Accessing non-business related web sites :( Bye Bye.

We are now proactively monitoring the traffic on our network at ******* and we are experiencing periodic performance issues with our office networks due to some staff streaming/accessing non-business related web sites (i.e., stream/accessing YouTube, social media sites, etc) during office hours. We will be implementing a policy whereby all access to such web sites will be blocked. If your staff have a genuine business need to access such sites, and are being blocked then please raise a call to IT, who will give them access. Implementing this policy will improve the overall performance of the network at ****** so that business tools like; email, Skype, etc are not impacted by degraded performance.

🙁

It’s been a blast.

you think they’d block specific sites rather than allow them – seems very limiting for anyone doign research etc. if they have to get stuff enabled all the time.

Better sell your Facebook shares then 🙂

Maybe this place will sneak under the radar.

How did we ever survive without the Interweb 😐

I was at school…

How did we ever survive without Interweb TSY

They might just block sites that now to be high bandwidth, eg facebook youtube, internet email, or inappropriate content.

I’m sure its easier to block a few sites than to block everything then be inundated with requests for access to websites.

I don’t know I think a few people on here work in IT maybe they could help.

Sad but I guess the morons at your work took the p*** and so something has to be done.

Work are paying for you to work after all.

There is another sad reality to that sort of IT policy. People who do a bit of shopping , surfing, holiday booking etc on line during work time probably saw it as “swings and roundabouts”which is of course what it should be. If IT have taken their swings away, the business will find some staff take their roundabouts away too thereby reducing the overall flexibility of the staff.

Ho hum, that’s corporate nonsense for you.

Bet the IT department, don’t take their own rights away……

You might be OK – my work block a lot of stuff but most of the time I can get on STW

We outsourced IT and the system has fallen over. Cest la vie.

TBH I reckon this…

They might just block sites that now to be high bandwidth, eg facebook youtube, internet email, or inappropriate content.

Is porbably what they mean… doesn’t pay to have a forum open all day if people are checking stuff though.

In all honesty it isn’t Singletrack that is causing “periodic performance issues with our office networks due to some staff streaming/accessing non-business related web sites”

This site is mainly text based and static graphics – pretty light on bandwidth really. Chances are any performance issues are really caused by a few muppets sat watching iPlayer and YouTube all day.

Ah well.

Time to buy a smartphone?

My company buys in its web filter, so they can select which categories of sites to block, so social, forums, shopping etc. Kind of good, as it still allows a certain level of use while stopping excessive users.

It’ll be nothing to do with internet performance and all to do with people spending 7hrs a day surfing the web (probably on STW)

There are many ways to get around the block, depending on how they do it.

Wasnt that why ipads were invented? 😉

There are many ways to get around the block, depending on how they do it.

But your job is rarely worth it. Actively trying to find ways around blocks etc is never going to go down well.

I’d refrained from too much STW until the heat has died down, then keep your visits short and few until you find out how draconian they are with the new policy.

I could look on the positive side and see it as a chance to break free…

That’s what i did when they introduced a blocking system, then my mate in the comms dept found me a way to bypass it 🙁

I know our blocker stops access to anything with ‘forum’ in the url, but sometimes I could get on here through the homepage

My old place of work required us to look up a fair amount of stuff from the web so blocked all but about 6 or 7 sites, so we used to go to the tea room and use the computer there, then that got removed, so we started to use our own mobiles, which were then banned from the office floor, so then we were unable to do our jobs properly, and the place went to pot, which is where it was when I left.

Implementing this policy will improve the overall performance of the network at ****** so that business tools like; email, Skype, etc are not impacted by degraded performance

Of course, having loads of users with a Skype client sat running on their PCs is going to have no impact on network performance…

use a colleagues pc whilst they are at lunch for a few weeks until you can judge what retributions are in place.

Purely from an IT perspective, it’s better to blacklist than to whitelist. Back when I used to implement this sort of policy for performance reasons, I used to look at the top ten non-work-related traffic generators each month and blackball them. The biggest culprits at the time were file sharing sites, stuff that streams(*) and flavour-of-the-month sites(**). The vast majority of network traffic was generated by a small minority of sites.

From a business perspective, it’s arguably better to whitelist. Need access to a site, let us know and we’ll allow it. Pretty draconian way of doing things though.

These days, most filtering is done by content. I can’t imagine maintaining manual lists of black/whitelisted websites. More cost-effective to pay for a filtering company / software just to block by category.

(* – the biggest ‘streaming’ bandwidth hogs were, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, a BBC news feed ticker desktop add-on, and live desktop wallpaper changers)

(** – Big Brother updates, cricket scores, that sort of thing)

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Our internet usage at work is monitored. My boss asked me exactly what singletrackworld was at is used such a lot of bandwidth. I only use it at lunchtimes too

There are many ways to get around the block, depending on how they do it.

Quite possibly, but circumventing security like that is gross misconduct. It probably not worth the risk loosing your job to surf the net.

we used to have SurfControl where I worked once, it was circumvented by using our ISP proxy server in your browser (with the reasonable excuse that it makes some stuff quicker).

Bet the IT department, don’t take their own rights away……

this IT department does. We’re supposed to be setting an example.

We have something called “Websense” which filters on categories. So Sport, Shopping, Social Networking, etc are all blocked for all. Our corporate head office is in Tampa, and one year the Superbowl traffic got so much that the management couldn’t get any work done. So now we have Websense

correction – not “blocked” but “monitored”. You can still go to the sports etc pages at lunchtime/in your own time, if you’re prepared to risk a telling off

I could look on the positive side and see it as a chance to break free…

Yeah right, that’ll never happen! 😆

So what’s the solution then? You gonna play it careful a bit, or throw caution to the wind? Or have you found a way to justify an iPad with unlimited data package all of a sudden? 😉

Personally,

I’ve always held that there’s a difference between using the Internet for personal use occasionally / at lunchtimes, and taking the piss. If someone wants to check last night’s football scores I could care more, but sitting there doing it all day is a different matter.

Not that I ever followed my own rules, of course (-: A lot of my job involves waiting for installs to complete and so on, so even doing two or three jobs at once there’s often time to fire out a quick post or two.

Cougar – that’s the shitter of it all really… I have plenty of time where I can be on the internet whilst my work is happening in the background.

I’m going to have to analyse the arse out of every bit of data the companies got until they realise they need to buy another server or two.

I don’t know why they bother blocking, just monitor and then it provides easy provable data to support sacking anyone not pulling their weight.

A bit of fair usage for everyone keeps everyone happy, and get rid of the shirkers who piss everyone off anyway.

This policy is just totally incompetant management.

They’re not monitoring to sack people IMO. There are some stupid capacity issues… e-mail servers dying every 10 mins etc.

I use a citrix gateway at home, works a treat. All they see us secure traffic to my home ip. Been working fine for 7 years now 🙂

Sounds a bit lame.

I started at a new place a month ago & the internet/e-mail policy is pretty rigorous.

I couldn’t be doing with sneaking around it so have been spending a lot less time on here. I use my phone every now & again, but value this new job so will be keeping It to a minimum.

I’m still in the room 😀