Security Fears Prod Firms to Limit Staff Web Use 242
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Companies are limiting employees' use of free Internet services, such as Skype and video downloading, to protect themselves from viruses, communications traffic jams and regulatory missteps, the Wall Street Journal reports. ABN Amro's global head of strategy and engineering tells the WSJ, 'I'm not allowing Skype because I don't know what it does.' Some colleges and departments at Cambridge University also ban Skype. The limits affect executives as well as the rank-and-file, the WSJ finds: ' "I used to think nothing of checking my Yahoo mail several times a day," says Global Crossing Chief Marketing Officer Anthony Christie. Now that he can't, his long workday makes it hard to avoid using his work email account for personal messages, he says.'"
Re:Oh noes (Score:3, Interesting)
If your company doesn't do this (Score:1, Interesting)
Locking down net access at work makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
When these items cause problems that reduce productivity they have to go. It's that simple.
Due to unrestrained (and uninformed) users I now have to go over all 50 machines with a fine-tooth comb to scrub off the bad stuff. Several of these machines are probably going to have to be wiped. This is 100% due to user loaded "personal" software.
As I fix each machine they are getting locked down. I've been directed by management to prevent users from pirating music on company machines or using filesharing to share pirated music. I don't see anything unreasonable at all about that.
Any app that is well-behaved and does not expose the company to liability is fine with me. Otherwise it has to go.
Bandwidth always a worry at Cambridge (Score:3, Interesting)
The banning of Skype at some departments and colleges at Cambridge comes as no surprise to me.
I was at Cambridge during the late 90's-early Noughties, and I seem to recall a number of stern warnings to students about bandwidth usage from both College and University computing authorities. One of them even included a plea to use European or British mirrors as much as possible.
The shame is that while the Cambridge University Data Network [cam.ac.uk] had bandwidth to burn within Cambridge, it seems that the trouble was always further upstream on JANET [ja.net].
Things got so bad that there were rumours at the time that the poorer colleges were going to start charging their students for bandwidth. I never heard anything of it, and it didn't stop the proliferation of p2p (both in the form of Napster and samba shares) in my time there.
IM and Web blocking at GE (Score:4, Interesting)
And I can understand why. By only allowing communications through official chanels, the companies can better protect themselves by doing such things as applying corporate wide virus checking on emails. It also provides a log as to what communications occurred when. Though I do admit that flash drives and take home laptops can easily bypass any of these measures.
One downside to this is that the corporate policies also block VPN accesses, so I can not get to my offices servers while at the GE location.
One amusing anecdote relating to this is that where I work there is an analog phone line kept for the times when you really need to dial up a system. One lunch time I was using it to send some private email and also to chat with some friends (MSN messenger I think). When I was done I just picked my laptop up and walked back to my desk and plugged into the corporate lan without powering down. I was surprised when 20 minutes later one of my friends initiated a chat session with me. After the shock of chatting from my desk wore off, I realised that the chat program used two separate protocols/ports: 1 for logging into the chat system, and another for the actual chatting. The corporate IT people had only blocked one system and not the other, perhaps in the belief that that was all that was necessary. Combined with the chat system not timing out during the walk back to my desk, I had effectively bypassed their strong security.
I installed Skype while working for a Swiss bank (Score:4, Interesting)
When I got back to work on Monday, my Thinkpad was taken away and reformatted, and handed back to me -- without local admin privileges.
Now I work for a University. It's a whole other world.
What is happening (Score:3, Interesting)
Here is my take on what is happening. As network management tools become easier to use and more widely deployed, more and more people are starting to have a real understanding of their management and business networks. It used to be that the network engineers might or might not have a good idea about what kinds of traffic were flowing where. Now, a middle manager with only the most basic idea of how networks work can log into a Web interface and see what programs are being run by what people, connecting to what sites. As a result, they are more prone to hand down policy decisions based upon this new information.
At the same time, the workplace has become much more mercenary. Companies don't take care of their employees and employees just want to milk companies for as much as possible. No one trusts anyone. Managers want to get as much work out of their hirelings as possible and many don't care about the health, stress, happiness, etc. of those employees. In sociological terms, they are imposing physical barriers in an attempt to replace crumbling social ones. The problem for them, is they are usually way behind the technology curve. An employee who wants to play hardball can probably raid the company for all the info they want and carry it out on their cellphone or iPod. It's like moving from an honor system where captured soldiers swear they will stay until ransomed, to a military jail with as many bars as possible, except the prison is designed by a bureaucratic committee, each member of which is just trying to make as much money off of kickbacks and saved funds as possible. Time will tell which is more effective.
Right On Man (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This type of admin is the bane of users (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, by and large that is, indeed, the job of IT admins and directors. To allow the people who are actually creating the stuff (or marketing it, or selling it) to do their jobs in a way that optimizes the employee's time.