On Sun, 7 Apr 2002, aormygod wrote: > Hi all, > > I really disagree with the companies, which are setting firewall to over- > control employees' activities in the workplace. It makes me annoying > and feels that it has power over my right even during the break time. > What do you guys think on this matter?
Having had to investigate and deal with the abuses that users have done during work hours on company time, and dealt with the legal risks to the company, I think that it's appropriate that the company control their resources. Deal with the fallout of someone printing sick images to a printer then forgetting to pick them up, and the next person having serious emotional problems with the subject matter. Deal with someone gratifying themselves on a shared workspace machine while surfing porn in off hours. Deal with someone e-mailing competitors sensitive information. Deal with someone harrassing ex-spouses via e-mail. Deal with someone trying to hone their 'leet CGI-busting skillz over the company firewall. Deal with the person running an Internet company of their own out of their cubicle instead of working. Deal with dwindling budgets and people who want to download 2000 30MB images to have "interesting desktops." Get paged out of birthdays to deal with users sending spam. Get to stay late to investigate a machine when you have something important and personal to attend to. Take all the incomming fire for a mail gateway not getting necessary corporate mail from a remote site because some moron has so share a "dancing baby" e-mail with 20 of his friends at the end of a slow dial-up link at 3am. Have a team spend a week cleaning up from an internal virus event that comes in via personal mail. Now, get offered the chance to block say *half* that abuse by installing filtering products. Which choice would you make? I doubt it'd be the non-filtering choice. If you want unrestricted Internet access, get a personal account from home and have all the fun you want. When you're at work, it's the company's time, the company's resources, and in many cases the company's liability (or at least somewhat of a burden to prove it's not thier liability.) The company has to staff and support the infrastructure, pay for the bandwidth, and resources, and pay for you to do your job. You can thank all your virtual coworkers in companys all over the planet who can't draw the line between appropriate and inappropriate personal usage for the current state of affairs. About 8 years ago, I remember sitting in a meeting room at a very large site I was responsible for and telling the CIO that I would NOT turn on logging and start netcopping users. I remember about a year and a half later sitting in that CIO's office and explaining how my logging and abuse reporting activity would deal with protecting the victims of some incidents and protect the company from the inevitable lawsuits arising from that abuse or terminations which were the result. Even on "break time," it's the employer's equipment, infrastructure and facilities. Even on "break time," the employer has to deal with other employees, service and business concerns. Because it's break time doesn't mean you get to ignore the company dress code and dance around the office nude, make long distance calls to random people, etc. Internet access isn't a right, it's a privilege. Paul ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul D. Robertson "My statements in this message are personal opinions [EMAIL PROTECTED] which may have no basis whatsoever in fact." _______________________________________________ Firewalls mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.gnac.net/mailman/listinfo/firewalls
