HP CEO's Browsing History Used Against Him 230
theodp writes "Anything you browse can and will be used against you. An investigation of ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd's surfing history reportedly convinced the HP Board that Hurd had had a personal relationship with sexual harassment accuser Jodie Fisher, even if not sexual. Just the latest example of how HP 'work[s] together to create a culture of inclusion built on trust, respect and dignity for all.' The WSJ reported a person close to the investigation said Hurd had looked at clips from racy films featuring Ms. Fisher, a former actress, while someone 'familiar with Mr. Hurd's thinking' said he merely did a Google search of 10 minutes or so. One wonders how many more 'personal relationships' with Ms. Fisher the browser histories of HP's 304,000 worldwide employees might reveal. BTW, nice to see that Hurd has made it to HP's ex-CEO-Hall-of-Fame page."
Some other tidbits from his browsing history (Score:4, Funny)
bangedup.com
cracked.com
www.yzzerdd.com
naughtyceoassistants.com
google search: how to sexually harrass someone and not get caught
Re:Some other tidbits from his browsing history (Score:4, Funny)
google search: how to sexually harrass someone and not get caught
Clearly he should have used Bing for that search...
HA HA (Score:4, Funny)
Next time be really nice to IT
Or request your own internet connection, not going through proxies or anything
But better still, don't be a moron and look at anything NSFW (at least not intentionally) while at work
Funny story, my last company's proxy would prevent us from apt-get upgrade. Why? libsexy /o\
Re:HA HA (Score:4, Insightful)
But better still, don't be a moron and look at anything NSFW (at least not intentionally) while at work
Honestly, I wonder about people who do such things. Not just at work, but also in public places. I was on Amtrak once, and I sat next to someone who had a pornographic picture as his desktop background. In plain sight, on a train filled with other people, and no attempt was made to hide it.
I have no problem with porn, or looking for "racy" clips of your former-actress-coworker, but I would think that people would want to be a bit more private about these sorts of things. Surely the CEO of HP has a home where he can privately look at whatever he wants.
Re:HA HA (Score:4, Insightful)
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I don't get the idiots that would use the traceable network to get their porn. I don't think there are too many companies that track data accessed from the optical drive (4 GB) or an SD card reader (64 GB), or screen capture software to view what employees are working on. These people could easily carry the data to their machine by hand, access in a form that probably isn't tracked, keep it on their person to prevent it accidentally being discovered, and as long as they are discrete about making sure nobody
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Your workplace typically has far, far more bandwidth than your home, and a decent proxy server, and often has better computer screens and video cards than people who pay for home hardware can afford. That can provide a much better porn experience. And many porn sites do not easily support downloading the content, prefering to stream it live: technically sophisticated users can usually save it, but that's often considerable extra work.
I've actually gotten censured for having porn on the screen, even though i
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Re:HA HA (Score:4, Insightful)
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>>>Not only be innocent, but be able to prove it if you do anything that can be misinterpreted.
That's assuming they give you a chance. In my experience most managers fire the employee (or contractor) and have him escorted out of the building without any opportunity to access the logs on their computer (and thereby prove innocence). You are tried, judged, and presumed guilty automatically.
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Strange, it's been my experience that work hardware is exactly the opposite. And while the work place *may* have a better connection than you do at home ( not a guarantee in the age of Verizon FIOS and cable speeds ), their proxy usually ruins the experience entirely, by it's very nature.
The home computer experience is often much better than work, and you have the benefit of not getting in trouble for indulging in your albino midget fantasies.
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My home network can do 100Kb/s up, which is plenty fast for tiny proxy.
I also have a $4.99/month VPS that is on a very fast line that I run ssh -D and tiny proxy on.
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Depends where you work.. HP i'm sure has a lot more bandwidth than anyone does at home, and being high enough in the company Hurd probably has whatever their latest and highest end workstation is... On the other hand, he earned enough and was the CEO of a huge technology company so most likely he had a similar workstation at home plus all the bandwidth he'd need...
Other people who are lower down in such companies however, tend to have much older or lower end equipment...
And most companies that aren't huge l
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How is NSFW worse than something else? (Score:3, Insightful)
How does your morals matter?
How is someone looking at NSFW content worse than someone reading /. ? Does it somehow mean that the person is working even less because it's also amoral to you? ./ is not so bad because to many of us it can be work related at least a little. But my argument still stands. Either you are allowed to browse the 'net for non-strictly work content or not, content should not matter.
