FOFC is about to lose a bunch of daytime posters

[JeeberD]

Employees to be billed for personal Net use?

Employees who surf the Net at work could receive a bill each month for the cost of borrowed bandwidth and wasted time if Australia-based Exinda Networks' URL- and bandwidth-monitoring system takes off.

Exinda Networks says it's developed a system that allows a company to monitor exactly which Web sites are visited by each employee and how much bandwidth has been used--in terms of a cash loss to the employer.

Con Nikolouzakis, director of Exinda Networks, said the URL- and bandwidth-monitoring system was designed to ensure that employees are held responsible for the cost of misused bandwidth and time.

"If you use your office computer for Internet banking and booking theater tickets, you're fine. If you choose to use it to download illegal software, research personal interests or other non-business uses, then you could be issued with a 'please explain' and a bill for the costs of the bandwidth and time you wasted," Nikolouzakis said.

According to Nikolouzakis, access to certain sites can be blocked, and bandwidth abusers can have their bandwidth throttled, which would significantly slow that individual's access to the undesirable Web site. Additionally, the employee could be presented with a bill.

"Theoretically, individual employees could be charged a fee for non-business-related Internet usage on a monthly basis, if an employer wanted to get tough on staff abusing their Web access but didn't want to block them altogether," Nikolouzakis said.

However, not everyone agrees that charging employees for personal bandwidth is a good idea.

James Turner, industry analyst for security and services at Frost & Sullivan, said that charging employees for personal bandwidth usage would stir up a hornet's nest because bandwidth is relatively cheap and employees get a "morale boost" from having some freedom to surf at work.

"Most employees sign an acceptable-Internet-usage policy when they join a new company," Turner said. "After that, there is a level of trust between employer and employee. Companies like Computer Associates already have software that can measure an individual's bandwidth usage, so the technology isn't new, and across the market there is not a huge demand."

However, Turner did agree that there is a need for employers to spot the employees that regularly abuse the system.

"The tiny minority of bandwidth abusers are most likely downloading illegal material (such as pirated movies)," Turner said, "and their employers need to be able to detect and stop this for antipiracy reasons. No company wants to be involved in trafficking stolen goods, and storing illegal digital material is an extension of this."

Munir Kotadia of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.

[Danny]

Well that's a misleading headline. As the article stated, there is already software out there that does this. The article also states that the demand for such software is not high. All this is a report for a new piece of software, not some groundbreaking industry change.

[Alan T]

This ability has been out there for a while. I know perfectly well which employees in my company visit sites like playboy.com regularly. I even know which employees like sending nude pictures of themselves to people outside of the company. My guess is the companys who really want to crack down on employee websurfing from work have already. My company's policy has always been one of leanancy. We watch for viruses/worms/trojans or activity that look like that and we leave employee productivity issues up to their managers. Do they get their job done or no?

[sovereignstar]

Originally Posted by Alan T

I even know which employees like sending nude pictures of themselves to people outside of the company.

[Leonidas]

Originally Posted by Alan T

This ability has been out there for a while. I know perfectly well which employees in my company visit sites like playboy.com regularly. I even know which employees like sending nude pictures of themselves to people outside of the company. My guess is the companys who really want to crack down on employee websurfing from work have already. My company's policy has always been one of leanancy. We watch for viruses/worms/trojans or activity that look like that and we leave employee productivity issues up to their managers. Do they get their job done or no?

So you're the one who outed Hornsmaniac

[gottimd]

Originally Posted by Alan T

Do they get their job done or no?

Good point. I surf all day, and do MP league stuff most of the time. But when it comes down to it, I do this when I have already completed my work. I have pretty much all the financials automated, so it takes very little time to do what I need to do on a daily basis. If my bosses ask me to do something, I do it for them first, I don't tell them, "Excuse me, can't you see I am working on my Front Office Football Multiplayer League Site, I will get to you later." It comes down to doing your job first. There are web monitors and firewalls that prevent the "naughty" things and the viruses, there is no need to start billing people for surfing unless they just go to work and do nothing but that and bottleneck everything.

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by Leonidas

So you're the one who outed Hornsmaniac

Well I don't work at Dell..

But back in the mid-90s when I worked for Sprint, we had an issue where we had problems with database backups running slowly for certain lan segments. This went on long enough where we decided to look into it further. I found out that there was a group of 4 - 5 guys who would stay late after work 3 or 4 nights a week for some hot hot quake (or some multiplayer shoot em up game) action on the callcenter LAN. We had a different policy at Sprint then my current job, so we had to report what the cause of the "outage" was. I believe I was told all 4 of them were fired from their jobs.

I also had a case where we were troubleshooting poor connectivity for a group of users that was directly related to one of them downloading much much porn to his work computer. He was let go too.


Now a days, my current company doesn't have those type of policies, so I just get to find out what the good porn sites are so I can send the URL links to Schmidty.

[Radii]

You know I goof off a fair amount at work on the internet(but I always get my work done on time, and our policy appears to be the same as Alan T's current company...), and I can honestly say i've never even thought for a single second, "man, I want to go look at some porn on company time right about now" ... hell, I read TMQ's printable version of his column so I don't have cheerleaders on my screen in my cube, and I just can't imagine an office environment where I'd do otherwise.

[Radii]

dola,

I ssh into a linux box to IRC. Nothing illegal at all but a lot of stupid immature stuff and coarse language and unsavory topics for work, etc. I have always understood that to be reasonably secure, but how secure is it in terms of IT or whoever having access to whatever i'm doing there? How different/difficult is that to track compared to web access and IMs, both of which I understand are very easy to track.

[Tekneek]

Bastards. People should only develop programs that make our lives better. If you're going to develop this for the company, then develop the client that evades detection for the rest of us.

[Alan T]

I am assuming your linux box is at home or somewhere else non-work? Then the only traffic your administrators would be seeing would be your SSH traffic. There are ways to break the SSH encryption, but the time and effort to do so is crazy for just general network monitoring. Most likely they would see an encrypted tcp communication on tcp port 22 from your machine to somewhere offsite. The only flags that might raise is if your job is one that would not require such a connection to do work, what might you be doing through it. (ie: you can tunnel all kinds of stuff through an SSH tunnel if you so choose. You can use it almost similar to a vpn in some ways at times on a host to host basis)

[Tekneek]

Originally Posted by Alan T

You can use it almost similar to a vpn in some ways at times on a host to host basis)

Forwarding X through it can be useful. With a high-speed connection, it can be really cool.

[CHEMICAL SOLDIER]

Damn at cats! Always stepping on us.

[finkenst]

Originally Posted by Tekneek

Forwarding X through it can be useful. With a high-speed connection, it can be really cool.

yes... yes, it is.

Also, you can do stuff like forward your IMs and http traffic through ssh.

or, heck, tunnel vnc through it as well...

[Tekneek]

Originally Posted by finkenst

yes... yes, it is.

Also, you can do stuff like forward your IMs and http traffic through ssh.

or, heck, tunnel vnc through it as well...

All things I used to do on a regular basis...

[finkenst]

Originally Posted by Tekneek

All things I used to do on a regular basis...

all things i do occasionally but just don't have the time to do anymore.