Venkat, You may choose to see it that way, but the owner of a company who is paying for the equipment, the IT staff, the office space, the office furniture, and for the employees to sit there and to do actual work, may choose to see it differently. What matters is whose point of view is legally supported. IANAL, and maybe I'm being cynical, but it seems to me that your employer should have every right to observe anything you are doing on the company systems. It can't be an invasion of personal privacy because you shouldn't be doing anything personal to begin with!
I agree that it rubs me the wrong way, and it goes against notions of privacy and freedom and democratic society, but the workplace is not a democratic forum. You sign away a lot of rights when you take a job, especially at a big firm with a large, play-it-safe legal staff. Of course, everyone does something personal while at work. When you make a free local call home (in the U.S. at least) on your lunch break, you don't expect the lines to be tapped and your call to be recorded! Someone might argue that there is an expectation of privacy with certain computer activities as well... It's a slippery slope. I wouldn't want to work at that company either, but the truth is that such capability doesn't have to be built explicity into open source software. I'll repeat part 2 of my reply to Charles: "The patches that add the -stealth option to x0rfbserver effectively make exactly what Charles' boss is asking for possible (and it only took John Cuzzola one rainy Saturday to add those). With no intervention on the part of the user, their session can be remotely observed without interfering with the keyboard and mouse. Even if you'd setup encrypted email so that no one in between could decypher it, the boss could just sit back and watch you type it! x0rfbserver is also distributed with a program called rfbcat, which allows you to save x0rfbserver output to a file, thus preserving the data!" The intention of the -stealth option is to relieve the user of having to do anything when he/she needs help. The administrator can just jump in. This is not a requirement, but a feature that many people will find useful. Many well-intended features can be used against their beneficiaries. Jason > Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2002 09:05:14 -0400 > From: Venkat Manakkal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: Re: [Ltsp-discuss] RE: X0rfbserver Citrix Server semi-sol'n > > Charles Marcus ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: >> >> As distasteful as it sounds, my boss has asked me about the possibility of >> what I'll call 'Passive Shadowing', ie, shadowing someones workstation without >> the ability to take it over, and *without them knowing it*, so he can see what >> they are doing. >> >> The reason for this is, we have a big problem with people spending lots of >> time 'playing' on the internet when they should be working, and the boss would >> like to be able to look in on them from time to time. > > I see this as unethical and a violation of an individuals privacy and > dignity. I would never work for a company that had such equipment. I > do hope that such covert features never make it to mainstream open > source code. _______________________________________________________________ Don't miss the 2002 Sprint PCS Application Developer's Conference August 25-28 in Las Vegas - http://devcon.sprintpcs.com/adp/index.cfm?source=osdntextlink _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.openprojects.net