Maybe
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Re:How is NSFW worse than something else? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because non-sociopaths actually consider other people occasionaly.
The chances of someone being offended by seeing slashdot on your computer screen is pretty small, small enough to take the chance. And society as a whole would consider them to be the problem if they are offended.
The chances of someone being offended by seeing pornography on your computer screen is a bit larger, large enough to try and avoid the situation. And society as a whole would consider you to be the problem when someone is offended.
In the workplace there's the added joys of getting sued for sexual harassment because of the "hostile environment" created by having pornography on your screen for all your fellow workers to see.
Sure if your screen is completely private that isn't a problem though I'm sure that fact that someone shouldn't have been on that side of the desk in your office isn't going to save you from losing a sexual harrassment case. And if someone does find out about it they risk having any sexual harrassment liabilities be for the entire company and not just you if they don't try and do something about it.
Slacking off for a minute or 10 isn't something most companies care that much about (particularly amongst salaried productive staff - an assembly line worker is a different situation), putting the company at risk in a multi-million dollar sexual harassment lawsuit and even more damage in public image is something most companies care about.
There are reasons the label is NSFW.
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Sexual harassment unfortunately has succumbed to the 'I have a right not to be offended' school of thought(crime). There are most certainly legitimate cases of sexual harassment, but I think that the first test of legitimacy needs to be direction/intent. Is the act directed a person? No? Well then it had better be a pretty egregi
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It's got nothing to do with morality.
It's got to with legality and not wanting to offend people unecessarily. For sociopaths and assholes the first should matter, for the rest of us the second does.
I don't yell loudly on the train. I turn my phone ringer off at the cinema. I don't talk on my phone in the cinema. I leave the table to answer my phone at a group meal. I turn the television volume down when other people are sleeping in the house. And I don't look at pornography at work. These are all the same c
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Surely the CEO of HP has a home where he can privately look at whatever he wants.
That home is also where he most likely keeps his wife who can make his life hell, or take half his shit when she leaves.
Work is much safer.
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My wife fully supports my "habits," as I do hers.....if his wife doesn't like it, then I'd argue he married the wrong woman.
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If he needs to look at porn, I'd argue he'd married the wrong woman :P
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Re:HA HA (Score:4, Insightful)
The other day i was sitting at a stop light, and i looked over at the pickup next to me, and hanging from the rear-view mirror was a picture of a naked woman with enormous breasts.
And i thought "hrm.. wonder what the guy who drives this truck looks like?"
And i noticed a man driving, and a woman sitting in the passenger seat, i.e., a couple.
My thoughts wondered about the dynamics of that situation. Was that a woman who lived in an oppressive relationship, where her sense of self, and her idea of self-worth, and her opinion, were all suppressed? Was she desperately looking for a way out? Was this the best she could do?
Or, did she just not care about such things at all? Has she gotten over the fact that men are visual animals with a natural lust for the physical form? Does she simply accept him at his nature, and realize that it isn't a reflection of her or what he thinks of her?
I would wager that 80% of the over-the-road trucks in the USA have a 2D naked woman somewhere in the cab. It's as much of being a trucker as the CB radio.
For some reason, its more acceptable in a trucker cab, because that is "more private" than the glass box of a pickup cab, and that is "more private" than a laptop screen (to some people).
But modern work/life dynamics (and trucking regulation -- thanks DOT) are such that the trucker is in his office less than the information worker is in his (i.e. their computer screen is on...)
But i also think there is a just-below-the-water insidiousness in these judgements. I see a naked woman in a pickup, and i shift my gaze to see what the person _looks like_ who's driving the truck. I have some kind of inbuilt bias about what kind of person lets me see that they have naked pictures.
I expect most slashdotters are like this -- we've been tought that naked pictures is something to "get caught with", and that someone who might display them publicly has something wrong with them, and as such, when we see them in public life, we wonder what kind of wrong-person is responsible.
There is this idea that truckers can have naked pictures in their offices, and that CEOs can't.
Why are CEOs held to a higher "moral" or "ethical" standard than truckers? Aren't both of them just people?
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Step 1) Buy a 3G USB dongle.
Step 2) Disconnect your ethernet cable, insert dongle.
Step 3) Surf porn without risking your career.
