Last year my corporate whitelist didn’t include a local site I needed to do my work. I don’t really expect HQ to know about every local database, but I needed it anyway. So I asked my manager, who probably couldn’t modify the whitelist, and he promised to send a request “up the chain of command.”
Naturally, nothing ever happened. But they prevented me from playing Farmville, so that’s a big plus.
I don’t do much web development…but when I do, I use jquery. Seriously, that’s a well-known tool, how or why would they block it? Ah, checked the linked site:
Update 5:30pm Our enquiry with Sky has elicited a response "“JQuery was temporary blocked this morning having been misclassified. Our review process kicked in shortly afterwards and the site was unblocked just over an hour later."But hey, no biggie, right? I'm afraid this is where my trollishness takes over, at least in terms of dealing with Corporations. If they have an outage for undisclosed reasons, or reasons I don't find sufficient, they get a bill of some sort. It may not be a bill for much, and nobody has ever paid up (although I've gotten some good responses here and there in return), but I figure the first moment I miss a payment or otherwise don't meet their requirements they're sure to bill me. Quid pro quo.
A couple of jobs back I was working on the travel insurance section of a large uk supermarkets website. Once any updates were made we had to send one guy home to check all was well on the live site as the company blocked the clients site.
It was company policy that the site was blocked and this couldn’t be changed as it would lead to “increased time wasting”. My resignation speech for that jobs was and I quote “FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU ALL”
You know that the real reason you wanted to have it unblocked was so you could waste time by looking at groceries.
Looks like they blocked jquery’s site so if you used a local copy for your app, it would have been ok. I’ve seen tons of pros and cons to using jquery from a CDN version versus having a local copy but looks like this tilts things a little in favor of local copy.
I left two jobs right around the time they started filtering internet access. I didn’t leave because of that, but it is one of those policies that seems to come hand in hand with lots of other foot shooting policies. Now I see it as a red flag that some management drone doesn’t have enough to do and is looking for something that can be claimed as a business success during their performance review.
… carried by someone walking down the Information Superhighway ahead of you?
These bananas, just look at them.
I do computer and network security work. Our company firewall blocks access to many “hacking” and “malware” sites. And good for them, and when I’m actually trying to download malware I use the lab network, but blocking “hacking” sites is sometimes annoying, because too many good tool sites get classified as that.
I was at Oxford at the same time as Cameron, Rees-Mogg and the rest.
It is kind of interesting watching the gang of people you wouldn’t really trust to run an event without some major screw up attempt to run the country.
Corporate blacklist? Tether your phone. Geo-blocked content? Free VPNs.
My theory on corporate blacklists for users who understand computers: They’re gonna waste more company time than they save, since competent users see problems as challenges, not stumbling blocks.
The IT doods thought they were smart to block any proxy-offering site, so I just set up my own URL-obscuring proxy on a domain that doesn’t seem suspicious.
Previous office blocked bittorrent ports… so I found a plugin that worked over http ports.
All these things being said: ALWAYS befriend the IT guys: they get the final say on everything.
One of the major clients for my company is sports teams, when they initiated filtering a decade ago they blocked sports news. When I saw that I laughed and gave it an hour. Sure enough, sports sites access opened up after a major reaming.
I don’t understand why anyone would rely on software hosted from a site they don’t control. Single point of failure, ability to run arbitrary code on your site, ugh.
I see minimal bandwidth savings and perhaps faster security patches but with huge risks.
And that, my friend, is corruption. The more restrictive your corporate policies, the more you are inviting corruption into your corporate culture.
The recommended practice now seems to be to load from a CDN and if that fails, load a local copy. Only takes one extra line of JS.
With so many low level sysadmins involved in setting up these filters, I expect to see more sabots landing in the gears of the machines. But I fear the punters will not get annoyed enough to all turn off ISP-side “malware” filtering.
That’s a rather dramatic assessment of the situation… Turning a blind eye to harmless shenanigans or giving me a cat6 cable for my xbox is hardly corruption.
From the point of view of corporate procedures, technically, it is. It’s not a crime and it’s nothing compared to serious corruption, of course.
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