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I tried to go to the Sports-tracker site this morning to look at the log I'd just put in for my commute in only to find work had blocked the site, just to see I thought I'd try Strava to find that that is still fully accessible.
Obviously there's a few sites which they block Facebook for example which are fully understandable (I'd not blame them for blocking STW TBH), but Sports-tracker? Surely it's not that much of a menace to productivity and if it's been blocked then why not do the same to Strava? That's got to be as much if not more of a time thief...
So STW-ists what odd sites do your employers block and why?
Is it not simply not on their whitelist rather than blacklisted?
www.teenageladywrestling.com
When I ran the IT I use to have a daily report which showed me the most accessed URL's, then we'd block any (only top 5 stuff) that weren't work related.
I also installed a WiFi that was straight to the Internet, so anyone could use that, it was 'unmonitored' and not connected to any work network.
Is it not simply not on their whitelist rather than blacklisted?
Not sure how they operate the policy TBH but it is blocked, it was accessible a few weeks ago when I last used it from work.
I'll not complain, it's not a biggie as I can just log in and look at it when I get home, and it's not work related, I was just surprised at the decision to block the site, it's a pretty dated design but relatively innocuous as websites go, you really would struggle to spend more than a few minutes on there...
Interestingly ebay, youtube and Amazon are still un-blocked and I can't really see how those would be "business critical resources" especially at this time of year...
Those three sites must have a far bigger impact on productivity than a rather basic GPS Logging-Statistics page, fleetingly frequented by a pretty minor fraction of humanity...
http://www.teenageladywrestling.com
Perhaps I should have said no posting links, especially if it's NSFW...
Back when I used to administer web usage for my company, this is the approach I used.
Anything that was "inappropriate" was blocked. Essentially, this meant grot and anything illegal. The AV solution we used came with blacklist filters which were updated live, this proved largely effective and took the headache out of it. We could whitelist on request anything that was blocked incorrectly.
Bandwidth sinks like video streaming, internet radio were blocked. This was in the days of things like RealAudio.
Other than that, I operated a 'fair use' policy. I didn't mind occasional recreational use, so if for example people wanted to check the cricket scores quickly or something, that's fine. Also, lunchtime was largely fair game, so long as the connection wasn't getting so battered that people couldn't do any actual work. If it ground to a halt, I looked at live usage to see why, and disconnected people who were caning it.
Once a month, I produced "top 10" reports of the biggest web users, and the most visited sites, and manually checked for potential problems. There's a lot of false positives here; sometimes heavy users are actually using it for work-related reasons, and sometimes things generate a lot of hits which don't directly correspond to a lot of bandwidth or time wasting. For instance, a page which automatically refreshes every few minutes doesn't necessarily imply that someone's sat there gazing at it all day. Sometimes though, you get someone who's very clearly sat on the Internet for the last month, necessitating a quiet word. Serial abusers got escalated to their line manager and / or permanently blocked. (I appreciate the irony here; for my sins, I use STW whilst I'm waiting for work to complete, installs, scans, reboots etc.) On rare occasions people did actually their jobs over it, but this was only ever a last resort after repeated requests and warnings. There's a difference between making a mistake and outright stupidity.
Common problems were things like tickers; a lot of users installed a BBC (I think) 'news ticker' which was a bar that sat at the bottom of your desktop. Bloody thing absolutely drank bandwidth, so it got blocked. Seasonal stuff was also common; for instance, I ended up blocking the Big Brother website when it was in its heyday as half the company sat reading it all day.
The bottom line was, I'm fairly relaxed about it, so apply some common sense and don't take the piss. Bandwidth was limited, and expensive.
When I ran the IT I use to have a daily report which showed me the most accessed URL's, then we'd block any (only top 5 stuff) that weren't work related.
It makes interesting reading eh especially when linked to the ip address of the client. Up until recently we were using a Sonicwall firewall which updated itself automatically with lists of undesirable urls but we had to get rid of it when it started blocking search engines and news sites and basically the whole Internet
I also installed a WiFi that was straight to the Internet, so anyone could use that, it was 'unmonitored' and not connected to any work network.
Yup that's very useful.
Sites can get automatically added to blacklists because they get compromised by hackers. Many companies 'buy' blacklists from security companies, or at least use a service that refers to such things.
My company has a really silly set of rules, www.gmail.com is blocked but if i click on the link from google.com it is fine.
Facebook.com is blocked but facebook.com/login isn't..
The secure Wifi blocks Youtube, but the non secure wifi doesn't..
Plenty of others.
When I was with HBOS, they used a process which tracked the amount of use sites got and acted based on that- so if a site had never been used before, it'd almost always be accessible, no matter how dodgy. But on the other hand, when they noticed our office was constantly on the BACS website, they blocked access and left us unable to do any work. Which made me sad obviously.
Good company that HBOS, confidence inspiring.
Ah I used to monitor the web-usage for Europe. If a virus popped up, I'd check that user's access.. you should see what the Dutch get up to during working hours... 😯
I'm always amazed at how many firms either have a blanket ban, or leave it up to the IT monkeys to decide which sites should and shouldn't be accessible.
Put the correct antivirus/trojan/phishing/scam security in place and all you need is 1 simple rule - don't take the piss!
It's a management issue.
*and yes, the irony isn't lost on me either 🙂
TBH,
I'm amazed more places don't have a blanket ban. I'm sure many people can do their job without having access to the Internet all day.
The places I work follow the basic policy geoff mentions. We allow everything, if you're doing bad stuff and caught, out IT policy takes over. If you're pissing away days on facebook there's ways to deal with that. If your manager doesn't notice, there's ways to deal with both of you. Overall, you employ grown-ups and you expect them to behave as such and some people will always find a way around blocklists (I used to run a proxy using SSH port-redirection for example).
That said, I've worked in internet related industries (or those with a significant quantity of business on the internet) so people having access "feels" appropriate.