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Has anyone on HN actually worked for a company that filters internet traffic? Would anyone on HN work at a company that filters http? I've always thought that

by imack 17y ago

Has anyone on HN actually worked for a company that filters internet traffic? Would anyone on HN work at a company that filters http? I've always thought that if a company could effectively block internet traffic with a filter on a proxy then the problem wasn't that employees were wasting time surfing; the problem was that they were hiring employees incapable of getting around it.

windsurfer 17y ago
The government filters http. People generally assume that it's okay to slack off as long as you get your assigned work completed.
tezza 17y ago
Yep. Financial Services in London filter/block a lot. They also disable DNS lookups, and so only browser lookups and specially coded wget have resolution capability. No: Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Betfair, Twitter, Facebook
- ig1 17y ago
  It's generally done for compliance reasons, banks are covered by fairly strict regulations which require communication audit logs. Similarly most personal brokerage websites and gambling websites are blocked to prevent insider trading, obviously it's not going to stop someone who's determined to break the law, but banks have to be able to show they've taken reasonable measures to prevent it.
jrockway 17y ago
I work somewhere that does this. The reason is not to prevent employees from wasting time; it's to prevent someone from unintentionally putting internal data in Google Docs or something like that. The filters are stupid, though, and only cover the very mainstream. Digg and Reddit are blocked, but Slashdot, Hacker News, and Metafilter aren't. Plenty Of Fish is blocked, but OKCupid isn't. Even sillier, http://voice.google.com/ http://voice.google.com/ is blocked (because it's "voice over IP", which it's not) but http://google.com/voice/ http://google.com/voice/, the actual URL, isn't. Etc., etc. It's really stupid, but it's essentially government-mandated. In exchange for this, though, nobody dictates what technology I use to do my work, I can show up at 2 in the afternoon and nobody cares, and I get a lot of money. (The company I worked at before didn't block any websites, but the work was boring, my manager micro-managed every library decision, and I got almost no money. Trade-offs.)

by imack 17y ago

windsurfer 17y ago

The government filters http. People generally assume that it's okay to slack off as long as you get your assigned work completed.

tezza 17y ago

Yep. Financial Services in London filter/block a lot. They also disable DNS lookups, and so only browser lookups and specially coded wget have resolution capability. No: Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Betfair, Twitter, Facebook

ig1 17y ago
It's generally done for compliance reasons, banks are covered by fairly strict regulations which require communication audit logs. Similarly most personal brokerage websites and gambling websites are blocked to prevent insider trading, obviously it's not going to stop someone who's determined to break the law, but banks have to be able to show they've taken reasonable measures to prevent it.

jrockway 17y ago

I work somewhere that does this. The reason is not to prevent employees from wasting time; it's to prevent someone from unintentionally putting internal data in Google Docs or something like that. The filters are stupid, though, and only cover the very mainstream. Digg and Reddit are blocked, but Slashdot, Hacker News, and Metafilter aren't. Plenty Of Fish is blocked, but OKCupid isn't. Even sillier, http://voice.google.com/ http://voice.google.com/ is blocked (because it's "voice over IP", which it's not) but http://google.com/voice/ http://google.com/voice/, the actual URL, isn't. Etc., etc. It's really stupid, but it's essentially government-mandated. In exchange for this, though, nobody dictates what technology I use to do my work, I can show up at 2 in the afternoon and nobody cares, and I get a lot of money. (The company I worked at before didn't block any websites, but the work was boring, my manager micro-managed every library decision, and I got almost no money. Trade-offs.)