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The Internet Censorship

Does Your Company Censor the Content for You? 434

Posted by Cliff from the a-stealth-filter dept.
JAZ asks: "A few days ago a friend of mine and I were discussing this story. He was trying to make a joke about some content in the article that might be considered 'inappropriate' (the bit concerning 22,000 files). I didn't get his joke because the interesting bits weren't there. With a little investigation, I determined that my company's proxy server was delivering a modified version. Is this a common practice? Has anyone else noticed something similar?"

"In this case, words were not just filtered out, but the text had been changed so that the document still made sense. I suspect that someone monitoring a log and suddenly saw a document show up a bunch of times with the offending text in it. Then they modified the cached copy (I was viewing it a day after it hit the Slashdot front page) to make the alarm go away.

I have mix feelings about this, on one hand, even though the text in this case was meant as a joke and the content wasn't very offensive, I was using company equipment. But on the other hand, this company is a government regulated entity which isn't above pressuring its employees to vote the way management thinks is best (whether it is or not is a question for history). So I guess I'm scared that the company could push an agenda though 'stealth channels'. I realize that the information I read online can't always be trusted, but there are many people who don't know that. It's probably important to note that, while there is a policy of acceptable computer use, there has never been a notice that they might change the content we see online.

What are the feelings and/or experience of the Slashdot crowd on this?"
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Does Your Company Censor the Content for You? More

Does Your Company Censor the Content for You?

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  • Sad but true (Score:5, Funny)

    by Gzip Christ ( 683175 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:19PM (#7214867) Homepage
    I didn't get his joke because the interesting bits weren't there. With a little investigation, I determined that my company's proxy server was delivering a modified version. Is this a common practice?
    Yes. Ever since we've been under new management, the company proxy server has gotten progressively more restrictive in what it rewrites. It is really starting to smurf me off. The other day I needed to send an email to a customer about how to smurf a smurf and it rewrote every occurrence of smurf! I shudder to think what it might smurf up next.


    ---------
    The real Gzip Christ is user number smurf

  • When you consider how labor intensive it would be to come up with a sensible rendition of the article with "bad stuff" omitted - how do you propose it could be done.

    Programatically? Has anyone heard of a proxy/filter doing this? I haven't.

    • Yahoo has been doing it for awhile actually. I imagine it would be fairly easy. Read Up [bigmouthmedia.com]
    • It's a slightly different breed of technology, but it can be done in real time. I have a co-worker who feels strongly about language and protects herself and her family by using a product I can't help but find fascinatingly entertaining. Curse-Free TV [5starfamily.com] uses closed-captioning to identify and replace (visually while muting the sound if I'm not mistaken) potentially offensive language.

      Think of seeing that R-Rated action movie cut up for network television. You know the edits themselves were entertaining.

      • Sometimes I turn on Captions just for fun. One late night, I was watching the Kids in the Hall rerun on Comedy channel.

        When they had bleeped out the word "fuck" (or something), the captions had the unedited text! I searched the net about it and said for budget reasons sometimes they don't censor captions.
      • Think of seeing that R-Rated action movie cut up for network television. You know the edits themselves were entertaining.

        The first time I saw "Leathal Weapon" was on network TV. The edits in that are particularly amusing, but my favorite "edit" by far was one of Danny Glover's. After being shot in the shoulder and having lye and salt poured in the wound, Glovey says, "Go spit!"

        I laughed my ass off... imagine my surprise when I saw the uncut movie a week later and found out Glover really said that. Per
    • From the Privoxy documentation [privoxy.org] regarding filtering

      Typical reasons for doing such substitutions are to eliminate common annoyances in HTML and JavaScript, such as pop-up windows, exit consoles, crippled windows without navigation tools, the infamous tag etc, to suppress images with certain width and height attributes (standard banner sizes or web-bugs), or just to have fun. The possibilities are endless.

      Filtering works on any text-based document type, including plain text, HTML, JavaScript, CSS etc. (al


    • Has anyone heard of a proxy/filter doing this?

      We have Privoxy running at work (and I do here at home). It can do on the fly text mods in it's "playful" mode.
  • ... what exactly did the filter change "lesbian porn" to??

  • Hell No (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CrankyFool ( 680025 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:23PM (#7214901)
    I work at an extremely repressive Financial Services company that does extremely thorough and restrictive web filtering -- websites are white-listed, and are white-listed on a per-individual/group basis, so the vast majority of the people in the company can't even go to, say, Google.

