Genuine question as I know eff all about this stuff…

My boss just casually mentioned that I am one of the top data users on our Network…and that is going some given what media output we have.

Now it goes without saying I am not the busiest person in the world and so spend a lot of time on here. Will that show up?

Or is it (and I hope it is..) the 500GB portable hardrive full of music I have attached to my PC?

(cue loads of comments/acusations of goat porn etc)

Isn’t this what smartphones were designed to avoid?

Is that music you have receipts for? If not, you should be worried – if you’re not busy, that would give your manager perfect reason to say bye bye…

Rachel

My boss just casually mentioned…

I would be taking that as a friendly warning to be more careful.

Or is it (and I hope it is..) the 500GB portable hardrive full of music I have attached to my PC?

Unless you share the music across the network to other pc’s or download a *lot* of music to it on the network it won’t be this, sorry.

It’s more likely to be streaming videos than pages like the ones on stw, though, even the ones with lots of image son are relatively small.

Network usage implies it might not be internet data either?

Agree with edlong, its a friendly warning to be careful and reduce your usage otherwise as has been said they may know how little you actually do. Use your mobile or start to count the ceiling tiles.

HMM – no receipts the hard drive was a “gift” 8)

Not busy? yes, productive? most definently. Paid for what I know not what I do…( or so I like to kid myself).

Rachel – now I know you’re in IT so come on answer the question…

top data users on our Network

This could mean many different things.

I’d take it as a warning. As above though, anything streaming (eg videos or to a lesser extent music – eg spotify) will rack up the numbers way quicker than browsing.

Traffic to here or any site will be logged in your firms proxy server and firewall. If they’re good, they’ll have some of our software that can link logon sessions to your PC, to firewall events by your user Id. Casual browsing to here is going to be minimal. If you’ve been bad and stream films, download music, then be worried, but just general browsing, then you’re ok.

Your manager is probably more aware of how much data you have stored on various network servers and collaboration platforms like share point.

We do sell some stuff to interrogate data on attached media based on file type. Quite rare that anyone actually uses it in anger though, unless they’re a financial or government institution being audited.

Are you listening to music on Youtube? That would up the numbers pretty quickly…

I’d take it as a friendly warning, too!

Do you use streaming music services, or good forbid have a torrent client on your machine?

top data users on our Network

Just me that thought the response should be Yesss in your face second place (fist pump) 🙂

Being on here all day would barely register data wise. Unless you’re watching every embedded Vimeo 20x over?

I managed to get to be top user in my first month in the job 🙂

They could see where I’d been, but all my forum use was restricted to lunchtimes so no problem.

Being on here all day would barely register data wise.

I don’t know exactly what they were measuring but I know that forums seemed to score highly yet sites where I was downloading quantities of work related data barely registered. I suspect it was something to do with refreshing the forum pages.

Counter his question, ask him if your usage is a problem and if so has he considered upgrading the antiquated network technologies he is no doubt running. Put him on the back foot.

+1 on the friendly warning. If you have a good relationship with him then I’d ask for a little more info, what are they measuring and how? As already mentioned, (network) data usage could mean many different things.

This page is 1.7Mb measured using Developer tools in Chrome. That’s not insignificant (edit) given the nature of forum browsing, lots of clicks, lots of refreshes. Yes there is caching, but that can depend on what the proxy is doing.

one of the top data users on our Network

maybe he’s getting ready to hand out trophies, but he likes you and wants you to up your game so you get the top spot?

This site uses a lot of data per page. It’ll soon add up and most likely will show up

Did you ask what the prize for top user is?

I was not even in the top 10 at ours

1 person once spent 33 hours on the liverpool website- the lost 2 hours were just how slow the computers were to start up

Maybe there’s some backup software on your PC that’s trying to take copies of the stuff on your 500GB drive?

Whats the company policy? do they have any monitoring tools that you are circumventing? Have you been given any guidelines on what is acceptable?

edlong – Member
My boss just casually mentioned…
I would be taking that as a friendly warning to be more careful.

This.

FWIW, its illegal to be monitoring your activity without officially warning you they are doing so. Un til you’ve had an official warning, go careful of revert to smartphone without using the company’s wifi.

However, you should not be using work infrastructure for you personal use, yet posts on STW will be a small enough fraction of data packet size it’ll barely register. Its the firewall/history you need to be worried about, and that could be narrowed down to “unacceptable material” outside of company guidlines. For example, we have a policy which states we can use social media, but not on the company infrastructure and not able to post financial results or inflammatory comments about the company.

Ha ha! Our policy states that “When using social media to discuss personal non work related matters…” The implication is that I’m allowed to be on STW as long as I don’t discredit the company/reveal financial results. Coooooool.

I don’t know, but I’d like to know the position of using a company laptop through home wifi yet not logged on via vpn. Surely that isnt tracked on anything other than the laptop?

its illegal to be monitoring your activity without officially warning you they are doing so

Usually included in your work’s AUP & if that doesn’t cover it then we’ve built a $1billion business illegally.

FWIW, its illegal to be monitoring your activity without officially warning you they are doing so. Un til you’ve had an official warning, go careful of revert to smartphone without using the company’s wifi.

Yes – there has to be a policy saying the company has the right to monitor what you’re doing. However if someone said that to me at my workplace, my first thought would be that I’m using too much space on networks shares and the like.

its illegal to be monitoring your activity without officially warning you they are doing so

That maybe however its not illegal to monitor your network traffic and alert anyone with a higher than average usage. They haven’t said you need to stop surfing STW, just that the usage is one of the top users on the list.

hot_fiat – guildliunes are included in AUP, and so can the suggestion you will be monitored.

Subversive monitoring, or spying, on a targetted employee’s activities unless specifically agreed by the employee is illegal. However I suspect your business relys on the fact you are “monitoring business activity across the employee base for network traffic” or some such words.

I doubt you contract states “I’m providing a business to catch Kryton57 posting on STW to see if he’s wasting company time”.

The issue IIRC was data on my PC, we have remote desktop stuff for Office application and are expected to use the PC for internet etc. Data storage is a big issue for us because of the media files some depts use/need. The word “internet” was not mentioned.

Edit – my boss is female btw.

surroundedbyhills – Member
Edit – my boss is female btw.

Whats that to do with anything?

No we monitor everything, from AD logins to file and database touches, continuously across the enterprise. The aim is to capture the Who, What, How, When, Where and Workstation of everything. You end up with some BIG data.

Some of our unix and web stuff does screen capture and replay. Frightening.

Ok, you must have a specific application as your business then.

Let’s think a bit more laterally everybody. Dear Singletrack web wallahs, what are YOU doing to reduce the data size of your pages so that we workshy wastrels can wallow on here for longer?

Pook. Get a premier account. The ads are what smokes the bandwidth.

Is that music you have receipts for?

😆 who would like to go through my order history from online shops and compare with the music I have stored?

Our policy at work is that if you are not do something dodgy there’s something wrong with you.

I wonder if you having lots of data on your PC means that your backups (via the network) are what’s causing the problem?

Can you flag the external drive to not be in the backup plan?

wwaswas – Member

I wonder if you having lots of data on your PC means that your backups (via the network) are what’s causing the problem?

Can you flag the external drive to not be in the backup plan?

Posted 2 minutes ago #Report-Post

Told my boss I’d unplug it.

Customer chooses what they want to monitor and buys licenses accordingly. Usually its just gov / military and financial houses that have a trading floor who buy the whole hog, unless they’re in Switzerland where everything is monitored, but only by the Swiss, to make sure that people from outside Switzerland aren’t montioring it. And even then the data belongs to the employee, up to a point. 😕