Does Web Censorship Software Make Sense?

By

Like many other .NET Developers, I try to work as efficiently as possible for the benefit of my employer and clients. I don’t take smoking breaks, I usually eat lunch at my desk in about 10 or 15 minutes, and I don’t waste my employer’s time needlessly surfing the net.

But many employers don’t seem to appreciate that. They look at what they see as a problem, and use web filtering software like WebSense to block employees from “doing bad things” under the guise of “improving productivity”.  You know what I say to that? Bull!

Look, there are always going to be a small minority of employees who are irresponsible and don’t have good work-ethic values who will spend hours of their employers’ time surfing “unacceptable” web sites. But to punish everyone for the offenses of a few is like using a sledge hammer to swat a  gnat.

If you block people from web sites, what do you think they’ll do instead? Their productivity won’t increase – the “Baddies” will just do something else, like playing Solitaire on their computers. Or they’ll find something else to do that wastes the employer’s time.

Scott Hanselman actually got his blog “Banned” by WebSense because it got mindlessly categorized as “Personal Web Sites; Society and Lifestyles.” Can you believe this utter B.S.?   WebSense, because of the nutty algorithms that it uses, is intrinsically flawed.

For the majority of us “good guys”, being blocked in what sometimes seems a heavy-handed, indiscriminate manner is both an annoyance and a reduction in productivity.

Some companies prohibit employees from using IM clients like Live Messenger. At the company I work for, we all agree that it is a great productivity booster. Even the “higher ups” use it.  Sure, there may be a few abusers – but the benefits far outweigh.

Occasionally when doing a search for technical resources on a programming problem, I end up on one of those WebSense “blocked” pages. At a client’s site recently, I found that the entire domain “blogspot.com” – which has thousands of legitimate technical blogs on .NET, Silverlight, WPF, WCF and other technologies (including this UnBlog) – is BLOCKED.

What on earth are these people thinking? Is it really about “productivity”, or just the heavy hand of self-appointed righteousness? What do you think?

Item of Note:

My “playground” Social Short Url / Search / Tagging site, http://ittyurl.net, now has over 958 user-submitted links related to Silverlight, which has been the site’s focus since about June of this year. Keep those new links coming, and check out the Webservice API, which now features a new Webmethod to discover and Feedburnerize feeds on any webpage that has “link rel=” feed discovery tags! By creating a Feedburner Url for your feed, you automatically enable Silverlight cross-domain requests!

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. iransofaraway4:32 PM

    A previous employer of mine instituted Websense after I had been there for years, and it hurt my productivity. Technical resources that I used to browse on the web were no longer available, and to ask for them to get whitelisted was a huge ordeal.

    I ended up making a proxy/tunnel to my home computer (setting it up off the clock of course) and being able to browse off of that when I needed to.

    I can understand trying to crack down on an entire company, but the technical-minded people are usually too busy to be screwing around online, and if they are screwing around, it's obviously going to show in the code and quality of their work. So I don't think it's fair to impose limitations (from a web/technology sense) to those who fully understand how to use (and not abuse) that technology.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Phillip Gerrish6:43 PM

    I believe web filtering makes sense. I don't have experience with Websense but I use opendns.com both at work and at home. Blocking domains such as blogger.com takes it to the extreme but I would not run my home or work network wideopen without any filtering. I also feel that filtering gives me another level of protection from porn, phishing and sites that propogate malicious software.

    ReplyDelete
  3. peterbromberg8:47 PM

    @pgerrish,
    We are talking about two different things. I use OpenDns too. What I am talking about is employers running specialized software like WebSense that prevents you from visiting sites that fall into certain categories.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Phillip Gerrish10:13 PM

    I disagree with you, we are talking about the same thing. Once you create an account with OpenDNS.com and install their OpenDNsupdater on your computer, or server, you can select different categories to restrict through your accounts dashboard - settings. Through Opendns you can lock your network down restricting access to social networking sites and even web mail. When an unauthorized category is accessed you get hit with an OpenDNS page explaining that the requested website is restricted and under which category it was blocked.

    ReplyDelete
  5. peterbromberg8:07 AM

    Ok, from that perspective, yes we are talking about the same thing. But that wasn't the point. My point is that employers FORCE this on you. When you CHOOSE to do it via OpenDns, that is an excersize in free will. Also, it is YOU that gets to choose what's blocked.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some observations on Script Callbacks, "AJAX", "ATLAS" "AHAB" and where it's all going.