    We don't do content filtering/alteration, though, though I'm guessing our proxy can do it. If you can get to the site, you'll see what's on it. Period. Well, assuming what's on it is available on port 80/443 :)

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:24PM (#7214902)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • My condolences.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:27PM (#7214925)
    that you must work at such a place :(

    When the current government of ghana was elected, the new govt won every district where the TV and radio had been deregulated, and the old one won every one where they were state controlled.

    The power of media is very real, and very scary.

  • Oh, woe is me! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Constancee ( 714256 )
    Well at my school, they use NT servers which has many security holes, so instead of patching those, they install little brother software, and merely observe the pages, I find it quite comical tripod pages are listed as sex/porn on it.
    • The reason they do that is to get money from the government. The school district I work for needs to have a CIPA approved web filter installed in order to get e-rate money. Tripod is likely blocked for sex/porn because some tool probably put some porn up on it on his/her page, but the web filter saw it before the content got pulled.

      We don't have any NT servers anymore. We're 2000, but since I'm the sysadmin I'm working on Linux. Helps when you bring up to the teachers' union that Linux could save mone

  • More than likely... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cranx ( 456394 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:29PM (#7214946)
    More than likely, the article had changed between the time your friend saw it and you saw it. One or both of your proxies are probably caching different versions of the web page, and now when you both go to that site, you both see two different versions of the web page.

    It's highly unlikely your company has someone sitting around reading every web page requested through your proxy and quickly censoring it before allowing it to get to you.
    • The article still has the Lesbian Porn in it, and it's The Straight Dope, so it goes out the way it goes out.

      Most censorware only blocks pages that aren't algorithmically correct, but there's some out there that also deletes the dirty words, for whatever value of dirty the authors' dirty minds can imagine. Obviously, as you say, it's highly unlikely that your company has a Squadron of Elite Gorillas reading every page looking for political incorrectness; it's probably a word or phrase filter, like the kin

    • More than likely, the article had changed between the time your friend saw it and you saw it. One or both of your proxies are probably caching different versions of the web page

      I think the parent post is right on target. According to the message board thread about this article [straightdope.com] the article has been substantially edited since it first appeared (Cecil Ad... err, Ed Zotti himself even chimed in to warn of the pending changes). I read it when it was first posted and, while I don't remember specific differe

  • Did they inform you? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jdreed1024 ( 443938 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:31PM (#7214962)
    Are you sure your company didn't inform you of this? Like, did you read all the fine print when you started your job? How about the employee handbook? (The one where I work is a 3" binder - I know I haven't read all of it) Are there Rules of Use you had to agree to when you got 'net access? Are you sure this wasn't in there?

    Bottom line: if the company informs you of this, even if it's on page 356, Appendix B of the employee handbook or way down at the bottom of the Rules of Use, then you can't complain about this.

    Now if they didn't inform you, that's bad. But before asking Slashdot, I'd ask your sysadmin. Or your BOFH. Or your PHB. Of course, that would involve admitting that you read /. at work, which may or may not be a problem at your company. You may find out it was some overzealous PFY in the systems group who was afraid that the PHB might see "lesbian" on an employee's computer and tomorrow there might be a FOX News story "Employees at Company Foo use corporate networks to access porn." Sure, that's a little far-out, but PHBs are primarily concerned about covering their asses.

    • if the company informs you of this ....then you can't complain about this.

      Really? Wouldn't there also need to be some kind of a "first ammendment override" clause?
      • if the company informs you of this ....then you can't complain about this.

        Really? Wouldn't there also need to be some kind of a "first ammendment override" clause?

        No. The First Amendment to the Constitution only limits the actions of the Federal Government, not private institutions.

        If I work for a newspaper and they decide not to print my article, it's not censorship, it's editorial control.

        Going the other way: If you work for a company, they tell you that you are not to use company resources for per
        • No. The First Amendment to the Constitution only limits the actions of the Federal Government, not private institutions.

          Well if the private institution tried to sue the guy for complaining about their policy on slashdot, it seems the first ammendment would apply (while the fact that there was some fine print would not).

          Regardless of the 1st ammendment, it seemed the poster above was confusing the concept of "can't complain" with that of "wouldn't have a case in a court of law"....which are very different

  • Perhaps off topic.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wo1verin3 ( 473094 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:33PM (#7214997) Homepage
    but I'd like to praise my employer for having a very clear, upfront, and open Internet and E-mail use policy.