Is that really that freakin' hard for the CEO of a major computer manufacturer to figure out???
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Is that really that freakin' hard for the CEO of a major computer manufacturer to figure out???
I've worked at a computer company. Making middle-managers understand the concept of pressing Fn + F2 together (it was a laptop) required a Powerpoint presentation (I WISH I was kidding)
So don't even get me started on the 3G thing. But still, he could have asked someone to do it for him
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On that note, a rich guy like him couldn't afford an independent cell modem? I have one.
OTH, he probably felt he was doing nothing wrong until he got caught.
I suspect there is a lot more under non-disclosure agreements than came out== that and a 40 mil paycheck if he didn't fight it.
Re:HA HA (Score:5, Insightful)
When you're working at that level (CEO at a company as big as that), then your work and personal time tend to blur. In fact, ignore "tend to" you lose all separation. People call you up with work problems all the time, you're never disconnected from your email, you spend so much time with your PA that they're as much family member as colleague. And don't even mention the travelling. So you're hardly likely to carry two laptops everywhere you go or swap from one to the other constantly.
It's easy for people here to say "shouldn't have done this through work account" but in reality it's not so simple. And the argument of misusing the company's resources is valid, but the salary and expenses (legitimate expenses) of someone in that position are so high that it would seem absurd to such a person to say they were stealing from the company. They could (and do) repay the debt by working an extra five minutes that they're supposes to. Well, except that these sorts of jobs don't come with "forty hours per week" on the contract, but the point stands. CEO of a company isn't a job, it's a lifestyle.
Nice to see nothing's changed there (Score:5, Insightful)
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Perhaps the leak was intentional. There may be elements within the company that are attempting to drive the corporate culture in a more 'conservative' direction.
If so, HP is dying. Time to sell the stock, find alternate suppliers and cut your losses.
The HP Way is dead. (Score:5, Interesting)
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HP died with Lew Platt. Carly Fiorina was a trainwreck. The HP Way is gone and done, and has been since the first layoffs just prior to 9/11.
Amen to that, although the skeptical would assume that Fiorina was a sign and not a catalyst. HP is over and anyone buying products from them today is buying punishment for their bad decisions first and foremost. HP support has become a complete nightmare and like Sun, they have been buying products and firing the people who understand them as quickly as possible.
What would you bet... (Score:2)
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Train Wreck (Score:2)
The linked page of former HP CEOs [hp.com] is one of the most pathetic web pages I've ever seen from a company of the stature of HP. The horrible, unflattering thumbnail-sized photos. The description of their careers, which basically amounts to "this person lived for a period of time and worked for HP." What the hell kind of company puts this material on their website?
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The linked page of former HP CEOs [hp.com] is one of the most pathetic web pages I've ever seen from a company of the stature of HP. The horrible, unflattering thumbnail-sized photos. The description of their careers, which basically amounts to "this person lived for a period of time and worked for HP." What the hell kind of company puts this material on their website?
If you click on them, you get some details on their tenure at HP. Interestingly, Hurd's is a 404.
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No Sympathy (Score:4, Insightful)
No sympathy. I have no clue if he was a good CEO or not, but he was a stupid one, that's for certain.
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you have an obligation to not cross personal boundaries. Members of senior management should know better. It's inappropriate and it's the sort of thing that leads to trouble.
Really? How do you think he got to senior management? You don't think the upper echelons of management hinges on hard work and know how, do you? Please consider the need to be able to play golf in order to thrive in that environment.
The case against Hurd is dubious (Score:3, Informative)
This article summarizes it well but I'd have to quote more than "fair use" allows:
http://gawker.com/5609386/heres-the-real-reason-hp-ceo-mark-hurd-was-fired [gawker.com]
tl;dr Hurd was a goofus and tried to get intimate with a subordinate but backed off when it went nowhere, and probably did nothing illegal or immoral to Jodie Fischer or HP; the board just wanted to avoid publicity.
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Hurd was a goofus and tried to get intimate with a subordinate but backed off when it went nowhere, and probably did nothing illegal or immoral to Jodie Fischer or HP; the board just wanted to avoid publicity.
Well, I would hope that someone with his salary and responsibility would be more of a "Gallant" and less of a "Goofus."
Yeah, I read "Highlights" back then in the 70's in the doctor's office waiting room.
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The board just wanted to avoid publicity? They sure fucked that one up.
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the board just wanted to avoid publicity.
