"There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."
--Ed Crowly
If an employee is determined to access this content, he will find a way. If you
really want to stop him, you'll have his manager warn him and, if he ignores the
warning, fire him (with proper evidence, of course...logging software would be better
than filtering software in this case). If you show this to be the practice in your
company, others will stop or leave.
-----Original Message-----
From: Miss Yvette Seifert Hirth, CCP, CDP [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: January 10, 2000 12:59
To: List Server, Firewalls
Subject: Content Filtering
Hi everybody!
I would like to posit a question regarding content filtering. We have had
several employees use IRC, ICQ, etc. as well as rather disgusting porno-type
sites on company time. We'd like to prevent this.
It changes the office environment severly and disrupts productivity when
management is put in a position of cop/father and has to walk around
snooping over what one would expect to be "professional" shoulders checking
out what's on their terminal. The bottom-line is we'd like to trust people,
but sadly, we can't. Some commentary on corporate operations, huh. I'm
sure we're not the only site where this has occurred nor continues to occur.
A friend of mine told me that this is "a harbinger of a much more serious
problem", but he can't find office staff that don't have a tendency to
behave like this either! Seems like a sign of the times, I guess.
We've even gone so far as to consider DOS-based email and then deny people
the use of Mozilla, MS's Outlook Express, Netscrape, etc. We turned
thumbs-down on that, as once they get email, they can download any browser
they want, thanks to sites like "netbutler", etc.
What I'm asking is - does anyone have any experience with content filtering
software? I've seen these "screening" programs, and wonder what kind of
effectiveness they produce. Are they a bear to maintain? Are any sites
victims of "false-positive" testing (i.e., screened when they shouldn't have
been)? How many sites, percentage-wise, continue to slip through?
Is there something better, like softs that run on firewalls? The problem
with most of these screening programs is that they install on a user's PC,
which would imply, to me, that they could be disabled. Installing a
filtering mechanism on a firewall that's locked up with a password only a
handful of people know would seem to be more "indefeatable".
I'd really appreciate any experience anyone had; we're growing, and the
problem is getting worse!
-
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