    Chain letters = fired
    P2P apps = fired
    Harassment = fired

    Using Internet resources to maintain your own business is also against the rules, but it is very clear that it does allow casual web browsing, news, industry things, even personal websites so long as your duties at work are not interferred with. Coming previously from Big Blue, I found this to be an amazing change.

  • Sanitized for your protection (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Black Art ( 3335 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:35PM (#7215018)
    It is becoming more and more common to see this sort of filters. The reasons, in my view, are a bit complex, though kind of obvious.

    You have companies that are hypersensitive about any sort of lawsuit involving "sexual harasment" or anything resembling it. Since the court cases have been siding on the side of people who are far too sensitive for their own good, there is some cause for it.

    Another part of the equasion are control freaks who worry about what people do at work. They want everything filtered to only allow "work related" things. They want to produce and produce and produce with no thought to anything else in your life while you are there. (These are also the same people who tend to take long lunches and have all sorts of porn on their computers.)

    Yet another set are the moral control freaks who think that they need to prevent anyone from seeing anything "naughty". (These tend to be rarer, but I have seen places where this has happened.)

    All in all, it just creates contempt and dissatisfaction for the company by the employees. Adults do not like being treated like children, for the most part. People who get treated like this are more likely to bail when the opertunity presents itself. Of course, since MBAs are taught to try and turn all of their employees into interchangable parts, they don't quite get a clue how bad it hurts them in the long run. (Or the short run, for that matter.)
  • I recommend you quit your job immediately. Find another place to work. I am sure someone would gladly accept your paycheck and actually work and not worry about things like this at work.
    • My boss said the same thing when I told him that we were in violation of numerous OSHA regulations.

      And people wonder why there are labor unions...

      • My boss said the same thing when I told him that we were in violation of numerous OSHA regulations.
        And people wonder why there are labor unions...

        How could you even compare the two? On one hand we have reading slashdot, chatting with a friend, make a joke about lesbian porn, all while at work. On the other hand we have health and safety violations.

        Please, form a union that will lobby for the right to waste time on the clock, thus wasting the company's money. I'd love to see how well that works out.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:36PM (#7215026)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • This is truly "Orwellian" in it's scope. I'm willing to bet that your log watching IT department would deny changing it too....

    There have been incidents posted here (on Slashdot) before about content/news stories on the big outlets being "updated" without notice. That story you read last week might be "remembered differently" now...

    This is simply the next logical step in the erasing history as it happens. Modify content, delete facts or quotes, change facts too. ...I for one, welcome our new IT overloa
  • If you feel this is in error please contact the system administrator.

    Thanks for surfing on company time....

  • My Company censored does this practice and it makes me censored mad. What a bunch of censored but censored and censored oh well. At least I work on cool censored

  • Anonymizer (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tuxlove ( 316502 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:43PM (#7215090)
    This is what anonymizer.com (and others) are for. You can view any web site in complete stealth, since the data is SSL encrypted and the URLs are scrambled. Unless your company blocks anonymizer.com entirely there's no way for them to stop you from viewing whatever you want in complete uncensored privacy.

    • Re:Anonymizer (Score:3, Informative)

      by exhilaration ( 587191 )
      Or just install CGI Proxy [jmarshall.com] on your own server. I'm using it right now.
    • It looks like they might once have allowed you to use their service for free, but I just tried viewing a few sites with it, and it looks like most dynamic content (eg, Slashdot, any forum or blog-type page) requires that you Upgrade to their Premium Service with New Privacy Features!!!!!

      Yeah. Sure.

      Dan Aris

  • The easy way around this: (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bersl2 ( 689221 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:43PM (#7215095) Journal
    SSH client, X11Forwarding yes, Mozilla, and (if required) Cygwin Xwin. There is no way of stopping you without completely shutting you off from the Internet (at least that I can see).

  • Don't be a Dick! (Score:3, Funny)

    by kwerle ( 39371 ) <kurt@CircleW.org> on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:44PM (#7215097) Homepage Journal
    The company my father works for has an MTA that wouldn't let him send mail with the word "Dick" in it. It bounced it back to him explaining that it might be offensive.

    As in
    Dear Dick,
    We enjoyed dinner the other evening...

  • Three things (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:44PM (#7215101) Journal
    1) No one posting so far is familiar with such filter, which seems plasusible to me. Blocking on content is routine. Dynamically rewriting content and making it sound correct would be an ambitious doctoral project in CS, not a routine piece of network control software.