...and succeeded!
Oh, wait...
That's why (Score:2)
That's why I have an OpenVPN tcp tunnel to my home server and browser history and cache are automatically cleared.
Not buying HP (Score:2)
This me, committing to try to avoid buying HP for some time to come. These kind of tactics are immature, reckless, and generally indicative of people who are not fit to be making informed decisions.
Those decisions are likewise reflected in the HP product line.
Unfortunately, that pretty much leaves nobody with likely reliable equipment.
This is how HP operates.... (Score:2, Flamebait)
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2006/09/71730 [wired.com]
This company makes Intel look like shangra-la. Working for HP, even at the top levels, is akin to working for Uncle Joe Stalin in '43. They're gonna know who you are and where you live, who you talk to and if you like giving it ho
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Working for HP, even at the top levels, is akin to working for Uncle Joe Stalin in '43. They're gonna know who you are and where you live,
That's easy . . . working for Joe Stalin, means that they knew where you lived . . . in the Gulag Archipelago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag_Archipelago [wikipedia.org]
What is sexual harrassment? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's plenty of confusion about the basic definition of sexual harrassment. I've been a POSH (Prevention of Sexual Harrassment) trainer at my employer and I can tell you from hard experience - most people have no idea.
In broad strokes, then, here's what you need to know.
Most people think in terms of a "reasonable person" criteria. That's a relic of the past. When sexual harrassment first got major corp attention, the people in charge tended to apply common sense. They'd ask "Would a reasonable person consider this case to be sexual harrassment?" This seemed like a good approach and it did cover the basics. No reasonable person would disagree that "Sleep with me if you want this promotion" is harrassment.
The "reasonable person" standard, however, did not address the very wide middle ground. Are dirty jokes harrassing? If not occasionally, then how often? How many per day should be allowed? Should you be held responsible for being unintentially overheard? The "reasonable person" criteria failed to address all these at first blush.
Now, in my organization, we expected people to speak up for themselves. If someone felt harrassed and said "That makes me uncomfortable", then the person doing the harrassing action no longer had an excuse. Even if the harrasser felt that a "reasonble person" would not be harrassed by the situation, the harrasser now knew that their criteria was misused in re the person who made the complaint.
In practice, this meant that anyone could get away with anything (except the obvious aforementioned "sex for a job" situation I previously mentioned) until they were put on warning. Since it was up to the victim to issue the warning and since the victims frequently felt they were rendered powerless by the situation, warnings weren't issued. Bad manners continued to be displayed. Major harrassment incidents stopped but more subtle things that really do impact the bottom line (things like "a pervasive atmosphere of harrassment" or however you want to phrase it) continued unabated.
The "reasonable person" criteria had to be abandoned.
The new criteria is pretty simple. The victim defines the crime. If someone says something is sexual harrassment, it is.
The current situation, where *anything* is sexual harrassment if someone wants to feel they're being harrassed, results in lots of counter-intuitive weirdness. It seems crazy that if I stick up a calendar from a local sports team that has a picture of the cheerleaders on it, it's harrassment. That harrassment may not be in full flower but you better believe I'm going to be told to take it down before some super-sensitive idiot sees it and gets their feelings hurt.
As stupid as this seems, it actually works out better in practice. By "over-specifying" the defintion of sexual harrassment, the oppressive environments that were able to continue to exist under the "reasonable person" criteria are resolved. Yes, us old white men feel a bit put upon because we can't make dirty blonde jokes. But the upside is that the whole place works better and everyone can better contribute up to their potential.
Bottom line for people who don't work in big-corp type environments: the definition of "sexual harrassment" is much broader than seems reasonable. For practical reasons, learned the hard way over decades, the situation must be this way.
I don't like it. It offends my sense of justice. But I've seen it done both ways and in practice, the unreasonable, nanny-state version of sexual harrassment remediation just works better for everyone involved.
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But is it OK if at least one of you was drunk?
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I've seen that case more than once. Realy, really messy. And definitely not OK.
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Excellent point. Abuse occurs. People cry "Wolf!" when they shouldn't.
However, I work in an environment that respects everyone's rights. No one is going to get fired based on an accusation alone.
An accusation starts a process of investigation and resolution. There will be several opportunities for both sides to understand what went on from the others perspective. There will be opportunites for everyone to reach an accomodation and go back to work.
