Christian Conservative Christian "Independent"

I'm an evangelical Christian, member of the CPC, but presently & unjustly exiled to wander the political wilderness.
All opinions expressed here are solely my own.

Thursday, May 03, 2007

Facebook Blocked in Ontario Government Offices

Queen's Park has blocked all access to Facebook from Government of Ontario computers..."The province has quietly banned bureaucrats, political staffers and most MPPs from accessing the popular Facebook website from government computers.

To the surprise of thousands of Ontario government employees as well as Liberal aides, MPPs, and cabinet ministers, the 21 million-member social networking tool is now off limits."

Well, to be honest, I'm considering partially blocking it here at work... let's just say I've caught a couple of people on it during business hours. It may also be a "risk mitigation" move, to help prevent a leak that was sure to occur, before it occured. (you know, "Loose lips sink ships" and all)

h/t to Warren (May 3, 2007 posting)

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posted by Christian Conservative @ 9:52 a.m.  

5 Comments:

  • At Thu May 03, 02:16:00 p.m. EDT, Blogger Drew Costen said…

    It's generally a good thing to do some non-work related net surfing during work hours. It helps one clear their head and actually makes them better able to focus on the job.

    I really hope your job doesn't include tracking employee web surfing and blocking web sites. Even if it's in one's job description, somebody who would do this has absolutely no honour whatsoever. If your employer forces you to do this, the only way to regain honour is to either tell them no and accept the consequences or to quit on the spot.

     

  • At Thu May 03, 02:57:00 p.m. EDT, Blogger Christian Conservative said…

    "I really hope your job doesn't include tracking employee web surfing and blocking web sites. Even if it's in one's job description, somebody who would do this has absolutely no honour whatsoever. If your employer forces you to do this, the only way to regain honour is to either tell them no and accept the consequences or to quit on the spot."

    Are you kidding me Drew?

    Actually, ya, it is part of my job, and here's why: my employer has no issues with occasional web surfing, but has issues with 1) people who spend inappropriately long periods of time online when they should be working, 2) people playing online games during the night shift instead of working, 3) people doing anything that will get our organization sued, 4) or going to websites that get our PC's hijacked by SPAMMERS which then casues us major problems with e-mail because our firewall has been blacklisted... which happened last week, for the record... taking up two days of my time, and wasting the time of a department who were left without network access for two days, and intrrupted our overall business for about three days. (care to even try and calculate the wasted tax dollars there? From one idiot going to a website... still don't know who it was or where they went)

    My job is to ensure that our systems remain up and running, and to prevent system downtimes from occuring. With the prevelence of people online who are trying to hack my systems on a daily basis via brute force or by seruptiously programmed websites, you better believe that I'll go through logs and block stuff we deem necessary.

    I have no honour? Come on... I'm making sure you're tax dollars are spent wisely. We're not talking censorship here, we're talking network integrity. Please retract your statement.

     

  • At Thu May 03, 03:03:00 p.m. EDT, Blogger Christian Conservative said…

    And for the record, I haven't had a chance to monitor things to closely lately... I've been to busy. (not that it's a big issue to us) However, going through our records is necessary when issues arise in order to try and backtrack problems, be they technical or related to personel. Our firewall records helped me nail down two problems over the last two weeks... thank goodness for them. (of course, one of them just died on me... back to work I go)

     

  • At Thu May 03, 03:30:00 p.m. EDT, Blogger Drew Costen said…

    I was a little extreme there, I admit. :) As long as you don't block any sites (at least not any sites that don't harm the network), or get people in trouble for the odd web surfing, then it's not that bad. And yes, I do understand that logs have to be kept for the reasons you mentioned. I just get pissed off at the net admins who abuse their power or block sites arbitrarily so I went a little Klingon on you there. Sorry. :)

     

  • At Thu May 03, 03:42:00 p.m. EDT, Blogger Christian Conservative said…

    Thank you.

    Yes, going "a little Klingon" is a good way to describe it... I tried to look up a good Klingon reply for you, but I don't have time... I have a firewall to rebuild!

     

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