Internet use at work.

[SrDriver]

Seems many companies are putting various restrictions and monitoring what folks at work are doing on the internet.

Where I worked before retirement there was an employee that was terminated because of excessive web browsing and emails.

This year restrictions and monitoring software are being installed by more businesses as they have discovered not only is there a loss of production by employees but too they are finding that there is legal issues that can cause them grief.

 

[buster]

I believe it. For people like myself that sit in front of a computer all day long, I practically have to have it to stay sane. I'm on now. LOL....but so are all the rest of my coworkers.

 

[wavinwayne]

I never use the internet to goof off at work.

 

[Pablo]

Somewhat tolerated, if somewhat technical.

BITOG is a technical place.

They have fired folks, for girlie pic stuff. Little girls. Disgusting.

They do block some sites, but how the heck can they keep up....

 

[NJC]

Surfcontrol at my work. Blocks out gambling, alcohol, pr0n, guns et al. Mostly reasonable.

 

[Cutehumor]

at work, I do email and the oil board. maybe check the weather and read cnn.com
if not on the internet, I would just hide in the bathroom. LOL

 

[Mystic]

Where I work the IT department now blocks YouTube and they came out with this long memo a while back that stated, when you finally got done reading it, that the internet should be used just for work purposes. I don't know where people find the time to be on the internet much anyway. They make sure they get their money's worth of work out of you.

What is really funny we have all of these administrators and other people who seem to have endless time on their hands who are always sending emails and email attachments out to everybody. On some of the emails and attachments you have to click to show them you actually opened the email or attachment. I think maybe IT needs to talk to some of those people about the danger of email attachments. Some of the stuff these people send out have nothing to do with work. They will send stuff (potenially dangerous) like junk they find somewhere on the internet. But it is okay for them to waste their time on the internet.

We used to have this crazy woman working there who was going to all kinds of chat rooms and porn sites. She got in trouble although that was not the only reason she got fired. How anybody with an IQ can figure they are going to get away with stuff like that at work is beyond my understanding. They probably have a record of everything at the servers and with special software they can recover whatever they want. Heck, they can control the computers remotely if they want. I have called IT a couple of times because I was having problems and rather than somebody come over they just take control of the computer and see everything you can see on your desktop. There is no telling what sort of stuff they have on the computers-they may have keystroke recorders.

Somebody mangaged a while back to get all kinds of spyware and adware on some of the computers. IT put a lot of strange software on the computers after that. The next time somebody downloads a lot of worthless junk they are going to get nailed.

I really use the internet at work other than for company email. Sometimes I will check my own email or check weather forecasts and stuff like that.

 

[simple_gifts]

Plenty of technical controls where I work; websites are categorized, unknown, x-rated, gambling etc; these are blocked. BITOG is blocked. No streaming video sites (youtube). Active TCP resets are sent to places like Orbitz. The amount of "other stuff" peoples web transactions are sent thru is pretty numerous. Logging, well uh, duh.....

Hard to believe 8000 people can't work without abusing internet privilege. lol

Several years ago, we were running underpowered mail servers. Someone would get a video file as an attachment and within 2 hours hundreds of copies would be loaded up in the "outgoing mail queue" from numerous company employees; some sending it to 50+ friends in different domains. I called one guy and mentioned, uh it doesn't look company related and if the servers go down, your name will be all over it. Didn't seem to deter him. I even mentioned to have him send it to his home account and then to all his friends from there. He indicated he didn't have home internet access. To this day he still is sending video off the site.

 

[Mystic]

I really think the biggest problem we have comes from supervisors and people who have the right connections and are head of departments (I work in government) or for whatever reason don't seem to have to worry about being talked to for what they do on the internet. Sure, there are some ordinary workers who abuse the internet (I don't know where they find the time) but every time I check my email it is packed with junk from people who don't seem to worry (or don't have to worry) about all of the garbage they are emailing to everybody else.

The most time I spend on the internet at work is when I check my email. I try to check it as soon as I can early in the morning before it gets busy. A lot of the communication around here nowadays is done by email. Especially when I return from my days off I try to go through my email as soon as possible. I have to wade through a pile of stuff, much of it unnecessary, and some of it frankly endangering everybody because of the possibility of malware in all of this garbage pulled off of the internet. I wonder all the time why the people sending all of this worthless stuff don't get into trouble-I would be in trouble for spending junk like that. Somebody would come along and ask me if I have a lot of spare time on my hands. But in government if you have the right connections or the right position or know the right people you don't have to worry.

Even on my home computer I avoid dangerous websites as much as possible and try to be safe. At work I simply don't have time (unless it is a very slow day) to be on the internet. Now if it is slow and as long as I am not doing anything wrong what harm is there to be on the internet? Occasionally I will check out my personal email, if the weather is bad check weather forecasts, and I have even visited bobistheoilguy.com from work. I am probably one of the least offenders at work, at least compared to what these other people do.

But now that they have sent out their little memo (well, actually big, BIG memo), I will probably stick to my email which they have to allow us since they send a lot of their communication through email nowadays. If they decide to go after somebody they can use any excuse.

 

[jeffreydbrown]

I used to work as an IT director for a city government (now in private consulting/managed service practice), so let me offer a somewhat different viewpoint:

IT generally doesn't sit there and watch what you're surfing, but every site you visit ends up in the firewall/gateway system logs. While smart and scrupulous IT people configure the firewall to avoid this, it is possible that things like your banking username and password or other personal, confidential information can be captured. Just a thought.

 

[Pablo]

Indeed. It may as well be a public computer when it comes to that stuff....but I see people banking and stuff on work PC's.

Oh yeah well I guess I do check my 401K from my work PC.

 

[SrDriver]

Have read several articles that business is getting wise to employee use of the internet and that we will start seeing much more control and access limitations imposed by employers.

IT folks will have more tools @ their disposal too.

Before I retired there was talk of an intranet. This would allow company email, etc., and there would very limited internet access which would be monitored.

 

[2002 Maxima SE]

Good story on that:

During a financially difficult time with the company I worked for, a guy in the company started posting on the Yahoo financial boards...as the CEO! Used the CEO's name as his ID and posted all kinds of internal stuff and thing derogatory about the CEO. Admittedly it was funny, but the guy did this during working hours.

One day, the director came down the aisle and stopped in front of my cube. He peered over me and the cube into the cube next door. A few hours later, he pulled the guy in that cube away...he was the poster. Got fired later that same day. This was in 1998, so I can only imagine the tracking available today.

 

[Mystic]

Just to show you how bad the situation is where I work I will tell you something else. I found out the hard way that I can't get a simple email (no attachments or anything like that) from the outside world to my email address at work. I can send emails out but I can't receive anything on my email address at work unless it is sent from somebody in the government organization.

Like I said I found this out the hard way. I had given my email address at work to my brother and my sisters. My youngest sister had to be taken to the hospital and almost died. Emails were sent to me at work that I never received.

This should tell you something. There are administrators and heads of departments and so forth who can go out to the internet and download silly stuff and send it to everybody. I can't get the most simple, basic email through.

The same thing is true for one of my sisters who works for a major university in Colorado. I have never been able to send her an email at her place of work. I have to email her at home.

Today I can't even remember my email address at work. I can't receive any emails anyway from the outside world so why brother giving it to anybody. I can send emails out but I can't receive any emails at work.

But the people with the right connections seem to have little trouble downloading silly junk to put in email attachments and send to everybody in the organization.