February 17, 2004

WebSense

As is bound to be the case when morale is low at a company, people end up dreading reading the all-company email announcements. These typically get "published" by HR, but could originally come from anyone who has an official message for everyone. These historically cover things that affect everyone, like:

  • reminders of the computer usage policies
  • computer servers expected to be down
  • people (like the president) leaving the company (these are never sent until the first morning without said person)
  • raises being frozen until next year
  • layoff announcements

There have been many that I can't think of examples of right now, but they're almost never upbeat or cheerful. They're vague in details, and usually leave people asking more question of each other than they had before the email. The one paragraph email after the president left particularly set the rumor mill aflame.

This one came from the IT manager personally:

Next week, Information Technology will implement a new internet monitoring and blocking tool called WebSense. This tool will prevent access to certain web pages based on the content of those pages. The type of content being blocked is prescribed to us by (parent company), and should not impact our user community. The types of content we will be blocking will be adult, nudity, sex, abused drugs, MP3's, gambling, games, web chat, racism and hate, to name just a few, and all are considered to be outside the scope of what we, as employees of (company) would need to access in the course of conducting our day to day business.

Additionally, all internet use, both actual and attempted, is recorded and categorized in the system by time, user id and machine name.

If you attempt to go to a web site that is being blocked by WebSense, you will receive a message page stating "Access to this web page is restricted at this time." This page also describes how to report a web site that is being blocked inappropriately so it can be removed from the block list.

Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.


I didn't hear any grumbling or confusion after this one. That means that either nobody cares, because they never ever do personal browsing at the office (possible, most of the people around me have internet at home anyway), or the possibly more likely option that they just didn't read it. Quick scan over the content and, "Whatever..."

Posted by fictionman at February 17, 2004 06:56 AM
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