Re: Blocking social networking facilities
- From: Philip Herlihy <thiswillbounceback@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:37:28 +0100
f/fgeorge wrote:
On Tue, 22 Apr 2008 10:30:26 +0100, Philip Herlihy
<thiswillbounceback@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Phil Cartwright wrote:My 'company' has almost 30,000 users and we have similar problems.Philip Herlihy wrote:My advice was to appraise people's work based on what they achieved, and if they were pulling their weight,turn a blind eye to what else they might be doing at odd moments. However, this office has several young workers who seem unable to resist these facilities and despite discussion and eventually warnings continue to fall behind in their work. Your comment suggest you may be content to be a drone in an organisation too large to care, but this is a very small family business and it matters, not least to the people concerned who might end up losing their jobs if a solution isn't found.I've been asked to block access to a range of social networking websites like facebook, MySpace, bebo, etc, and also to prevent users running Windows Messenger, MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger.Stop being a net nazi? :)
I'm finding this hard! The firewall I'm using (Netgear FVS338) will block keywords but not URLs (so a mention of facebook on an otherwise respectable site will mean it's blocked). Otherwise I have to block individual IP addresses, and some of these sites have quite a few (according to nslookup, anyway). I suspect these IP addresses will be subject to change.
I've looked at using registry keys eg: DisallowRun in
HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Messenger\Client\
.. but I can't find a definitive account of this, and some of the PCs are running XP Home, which may make it difficult perhaps. Ideally, I'd want a scripted solution.
Time to ask for advice! Any suggestions?
Meanwhile, the Party knows where you live, and you can expect a visit very early one morning for your "re-education". This may involve extended travel, so have a toothbrush ready.
PH
There is almost one pc per worker, some have several pc's some have
none. But what we do is the same thing as you do but have also added
the ability to remote control desktops. That means they can also
record that users desktop remotely. In a couple of instances they have
done that and the user has changed their ways. In a couple of
instances the user was fired because of how little work they were
actually doing. It only took a few times before EVERYONE was aware of
what was possible, the old "big brother is watching" scenario and most
people now do what they were hired to do. In ALL cases the person was
reported, and warned, before the IT people setup the recording. One
person actually had a blog on his work computer and thought that it
was 'cool' to do that all day instead of work. He is gone! He actually
said "you can't fire me because it doesn't specifically say I can't
host a blog". As I said he was fired for doing non work related stuff
at work and the list of things prohibited at work was expanded to say
no blogging at work allowed. We also block all streaming websites as
they are found. Streaming, even radio sites, consumes a huge amount of
bandwidth and as such slows down the people trying to work. Skype is
another thing you may want to block. It loads wherever it can, no
amount of admin rights can stop it, and uses huge amounts of
bandwidth. We blocked the skype website itself and that seems to have
stopped it. We are also progressively blocking all the internet sex
sites as we find them. That seems to be another huge time waster for
some people.
It's just too easy to look as if you're working! We have RealVNC on most machines, but I don't think that has the capacity to record - interesting idea. In a similar vein I'm investigating the logging capabilities of the firewall - a smaller one (FVS114, rather underpowered) would log every site visited, whereas its big brother doesn't (obviously) do this. Even then, if we can block the distractions we may be able to steer people away from being in trouble in the first place.
Sounds like you have to invest a great deal of effort in this. :-(
Phil
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