If the situation is pushed, eventually an employee may f
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I've been a POSH (Prevention of Sexual Harrassment) trainer at my employer
The fact that this sort of training exists, and there's a (presumably) recognized acronym for it, means the whole situation has gone entirely too far.
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the unreasonable, nanny-state version of sexual harrassment remediation just works better for everyone involved
Even the otherwise innocent guy who loses his job when a coworker decides she wants a big payout from the company?
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That obviously won't apply here. He was a CEO, he can be pretty much guaranteed to have been guilty of something.
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I tried that. It didn't work. :-)
Joking aside, this has actually been tried. It didn't survive the initial stages of investigation. IOW, no person who has ever been told to take down a poster or change their computer wallpaper has felt sufficiently damaged that they were willing to make a formal complaint. If they're not willing to press the issue (especially when doing so is *so* easy), the issue doesn't exist.
Rights of company versus rights of individual (Score:5, Interesting)
Although European (EU mainstream) countries are far from perfect in this, legal restraints make it much harder for ambulance chasers to make fortunes by publicly exaggerating allegations, and employment law means that there are proper remedies at reasonable cost which means that companies are not exposed to excessive risks from ordinary human behaviour. (I might add that we don't suffer so much from kneejerk Protestant fundamentalism, but I think that's a sideshow.)
Interestingly, when I had to do the training in the UK, our (US) trainer was quite clued up on UK law, and commented that a number of the overbearing rules that get applied in the US would be rejected by employment tribunals in the UK as unreasonable grounds for dismissal ("you guys are lucky").
Bottom line: your comments may well be correct for the US as it is, but are a sad commentary on the US legal profession and the relationships inside US companies.
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No. See my other comment on the process of enforcement. [slashdot.org]
Having a written, enforced process to follow in the wake of allegations is incredibly important. Without it, the whole system would fail. I realize that in non-government and/or non-union shops, the process may be faulty or non-existent. If you're in such a situation, my heart goes out to you.
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Except the "reasonable person" issue is still there. If I feel pressured by a female employee in the workplace and report it, I will be laughed at.
And so it goes.
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In principle, I agree with you. In practice, no.
The "overall oppressive environment" where everybody has to watch their P's and Q's isn't that bad. It's really just enforced courtesy and respect. Sometimes it doesn't feel genuine and I miss the days when it was easier to tell who was a gentleman towards the ladies and who was just a crude ruffian. Nowadays, they all act about the same.
While the "enforced respect" grates on my nerves, I do see the practical aspect. A few people feel oppressed; they can'
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I think we're more alike than you realize. I'm willing to swill the koolaid in this job because I'm in a government agency that invents next to nothing, that has as its most important mission the uninterrupted, reliable delivery of vital services. That's not an environment where joie de vivre is the highest virtue.
In practice, my workplace isn't the same as the rectal probe manufacturer in "Joe vs. The Volcano". (Great movie, btw.) Neither is it American Apparel. I rather like the work/life balance w
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It is a paradox that the extreme opposite of many things (be it freedom, intolerance, etc) is itself - albeit in another form. Before anyone asks, no that does not mean that war is peace or lies are truth. An effective lie is always a distortion of the truth, not its opposite. Equally, war is a distortion of peace (which is why America isn't under Martial Law and everything appears normal).
In this case, total freedom for the accused has become total freedom for the accuser. No middle ground has been sought.
Nonsensical evidence (Score:4, Insightful)
If you were working at a company and you found out that someone you worked with had been in some adult movies, wouldn't you be curious enough to google them and check it out? I sure as hell would.
I can't speak about the rest of the case, but evidence of harassment or a personal relationship this is not.
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I think I'd do it at home rather than work though...
Less like a hall of fame (Score:2)
More simply just a list of all their CEOs? I guess that comment was simply meant to be catty and I'm over thinking it.
On the other hand... (Score:2)
I don't suppose that anyone has considered the possibility that this story and others like it are the result of a concerted effort by Mr. Hurd (and his rather influential allies) to rehabilitate his image by smearing his accuser? I mean, it's not like the method is unheard of (cf. practically every rape trial) or that misconduct by the executives of companies large and small, sexual and otherwise, is exactly a rarity. Moreover, there's a pretty vast disparity in the ability of these two individuals to pump
This should be interesting to ALL (Score:3, Interesting)
The second is that all should realize that Hurd was not fired for Sex harassment. He was fired because ppl on the board wanted him out and did not have the courage to simply fire him.