    2) "But on the other hand, this company is a government regulated entity which isn't above pressuring its employees to vote the way management thinks is best (whether it is or not is a question for history). So I guess I'm scared that the company could push an agenda though 'stealth channels'." Honestly, if your concern is that democracy is being subverted by your employer's policies of mind control you may want to just work elsewhere.

    3) No, whatever filters you have aren't there to surreptitiously insert pro-Arianna Huffington messages in Something Awful. They're there because if you and your friend discuss the NumLock article and say "lesbian porn" loud enough for a coworker to hear, she can sue the company for sexual harassment over the creation of a hostile workplace environment, and take money out of everyone else's pockets.
  • My company uses Websense, which is extremely irritating as it blocks many useful and interesting sites. It doesn't alter them; it just blocks them.

    Therefore, I have circumvented it by tunneling most of my traffic through SSH to external machines running the squid http proxy and socks (for IM).

    All they will see is intermittent encrypted traffic on port 22 (or whatever port your SSH server is on). Of course it would help if you have an excuse for needing an SSH connection. I'm covered as several servers und
    • There are several other ways around some of this software. One of my favorites is to convert the IP address of the server into the decimal equivalent (use something like Octave or Mathematica because your typical scientific calculator will change the number to exponential form). This won't work with virtual hosted sites but works on many, many proxy servers.

      Some of the weaker filters will also not block pages that are framed on another URL. If you have access to a webserver you could just create an html fo
    • bobbozzo writes:

      My company uses Websense, which is extremely irritating as it blocks many useful and interesting sites. It doesn't alter them; it just blocks them.

      Therefore, I have circumvented it by tunneling most of my traffic through SSH to external machines running the squid http proxy and socks (for IM).

      All they will see is intermittent encrypted traffic on port 22 (or whatever port your SSH server is on). Of course it would help if you have an excuse for needing an SSH connection. I'm covered a

  • An exercise in probability (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Michael Woodhams ( 112247 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:46PM (#7215121) Journal
    Choose the least likely two options out of the following:
    A) A person at the poster's company edits incoming web pages to sanitize them.
    B) A program is able to remove offensive language while leaving a result that makes sense.
    C) Two versions of the article were posted on the original website at various times, and due to caching the poster and his friend are seeing different versions.
    D) The poster is in error about or inventing what they saw on the page.

  • Happens Where I Work (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:47PM (#7215133)
    Same thing happened to me. The company put in a new proxy filter and now I AM VERY HAPPY HERE. So, I went to one of the system administrators and told him THAT HE'S DOING A GREAT JOB. Just the other day a friend sent me WORK RELATED MATERIAL. If this keeps up I'll just have to THANK MY BOSS FOR THE PRIVELEGE OF WORKING FOR THIS FINE COMPANY AND ASK IF I CAN WORK FOR FREE.

  • At least the company I work at is honest! (Score:4, Funny)

    by abolith ( 204863 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:49PM (#7215151) Homepage
    they just throw up a huge "THIS PAGE IS RESTRICTED BY COMPANY POLICY" page complete with little flashing red lights and sirens. that last bit is funny because you can hear them going off every so often as someone in the office tries a "restricted" page and has the sound turned on and up.

  • teaching high school (Score:3, Informative)

    by bigbigbison ( 104532 ) * on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @08:54PM (#7215197) Homepage
    Several years ago when I was teahing high school they would censor out "objectionable" words. However, the censor that they used was so dumb that it would not only censor out typical words, but it would censor out parts of words. So if I were to types something like "I wish it would stop," the censor would see the "sh" at the end of wish and the word "it," and think it was an "objectionable" word leaving blank spaces in my text and rendering it pretty unreadable.
    I only found out about it after a friend responded to me asking me what I was trying to say.
  • What? This is the first time you've seen such a thing? Time to wake up and smell the victory gin...

    At many of my (previous) employers, there are political action committees (PACs) to which management is "strongly" encouraged to donate, and exempt employees are recommended to donate.

    among their usual actions are a election-time list of candidates whose views on industry-relevant issues are favorable to the company.

  • Wouldn't this rewriting violate copyrights? It seems that modification of copyrighted works like that (since they are effectively publishing them) would be against the law.

    Bill

  • i'd start a job search (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Zed2K ( 313037 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @09:03PM (#7215263)
    If my company censored my incoming messages, websites, or email I would do a few things.

    First I would stop any "above and beyond" performance. I would do my job as it was expected of me but I surely wouldn't work weekend or late hours anymore. The office is a 2 way street. I supply my abilities and do the work, they pay me. Thats the usual way it goes. But I also am willing to go above and beyond without complaining because I'm given the leeway in my internet and personal time while at work. If that went away so would the extra stuff. I give them more, they should give me more as well.

