I.T Depts & Website Filtering

We block everything in college and have now started filtering the student accommodation so it means no more WoW. IT are exempt :D

MW
 
About 6 months ago some nitwit in our main office decided it would be a brilliant idea to block everything.
Now I cant even bloody ping out of my local network or access an FTP site even though my job requires the use of such tools.
Sheer genius :rolleyes:
The answer, we had to get an ADSL line installed at my local site at the cost of god knows how much a year just so I could do my job.
 
Job Perk TBH

Its nothing new being moaned at by the average user because they cant book there holiday or go on Facebook when they are supposed to be working.

Its not a God Complex its just tough on the average member of staff, but hey they can always complain and will no matter what we do!
 
Job Perk TBH

Its nothing new being moaned at by the average user because they cant book there holiday or go on Facebook when they are supposed to be working.

Its not a God Complex its just tough on the average member of staff, but hey they can always complain and will no matter what we do!

Quoted to THE ABSOLUTE truth!!

I've just had this very conversation with someone in my office.

That's exactly how it is here.
Pfff......'users' kill em all let god sort em out....oh wait!
 
I think these days a lot of companies do white lists not black lists. It just makes perfect sense.

They 'allow' what they want people to access and deny everything else.

That's the best way of doing it to be honest (for us, YMMV though), although it can be an administrative PITA to start with.

As regards blocking things like Spotify and other bandwidth hogs (iPlayer etc), consider this: pooled together, we've clocked around 40gb of traffic from these kind of sites over a few days, which by blocking them gives us a huge improvement on overall performance for "work purposes".

Without blocking such sites/traffic, the impact on business applications for our organisation is extremely noticeable and at the end of the day, if our users' applications don't work because of bandwidth hogging/latency issues caused by streaming and the like, PEOPLE COULD DIE.

I've emphasised those three words because it's that simple and that could be the end result of Susan from accounts catching up on iPlayer stuff she's missed, or Trevor from contracting listening to Spotify to get him through the day.
 
As far as I am aware we are currently going through meetings to decide what times to allow work users access to this sort of content because people take dinners at different times of the day. As far as I know I think it will be implimented at around 12 till 1PM and then 5 till 6PM.
 
Its a perk of the job, its not a god complex.

User Masses (many) > IT Employees (less) > Managers (even less)

Easier to trust the few and enforce the masses. If IT abuses it, managers will step in. Managers want IT to enforce the users and so continues the chain of control.
 
As far as I am aware we are currently going through meetings to decide what times to allow work users access to this sort of content because people take dinners at different times of the day. As far as I know I think it will be implimented at around 12 till 1PM and then 5 till 6PM.

I set-up plenty of sites like this who have heavily staggered lunch times. I just use quotas instead of time periods.
 
Our internet access here is totally unrestricted.

There are rules that you cant use Social networking sites, youtube (or any video sites) as well as online gambling and gaming sites. People still go on facebook and youtube though.

Ebay is fine.

In fact, pretty much everything is fine as long as you dont take the ****.
 
The rules for internet use here are defined and governed by the business, reports are produced each month on what sites are visited and biggest internet users etc which are presented to the business for review. All we do is make sure the boxes are up and running and deal with any support issues, the actual sites you can visit are administered by a communications dept who are also subject to the rules. It was set up this way as we (IT) did not want to be seen as the bad guys/internet police and eventually most internet usage is about loss of productivity to the business whilst people surf interspersed by the odd pr0n violation.
 
The rules for internet use here are defined and governed by the business, reports are produced each month on what sites are visited and biggest internet users etc which are presented to the business for review. All we do is make sure the boxes are up and running and deal with any support issues, the actual sites you can visit are administered by a communications dept who are also subject to the rules. It was set up this way as we (IT) did not want to be seen as the bad guys/internet police and eventually most internet usage is about loss of productivity to the business whilst people surf interspersed by the odd pr0n violation.

That's exactly how my last place did it, and I think how this place want to but can't be arsed :p
 
We're just about to implement a smoothwall box to filter out any "non-educational" content (this is a College network). So essentially all gaming sites, social networking sites, gambling sites etc will be blocked :)
 
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