Third, that is DAMN scary that Sexual harassment can be looking up public information about somebody. Would I, or anybody else, watch that kind of info on an somebody in a public position, esp. an actress? Hell yah. Even the HR would have done that.
Ahhh...the web logs... (Score:2)
Many employees worry about WebSense and other logging apps but in my experience, those apps aren't what gets you in to trouble. I've never seen an investigation start with the logs...but I have seen a couple of senior execs fall after the board started an inquiry in to some internal financial issues and the investigators found porn on the execs computers. As soon as they find out they go pull the web logs and then things spiral. So often these logs aren't really the target of the investigators, but if th
Here's the problem I have with this... (Score:2)
Racy Movie (Score:2)
For those interested, the movie in question was called "H P Lovecraft" but due to a virus was replaced with some sort of cephalopod-related porn movie.
No automatic sympathy for either. How about facts? (Score:3, Interesting)
sexual harassment is pretty serious. one would think we should be more sympathetic to jodie fisher, not hurd. oh right, his browsing history was used against him. therefore, we should be sympathetic to him (rolls eyes)
Pardon me if I'm sympathetic to neither since I know neither party nor do I know the exact circumstances. A woman making a sexual harassment claim should neither immediately receive sympathy nor suspicion. Likewise claims of spying or overstepping the bounds of what might be considered reasonable surveillance is not something anyone should automatically have a knee-jerk reaction to. The bias you are seeing is because you are on a geek message board not a feminist message board.
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Re:the story summary is rather sympathetic to hurd (Score:4, Insightful)
sexual harassment is pretty serious
The last time I worked for a big corporation, we were given a guide to avoiding sexual harassment. Already, this should suggest to you that "sexual harassment" covers more than you think it does -- after all, we were given a guide to avoiding it, not just told to show respect to our coworkers. The guide indicated that pinning up a swimsuit calendar in your cubicle is considered sexual harassment. So is look at sexy (not necessarily nude or pornographic) pictures on your computer, since a female coworker might see the display and get offended.
Sorry, but ever since then, I have been suspicious of "sexual harassment" claims, particularly when details are scant and the claims come out of a corporation. If one her first day at HP, her first encounter with Mr. Hurd was him grabbing her butt in the copy room and asking her to get naked, then fine, it is sexual harassment. Without details indicating that, though, I would not jump to conclusions.
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If one her first day at HP, her first encounter with Mr. Hurd was him grabbing her butt in the copy room and asking her to get naked, then fine, it is sexual harassment.
Nah, he waited until the second day. That's what his buddy Larry E. told him to do.
Re:the story summary is rather sympathetic to hurd (Score:4, Interesting)
"Already, this should suggest to you that "sexual harassment" covers more than you think it does -- after all, we were given a guide to avoiding it, not just told to show respect to our coworkers."
I use the military "senior NCO self-defense" method though I'm now retired. I don't speak to female co-workers unless it's pure business, I don't socialize with female co-workers, and I'm flawlessly polite to them. I avoid being unaccompanied with them in the same room, but do it subtly.
I ensure they are assigned and evaluated fairly, but given the choice I'd rather keep females at the workplace far enough away to avoid any perception of conflict-of-interest.
Military-origin Protip:
Keep at least one kickass female supervisor around to discipline other females. Bonus if that female is non-White. There are plenty of good females who want to do their job, but the game is what it is and it doesn't respond favorably to resistance.
What is the Real Reason Hurd Was Fired? (Score:5, Insightful)
sexual harassment is pretty serious. one would think we should be more sympathetic to jodie fisher, not hurd
I agree, sexual harassment is a very serious problem and should not be taken lightly. But could you present the evidence of sexual harassment? Larry Ellison said of it [businessinsider.com] '"The H.P. board admits that it fully investigated the sexual harassment claims against Mark and found them to be utterly false." Furthermore the reason Hurd was fired appeared to be [gawker.com] "numerous instances where [Hurd's love interest, Jodie Fisher] received compensation and/or expense reimbursement where there was not a legitimate business purpose, as well as numerous instances where inaccurate expense reports were submitted by Mark or on his behalf that intended to or had the effect of concealing Mark's personal relationship with the contractor." If that's true, misuse of company funds is also serious but not on the level of sexual harassment.
oh right, his browsing history was used against him. therefore, we should be sympathetic to him (rolls eyes)
My concern here -- and what I think the general readership thinks -- is that Hurd did some questionable things or possibly made some enemies and so they tried to dig up anything they could on them. When the sexual harassment charges didn't stick well enough, they used a company policy that everyone is guilty of: using company resources and time to google silly things or read tabloids or do things unrelated to work. "Racy" means [wiktionary.org] "Mildly risque, exciting." So he visited some mildly risque sites?