By
I've taken a more than cursory interest in the whole Remote Scripting (.NET species) vs. AJAX and now ATLAS discussion, mostly because I started using Remote Scripting since Microsoft first released it, and because I continued to refine it after seeing Brent Ashley's excellent work with JSRS, which was one of the first "real" cross-browser solutions back in 2000 (that's the turn of the Century for you history buffs). Now Bertrand Leroy, a Microsoft guy whose work I like , has authored some very interesting ASP.NET 2.0 script callback stuff that he points to on his blog, and he is obviously (at least, to me he is) involved quite heavily in the development of this new ATLAS infrastructure that they'll preview at PDC. Leroy's most recent post brings to the surface what I agree are the major differences between the "AJAX a - la .NET" approach as popularized by Michael Swartz with his AJAX.NET library, and Leroy's RefreshPanel, the ASP.NET 2.0 b...
Read more

IE7 - Vista: "Internet Explorer has stopped Working"

By
Image
This one was a bitch. All of a sudden for no reason at all, out of the blue, I get this dialog "internet Explorer has stopped working". I didn't install any new software, crap- I didn't do anything! So here I am using FIREFART to go on the internet and find out what to do! Damn! Good thing I've got the sucker on the same machine (I'm not "anti-Firefox", i just don't use it that much except to check my page renderings). The Fix The fix (at least for me): 1) Go into Control Panel, and choose "Internet Options". 2) Under the "Advanced" tab, press the "RESET" button at the lower right: Don't ask me why this happens, or why the fix works. That's a BUG, D00D - I don't care how you slice it!
Read more

FIREFOX / IE Word-Wrap, Word-Break, TABLES FIX

By
One of the most annoying things a developer (who would normally delight in writing code, not futzing with markup) can have is getting rendering issues between different browsers. The two biggest players are of course Internet Exploder and Firefart (as I lovingly like to refer to each). In most cases that's going to take care of 98 percent of your total site traffic. IE has had a proprietary "word-break" style attribute for a long time, and this made it into the CSS 3.0 spec. But that doesn't necessarily help you with Firefox right now. Firefox literally - (and I consider this completely idiotic, since it's been in their bug database for FIVE YEARS) does not have a reliable CSS style element to force table cell content to break in the middle of a word in order to stop the content from expanding your table / div off the page or over other content on the page. Here's a partial fix, which will work for most tables and browsers. The style declaration (I call it m...
Read more

System.Web.Caching.Cache, HttpRuntime.Cache, and IIS Recycles

By
Recently I chimed in on a newsgroup thread to an OP (Original Poster) who was questioning why he was losing Cache items. This individual would load a dataset from the Cache object into a local object to use to perform processing. He had been using httpcontext.current.cache and noticed that sometimes he was not able to get the dataset out of the cache. He tried switching to HttpRuntime.Cache and it seemed to help. The OP claimed that the application is under heavy hits, and once or twice every month he would see this error. He wanted to know why does the HttpContext.Current.Cache call work sometimes, while some other times does not. A couple of posters replied, one of whom is a respected MVP who usually makes very astute, high-quality posts. He posted," The cache is only valid during the life of the request. how is you[sic] code using the cache?" Somebody else (also pretty astute, usually) responded, "Cache is valid during lifetime of application not request.....". W...
Read more

FIX: Requested Registry Access is not allowed (Visual Studio 2008)

By
Symptom: in Visual Studio 2008, you attempt to add a new WebContentForm and associate it with a MasterPage. You receive an error dialog "Requested Reqistry Access is not allowed". Don't ask me what caused this; I'm guessing that the registry keys involved had their access denied due to removal of a previous version of Visual Studio, leaving the new guy (Visual Studio 2008) in the lurch. Here's the fix: Download "subinacl" here . This is a command-line tool that enables administrators to obtain security information about files, registry keys, and services, and transfer this information from user to user, from local or global group to group, and from domain to domain. After installing subinacl.exe (it will be in the C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools folder.), drop to a command prompt and run the following batch file, which you have saved in the same folder with the filename "FIX.bat": subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudi...
Read more