and destroyed it. It seems to be a growing trend among Corporate America. Oh well at least I have a choice. I feel sorry for all the smaller guys/gals at the company. Companies will be sorry, all the talent will go to companies that actually care about their employees (a little).
Just my
already happening (Score:2, Interesting)
We're allowed to send 3 personal emails a week and receive 3 (all without attachments) we can surf the web for personal use for a max of 1 hour a day during breaks and cannot use chat rooms and webmail. We cannot do any ecommerce. Failing to adhere is a serious disciplinery action and permie staff and contractors can be dismissed.
That's the "official" policy but in practice, people seem to be disregarding it so far.
I can understand that companies want to protect their systems and to not lose productivity by people emailing and surfing when they should really be working. Internet access at work is a privilege and not a right and it's abuse of this right that has led to this, as some see it, "draconian" policy.
tracking bandwidth/time surfing... (Score:2, Interesting)
People often forget that bandwidth is a whack more expensive outside of the USA. I'm the NetGeek at a small "historically disadvantaged" (i.e. black) university in S/Africa. We're sitting on just about a T1, and seem to have about 400 staff users and a couple thousand student Net users.
A lot of the cool P2P stuff, MP3 suckers, streaming audio, etc, just isn't on -- I reckon 3 users would fire up 128Kbps streams and that would be the end of it (we're have a 480Kbps CIR from overseas).
I've bashed out some stuff that bolts onto squid so that the students get preset usage limits, and see these in the face every time they fire up a browser in the lab. It seems to be working ok, and I think its a good solution to controlling B/W abuse. I'm still worried about the content scanning (virus) issue. I can't imagine implementing any kind of "quarantine area for attachments". The academic staff send Word/Excel & a bazillion other kinds of attachments to colleagues at other universities several hundred times a day I'm sure, completely legitimately. (And the secretaries send AVIs of Fabio to all their friends...)
But, one of the PHB types in our management wants me to monitor how much time staff spend on the web. I told him I don't think this can be done reliably since people leave their browsers tuned in to sites that automagically refresh all the time -- I can see a handful of people with "WWW sessions" that run all through the night. Believe me, a couple of HoDs have asked about web usage stats as they would use these when drawing up retrenchment shortlists.
Putting a choke hold on employees yet to be hired (Score:2, Interesting)
Imagine, in 3 or 4 years, when a fresh group of entry level employees arrive (job function will not matter at this point.) Manager asks new employee, tell me why X is happening. New employee doesn't know much about X so he/she wants to do a little research first. In their HS/college days, the research was done on the net, so new employee opens up the browser and attempts to access a search engine. Only an error is returned, citing restricted 'net access. So the new employee, after having to ask around a bit, finds out that you must get approval to have any sort of access. Now the fresh-out-of-school employee has to call IT to find out the procedure. He/she then must get various signatures from HR, management, and whoever else. That HR person is on vacation, so forget about getting approval this week. Later on in the day, eager to find out how his/her new employee is doing, the manager asks about the answer. Now the new employee is screwed, on their first day.
Moral of the story? The next generation of employees is being brought up in an environment where knowledge is known to be easily available on the 'net. Due to this, they begin to rely on this means of learning more. Web classes are now tought in most colleges, many secondary schools, and some primary schools. 2nd and 3rd graders look things up for homework asignments on the web. Students learn to rely on the web to help them learn and solve problems. But when they get to work, they won't be able to do so and will be stuck on their first days.
Don't beleive it? You should. There is absolutly no way I could preform at my best without the web. It allows me to find out anything I might need to know in order to be an effective problem solver (a major part of my job.) I started using the 'net to help myself learn around '93-'94, at the beginning of HS, when it [the 'net] was in its infancy. Imagine someone who began using it yesterday, or today, as a secondary school kid.
Although the security problems merrit much concern (hey- I'm in IT too!), a simple end to unrestricted 'net is a very short-sighted solution. And I'm not even mentioning all the other aforementioned reasons 'net access is inherently good.
BTW, on a personal note, the day I am stripped of 'net access is the day I stip my employer of any thought time spent on company business off company time.
This is 'News' allegedly ? (Score:1, Interesting)
Ping : No Fscking Way
Outside DNS : LMAO
AIM/IRC/ICQ etc : You must be fscking joking.
