My company's been rolling out Websense in the past few weeks, and I can't believe how annoying that damn thing can get. We've already had a policy of blocking mail sites and general time wasters like orkut. Fair enough.

But now with the Websense trash in place, every odd site I open is blocked for some lame reason or the other. For instance, this amazing speech (given by Cory Doctorow to Microsoft on the evils of DRM) is blocked, as is another famous article on copy protection.

Slashdot banned us for the last 2 weeks here ($DIETY knows what some idiot at work did to get all of us banned), and it finally opened today. And guess what? Websense has blocked the YRO section, because it apparently comes under the category "Proxy Avoidance".

I can't believe the amount of money that must've been wasted to put this crap in place. And if they thought blocking sites would improve employee productivity, they're way off target. My motivation has rapidly spiraled downwards, and looking at the responses from others around me, I'm not alone either. And if they really were worried about conserving bandwidth for 'business-critical' tasks, they should've probably started blocking the online trading and sports sites that I see open all day long. Freakin' double standards.

Enough of this rant; Maddox does it far better than anyone else, so here's his scathing article on Websense (which is obviously blocked here, too).

I usually avoid blogs like the plague. No, not stuff like Slashdot and Groklaw, I mean the billions out there at Blogger and Wordpress. But for no particular reason, I've just started a new one. An earlier one at Blogger was lying untouched for more than a year.
Wordpress is decent, but not very configurable. I would've loved to be able to put my own templates and stuff. Since this just an idle pastime, I don't intend to host my own domain and stuff, so its alright I guess. No ads of course, I don't intend to ever start all that.

My experience with Red Hat is limited, but my respect for them has grown deeply. I came across their response to the Novell/Microsoft deal today: "Unthinkable".
Its nice to see not every big company is a sellout like the green chameleons at Novell.