    Then I would start looking for a new job. Its easier to find a job when you have one.

    • First I would stop any "above and beyond" performance. I would do my job as it was expected of me but I surely wouldn't work weekend or late hours anymore. ... Then I would start looking for a new job. Its easier to find a job when you have one.

      I beg to differ.

      Before leaving a job, I'd work extra hard for the last few weeks. When a new potential employer calls to ask about past job performance, your boss will likely give them a good review of you [like 'He has been finishing projects ahead of schedule.

      • Frobnicator writes:

        Before leaving a job, I'd work extra hard for the last few weeks. When a new potential employer calls to ask about past job performance, your boss will likely give them a good review of you [like 'He has been finishing projects ahead of schedule.'], rather than the 'legal requirement' version [such as 'he works here and was hired on @date@, and he does his work.']

        Keep in mind that for many employers, policy forbids giving any information beyond the 'legal requirement', good or bad,

  • Legality? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mr100percent ( 57156 ) * on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @09:03PM (#7215264) Homepage Journal
    Didn't Dialectizicer get sued and temporaroly removed for this sort of thing?

    Once you edit content, you as the ISP lose your "no liability" status as to what gets sent and received by your system. That's why some colleges got sued by the RIAA when they tried to slow (but not stop) file sharing.

  • What I've discovered (Score:3, Funny)

    by M3wThr33 ( 310489 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @09:13PM (#7215323) Homepage
    The problem with filters is that they [help business and productivity] because it [encourages] the flow of information. Of course, I've found [it helpful] by [complying]. You should try doing that, too, if filters [help] you.

    [Vote Bush]
  • I run my own small business (let's me run things however the fuck I want to)... and I wanted to point out that curses etc in emails etc can be useful because they are part of language! Filter them out, and you lose some meaning or emotion in the communication.

    For instance, if I get an email from a customer telling me: "your software is fucking terrible!" then I know this is really bad. If I read instead, "your software is gosh darn poor" then this carries somewhat less force.

    You see what I'm getting at? T

  • No my company does not censor content.
    It is a good company with excellent benefits and competitive pay.
    They support the community and donate generously to local charities and organizations such as [@orglist@].
    @companyname@ is an equal opportunity employer.

    %UNDEFINED: @companyname@
    %UNDEFINED: @orglist@
    %CHECK FILTERBOT_GLOBALS.INI

  • Presumably it the reference in the dir name that is changed. Is it simply taken out or replaced.

    If as you say the text had been changed so that the document still made sense well you could replace every occurance of the offending phrase with \random and it would make sense.

    The smurf example in the first post is an extreme but you could probably have substitutes for all the offending words in their varying formats nouns, verbs etc and not destroy the grammer. But I think it would be impossible to not destro

    • Like this: (using any adjective noun combination, and noticing the DOS prompt)

      C:\Una\Purple Pants>DIR . . . then the 22,000 files in that directory scroll past so fast I can't see their names. However, if I apply the pipe function at the command prompt like this: C:\Una\Purple Pants>DIR | more . . . then the display will show me one screen of files at a time
  • When I first read this article I was thinking, like, funny article. This story really confused me because i could not for the life of me see anything that would be offensive to anyone

    Upon a careful rereading I came up with two possibilities. First, and most likely is the math lesson on bitwise math operators. In my experience the average person get very offended why I start talking about math. On several occasions I have feared for my life. Most of the time, though, the bird I am chatting up just wal

  • Create an SSH tunnel and run some kind of proxy on the other end (I used a Perl script to help out a friend of mine). Then tell your favorite browser that all your web are proxyed on localhost 22, and BOOM employer can't see that you are browsing the web and can't filter it either.

    Probably possible to do something similar with mail, at least with an outside address.

    If you don't have SSH access it *might* be possible to actually run your SSH tunnel out your companies port 80. Assuming that such a thing wou
  • Yeah, they change all the Slashdot comments to trolls!
  • People are more or less trusted where I work, though occasionally I'll skim through the logs, mostly to look for suspicious traffic like adware. We do have some pornsters but they're too valuable to fire.

    At another place I worked, I must say there's nothing quite like showing a new realtime log analyzer to your boss and seeing it pop up a bunch of suspicious animal porn (?) links during the first minute, after several days of rather uneventful testing.
  • It is a Proxy service [tu-dresden.de] run through a University in Germany.

