I'm so glad that Mefi and MeCha are not on the banned list at work for me. They ban about 2/3 of the Internets so I'm supprised and fully expect them to stop working at any time but for now I'm happy. I can't ever see the Photo Fridays at work though since all picture hosting sites are banned.

I'm back too, but less like a phoenix rising and more like a lazy guy getting off the couch after a Real World marathon. I took a 2 month self-imposed MeFi/MeCha exile (and most of the other site I frequented on a regular basis) because I really needed to focus on some other things. But I missed this damn place and have adjusted the real world accordingly. Now I just have get back into the swing and figure out what the in-side jokes and references all mean.

For some reason, all metafilter.com/tags/ pages are blocked here as "Sex;Adult Material". Those must be some smoking hot tags.

I find corporate blocking to be so bizarre. Any time you have a blacklist, you can't help but think that anything that *isn't* blacklisted is fair game. Our net monitor is SurfControl, which isn't terrible, but we seem to have added a bunch of sites on top of the default settings.

What's really weird is when only parts of some sites are blocked. To boot:

Most of snopes = okay.
Risque section of snopes = not okay.
(That makes sense enough, I suppose.)

Most of metacritic = okay.
Games section of metacritic = not okay.
(Hrmm.)

It's also lame because having an internet job, it's very frustrating when I can't do work because I run into SurfControl. Don't get me wrong, I don't think people should be pr0ning in up at work, but for me, SurfControl gets in the way of real work far, far more often than it stops me from doing something naughty. Hell, I had to petition to get web.archive.org whitelisted.

Anything with the word 'chat' or that some algorithm or other identifies as a forum or blog is banned, as is anything with video content. Surprisingly, b3ta hasn't been banninated yet. But as my desk backs onto the main corridor through our open-plan floor, looking at b3ta isn't really an option at work.

The most annoying thing is that all of blogger is blocked as a whole and there are sometimes technical stuff that I want to look up that's in someone's blog and I can't because it's blocked.

If it makes you all feel better, my sister works as a network admin at a very big drug company and does not have any internet access from her desktop at all. There's one kiosk in the office that has internet access. So if she needs to download drivers for machines that she's setting up, she needs to download them from there and then sneakernet them to the internal machines.

I always feel bad about the fact that nothing here is blocked. (Not even pron, as we found out by mistake when looking for some STD-related article one day, ew.)

Then again, it has been making my life a hell because I needed to download translation software to test it and IT was like GTFO.

Drug companies are special cases -- they have to have particular types of backups and security to comply with federal regulations. Plus there are all the trade secret issues.

dhartung, she's worked in the drug industry for fifteen years and it's not that. This is just the current management (after a merger) being shortsighted dicks.

Sneakernet! Ha! I can't believe I've never heard that before, that's great!

We just passed a magic number of credit card #s our databases store, and now we all have to wear badges at all times to be in compliance. At least my picture came out well.

My office treats internet abuse as a management issue. As in, if your employee is wasting his or her time on facebook, you should deal with that. No blacklisting, no monitoring. It's refreshing actually.

For years and years, my public employee would "rather not know" about this stuff. Anyone caught doing stuff was because someone could see their screen, or they were dumb enough to do it on other people's computers and not wipe stuff (as in downloading rather than merely looking at, images). One teacher was let go because of images he was surfing while the students watched a movie, and one kid looked at the guy's screen and it was not an appropriate image.

That has changed, in that each session is signed into, and, presumably, able to be tracked. Lotsa traffic, though.