Basically this looks to be a scenario where Hurd upset someone and they simply looked through his browsing history in order to find a reason to terminate him. Are they constantly searching through browsing histories of all 304,000 employees to find which employment they should terminate? No, they are not. You speak so highly of ethics regarding sexual harassment but what about the ethics of terminating the employment of just one person when he is no more guilty than thousands of other employees -- which you also have the means and option to investigate.
Re:What is the Real Reason Hurd Was Fired? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What is the Real Reason Hurd Was Fired? (Score:4, Interesting)
If that's true, misuse of company funds is also serious but not on the level of sexual harassment.
Seriously, you think sexual harassment (an entirely civil matter) is worse than embezzlement (a criminal matter)? How does that make a lick of sense?
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Seriously, you think sexual harassment (an entirely civil matter) is worse than embezzlement (a criminal matter)? How does that make a lick of sense?
It's dangerous to assume that sexual harassment can't escalate to a criminal charge:
Is Sexual Harassment A Crime?
While there is no specific criminal charge called "sexual harassment," [in Kentucky] behavior that constitutes sexual harassment may violate other criminal laws. Possible criminal charges include:
Stalking
Assault
Harassing communications
Thus, in addit
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Yes sure, if you commit a crime while engaging in sexual harrassment that crime is still a crime. Amazing.
Wearing jeans might be a criminal matter too. If you rob a bank with a gun while in them you may find yourself being charged with armed robbery. Equally amazing.
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misuse of company funds is also serious but not on the level of sexual harassment
HOW do you figure that? Sexual harrassment can be minor or it can be a major, in this case we have no idea what level this could have been considered.
On the other hand, we have $75,000 thrown away on non-work related stuff. This is not like taking a sticky pad home with you or using the business copier for your own use. If this was any other employee in the company not only would they be frog marched out the door, they woul
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To someone earning the amount he does, the typical pilfering of a sticky pad simply isn't worth the effort. It's also generally easier to get away with such things when you're higher up the ladder.
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At Hurd's level, $75,000 is peanuts. make him pay it back, have the BoD chew his ass out and get on with business. It's not like he's embezzling funds at this level. Its like the average employee swiping a few pens and pads of paper. If it was intentional embezzlement, I'd expect tens of millions. Or he's an idiot as well. Now its costing them $40 million.
Someone at HP seems to have a $40 million axe to grind. That's not smart business thinking and certainly not a company I'd bet a career or investment mon
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I'm sorry ? You find that behaviour that is damaging to the company as a whole is not as serious as behaviour that, while inappropriate, harms only one employee who can't stand up for herself ?
Peculiar.
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But, he wasn't.
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The investigation found he did not commit sexual harassment, but did find he violated the company's business conduct code. That is why he was asked to resign and he resigned because the board intimated that he could resign or he could be removed.
Maybe you should try reading the actual stories about this subject. Then, you wouldn't say things that are patently and provably false.
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Are there really people who believe that there is an inverse correlation between guilt and defence?
I think if someone accused me of something wild and outlandish which I didn't do, I might just shrug my shoulders, keep my mouth shut and put up no real defence. I wouldn't say I was guilty - but neither did Hurd - but I just don't care to defend myself. I'm past the insecure days of caring about my image or wanting to hang around in any environment where I have to endure petty shit.
At any moment in life any m
WHAT a BARGAIN! (Score:2)
I probably won't even bother to sue you on any actionable counts of slander, since I'll be busy snorting blow off three hookers' asses on my yacht.
bloody small-minded peons.
(incidentally, has anyone summed up what HP has paid this slimebag? Was it worth it?)
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sexual harassment is pretty serious.
Unless it is committed by a Democratic governor of a southern US state. In that case, perjury and a little political demagoguery can make it go away.
MPU (Score:2)
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HP printers are already shitty, so I guess 1 out of 3 isn't that bad.