    I use it at work even though they don't filter anything (or so they say, but they can still log where one goes).

    It is pretty "smart" in the sense that it also re-routes all the DNS requests through them, thus nobody will be any wiser on where you're going, all they see is an SSL connection going somewhere, I guess they could decide to block the ip-block, but supposly the system can get around this as well.

    There were some concerns recently as the B

  • Our town public library filters out words like that from the public-access Web terminals.

    A couple of years ago, I was reading a friend's journal online, where he seemed to say that someone had sent him an E. Another page showed me a list of " ing lists". It turned out that they block out a certain set of words from all pages-- and one of the words was "mail"! (They have a special room with computers which let you read email, and you have to pay for that, so I guess that must be why.) Of course nobody ever

  • It was a snippet of sample code written in f*ck f*ck [chilliwilli.co.uk].
  • If you are so concerned about the content you post to be accurate use a news group that has SSL enabled. In case someone can modify that post to sound accurate and you can prove it, you can cash in from your SSL authority :)

  • I would have thought more of /. moderators (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Awptimus Prime ( 695459 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2003 @06:19AM (#7217610)
    Really now. You guys are supposed to be the cream of the crop when it comes to technical stories. Some schmuck sends a submission with a highly outrageous claim and you post it for discussion like it's a legit concern?

    I bet if I sent mail to Wired News asking the same question this guy asked, if someone was to write back, they would probably inform me of the fact that the pages was modified, then cached.

    In these days of companies losing money, laying off workers, etc there's no IT department I've seen who has the funds to hire an army of people to dynamically change content for their employees.

    You'd also think, if there was software that was intended to do wide scale dynamic changes web content the moderators of one of the biggest geek sites on the planet would know about it.

    Be wise.. !

  • Company property (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gone.fishing ( 213219 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2003 @09:09AM (#7218363) Journal
    You were using company property and company bandwith for personal use, discussing a slashdot story. In some companys they would have flogged you, in others fired you.

    I know I am taking it far, but the real truth here is that you really don't have a lot to say about how a company uses it's equipment and if you don't like it your options are limited, put up with it or leave.

    It may not seem right but perhaps that is because we feel freedom should extend into our jobs but the reality of it is that we sell some of our freedom when we accept a paycheck. We all know this and have to somehow accept it and live with it.

  • Violation of free speech (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rollingcalf ( 605357 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2003 @09:21AM (#7218493)
    There should be a law against middlemen altering content without notifying the reader of such content. Anytime this is done to a page, the page should contain a big and bold sentence warning the user that the contents have been altered from the publisher's source, or other obvious notations like "[expletive deleted]".

    It's the company's network and computer, so they should be free to BLOCK any content they want, but they shouldn't be able to use that power to mislead the reader into believing the publisher was saying something that they didn't. It's fine if they want to ban me from using their phone to make personal calls; but if they allow me to make personal calls they mustn't secretly use voice processing hardware to alter the words I hear or speak.

    It is a violation of free speech because it *secretly* robs the content publishers of opportunities to deliver their intended message. If they block a web site or inform the user that the content has been altered, the user still knows they can go elsewhere and access the unmodified content. But when it is altered secretly, the user is misled into believing the content had certain information, without the knowledge that they need to go elsewhere to see the real infromation.

    I can smell a lawsuit from the content publishers brewing.

  • Corporate Rights (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Webmoth ( 75878 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2003 @03:22PM (#7222577) Homepage
    This is a simple issue of Corporate Rights.

    1. It is their computer.
    2. It is their network.
    3. It is their monitor, it is their hard drive.
    4. They paid for it, they can do what they want with it.
    5. You are their whor^H^H^H^Hemployee.
    6. They paid for you, they can do what they want with you.

    Simply put, your rights as an employee are subservient to their rights as an employer in terms of the information you access in their emplyoy. Yes; you have rights over theirs when it comes to discrimination issues (age, gender, race, creed) but, in terms of information, censorship is entirely their right.

    7. You have the right to leave at any time without notice and without fear of reprisal.

    • Re:Corporate Rights (Score:3, Insightful)

      by adb ( 31105 )

      So what? The author is made nervous by the company's creepy abuse of its power; the author's remedies include leaving or, if said creepy abuse of power is in violation of contract or state or Federal law, suing. That doesn't make the abuse of power any less creepy.

      Speaking of creepy: I find it profoundly creepy that people tend to respond to "thing X is unethical/obnoxious/gross and I don't like it" with "no, thing X is not actually against the law". It lends all too much credence to the idea that ne

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