How dare they block the SDMB as a “worthless” site!
I understand and reluctantly accept the need for the hospital to use blocking software on their servers to prevent the dim-witted among the staff from accessing those few sites (such as porn sites) which could potentially land the hospital in legal trouble. But I do not understand the need to block innocuous sites such as the Straight Dope. If they feel that certain people are making inapproprate use of the hospital’s internet access, isn’t that better dealt with by telling the offending employees to knock it off? What are they going to block next - the New York Times website because people also enjoy looking at that while they drink their coffee in the morning?
Damn. They’ve just insured I’ll be counting every minute of the workday until 5PM, and bolting out the door every day the first chance I get. Thanks, IT Department, for making my work environment a little drearier. Even though my office lacks a real window, the internet used to provide a virtual one. My occasional web-surfing breaks made the day pass little more quickly; it hurts to have that web-window suddenly slammed shut for no good reason.
Well, my hospital blocks SD, too, but once I was able to get around it by clicking on the Chicago Reader site and fooling around in there. I don’t know why it worked or if it still does, though.
This hospital has weird blocking software. I can get to the SDMB and actual job-related sites (do you use Immunoquery, artemis?), but some totally innocuous ones are blocked for no apparent reason.
On the other hand I’ve heard of people accidentally accessing really lurid sites. At least they claim it’s accidental.
Same thing here. No problem accessing SDMB, LJ, all the mainstream news and sports sites (not that I care about sports), and all sorts of useless crap. But they have blocked, of all things, NPR, Radio Free Europe, and at one point even part of the website of one of our major clients (I had a hissy fit to IT over that one; I needed some publicly available financial info for our client, a major wireless telecom company, and I needed it NOW. Maybe the filter thought SEC was a misspelled abbreviation for sex?)
Then again, it’s hard to tell sometimes what the filter is blocking. I frequently need to do Google searches to find the most random info (usually scientific/tech stuff), and of course if I click on a link to a search result and it’s blocked, I’ll have no way of knowing what it was. Most of the search results look reasonably legit from the brief summaries, or I wouldn’t have bothered clicking on them. So who knows what’s actually being blocked?
Hey, I’m sure there are people here who have accidentally clicked on porn and other work-inappropriate links. Another one of our clients is a major pharmaceutical company, and they are developing new drugs for erectile dysfunction. This is why I agree that either they should find some software that does a better job of distinguishing porn from scientific info, or just leave people the hell alone unless there’s a productivity or liability issue.
I work for a private company, but I work in the client’s office (I’m field staff), using the client’s servers and equipment. The client is a huge public employer.
I’ve noticed that I can get into Mormon web sites, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, Jewish, Budddhist, Hindu, Muslim… every single religious web site except the one for MY religion.
So sue me, there was a Samhain ritual (pagan/wiccan) that I wanted to attend and couldn’t get into the web site to find out what time it was scheduled to start. According to this public employer, MY local religious community’s web site was deemed “inappropriate.”
Personally I think it’s discrimination. If you’re going to allow access to religious web sites, then you shouldn’t cherry-pick which religions you think are appropriate. I’ve considered suing, but I really shouldn’t be surfing on the web at work at all.
Our hospital’s blocking software doesn’t make any sense. Sometimes it will block something as innocuous as eBay; other times I can read Savage Love with impunity. (Others have had no trouble at all with actual hard-core porn.)
I do wish our hospital’s IT department would get off its collective ass and fix the computer in the emergency room MD’s office that keeps locking up on me. I used to leave them a message every time I had to reboot it, but on a busy night, that can be up to six or seven times. (It’s usually evening or night when I’m using it.) It still isn’t fixed. One of these days I’m just going to rip the damn thing out of the wall and leave it in front of their door.
I have the same trouble at school. Obviously a school is a lot different to a hospital but I find it almost appalling that I could access it freely for a year then all of a sudden. Bam! I’m locked out. There wasn’t even any reasoning behind it. They have the cheek to tell us that we should be broadening our horizons and then prevent me from doing just that!
Yes, I use Immunoquery and love it. I also use the CAP website a lot; we’re in the process of switching over to templates for major tumor diagnoses, but only have a few built into our hospital’s AP computer system so far, so we use the CAP checklists for the major organ systems we’ve not yet built templates for.
I’m almost tempted to bring the IT folks and the hospital administrators over and show them just how flawed their filters are (a quick jaunt over to Google groups and a tour of the Usenet groups in the alt.binaries heirarchy should do nicely), but heaven knows I don’t want them tightening down even more than they already have! But they should know that ultimately the problems they fear lie with users, and irresponsible people aren’t amenable to simple software fixes.
But that would be useful! How are they going to find the time to keep updating their web-blocking filters if they’re spending their time actually fixing broken things?
I think one of the major things that caused our hospital to go with blocking software was that we were hit hard by a computer virus a few months ago, so they don’t want people randomly surfing. Of course, if they REALLY want to improve security on the system in a meaningful way, they might want to ditch IE as the hospital system’s browser (or at least fit it with a pop-up blocker to keep the PCs from being hit by browser hijackers and malware popups), and undo their recent “improvement” to the email system - we were just switched from Eudora to Outlook Exchange.