Direct HTTP Access : Go and boil your head
You get proxied and filtered HTTP access and thats it. Active content again is blocked. Trying to bypass it through SSL tunnels/whatever is a mandatory P45.
Fsck with my perimeter, the IDS spread randomly throughout will see what you are doing. Again you will be joining the ranks of the unemployed.
All inbound/outbound SMTP AV checked & filtered with active content blocked and held, through 2 tiers of mail servers running complimentary products.
Access to 'everyone' in the mail directory is restricted to supervisor use only.
Group security policy makes amateur gyneacology over HTTP a sacking offence.
Nothing new there. Wake up Yanks, the way we do things in Europe is a tad different from over there.
Curmudgeon
I finally got around it all (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yup. (Score:3, Interesting)
Ignoring for a moment paid software, so we're on a level playing-field with Outlook Express, and remembering that an extra $40/seat or whatever for something as simple as an email client can really bulk the cost of an office-full of machines.
Free email clients which support multiple POP accounts? Not many.
Filter that list for those which support attachments, even fewer.
And those which support PGP (ok I know OutExp doesn't either but it's useful) and filtering rules
Now if only there was something like KMail for Windows, we could all stop using outlook express. But if there is, I can't find it.
Any ideas?
Re:They will still come and get you, a vent. (Score:2, Interesting)
I head the same thing is going on in Korea, Hong Kong and some of the bigger cities in China. It's interesting that the US is finally falling behind in residential telecommunications. I understand parts of Scandanavian Europe and Auckland New Zealand also have residential ethernet service. Perhaps the future of the net lies well beyond the borders of the US and its restrictive net policies.
XML will solve some of the e-mail problems (Score:2, Interesting)
Corporate America (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, we have virus scanning software that scans all email, desktops, and user shares, but that still does not mean viruses do not get in. Users like to check their 'free' email on Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, and other places and bring many in around our normal system.
People complain filtering content in the workplace seems draconian, but I see no reason users need to be viewing 'hot, young, fill-in-the-blank' websites anyway. In fact, in some states, like in Virginia, it is illegal to view adult content on state owned computers. As a former employee of the state, I saw 14 people fired in a one year period for surfing adult sites. You first get a warning and they start monitoring all http traffic from your box. Next your gone. People still thought they could get away with it.
As far as the other so called harsh draconian measures, think about this - most users are not techno-savvy. It's not a Microsoft issue, it's a person issue. Some people hate computers, they hate to use them, and they break them often. All software crashes as some point or another. Reviewing our helpdesk tracking software I can point out many Mac's and UNIX issues that they have had to solve as well as microsoft issues.
Think about this - do you wear a tie to work? Why? It's corporate policy. Do you work better with a tie on? Why don't we just ban tie's because wearing them seems useless. Corporate polices are there for a reason. Apperance, preformance, and substinance counts. It's what seperates the Fortune 100 from the rest of the pack. Polices like the ones discussed further this mentality. If you don't agree, fine. Work for a small more personalize company, but don't expect to be on the cover of Forbes anytime soon.
Bottom line, most users not in IT are computer ignorant. They call up and ask what their password is, after they create it themselves. Should we blame the companies that make the software? Should we blame measures put forth to stop people from hurting themselves? Why should we try and place blame on anyone? This is more of a western philosophy. In eastern thinking, people focus on the problem and fixing it, not on placing blame on a group or individual.
An old tech guy I used to work with summed up this argument pretty well in something he said to me about the shipping department in a company I used to work for. The department had multiple new calls to the helpdesk every week from these guys. Many times, the guys down there (large, burly, bearded men) would break their boxen so bad they would have to be replaced. We couldn't even figure out how they broke some of this stuff, but they did, constantly. I asked about it one day and he said to me:
"The shippping department? Well...I'll put it this way, you could leave three cannonballs down there on Monday, and by Wednesday, they will have broken two of them and lost the third one."
Sometimes you have to save users from themselves.
{/rant}
Call me an Admin-Nazi (Score:2, Interesting)
At my work I am one of these creatures. I used to be one of the users, and did the same things they did. I feel bad about selling out sometimes, but my boss wants to ensure 100% efficiency on the part of the technicians. And a technician playing games or writing email or surfing the web isn't making money. And that technician not making us money may be why I get laid off next year. It's a horrible fascist regime we run at my work. No wonder we have such a high turnover rate.