Today, I received an e-mail forward from a colleague in the same industry, who had added “Larry - thought you might appreciate this - seems like your sense of humour” at the top.
The forwarded message:
Elapsed time since I written the above message and sent it to all employees: six hours. 
(Yeah, it is a pretty insular industry, but still… )
I assume your friend has already had to block web access except for an approved list of business-related sites. If the Internet has proven anything, it’s that people cannot police themselves.
I would tend to agree, but management is very keen to adopt a posture as a fun, hip* environment to work in - and they’re doing a pretty good job of it. That means I get to be the officious prick who snoops on people and comes down on them when they’re being stupid – lucky me.
Actually, of a company of ~50 people, it’s really just 3 (or at most 4) who are consistently abusive, and seem to feel that they’re entitled to stream music at their desk and that I’m just being a big old meanie. I can show them what we pay for bandwidth and explain what it would cost the company every everyone did that, and they shrug and say “Well, it’s not everyone - so it’s not that big a deal, is it?” 
I would really love it if they could just be sensible about it, because I’d like to believe that I work with people who are both reasonable and intelligent. I’ve tried to imply that if they don’t straighten up, the entire company is going to become a no-fun zone and everybody is going to know exactly who to blame.
Realistically, I’m just going to set up a proxy server anyway, and configure it so that the bandwidth hogs are pretty much locked down but it’s business as usual for everyone else. It will be worthwhile just for caching and for traffic shaping to give priority to RDP so our remote users have a better experience. Ideally, I’d like to set a cap for these users that is close to the average. After they burn through that, then the blacklists would kick in for them.
Seriously, the only time we really want an URL BLOCKED! window to pop up would be for spyware. We really have more than enough bandwidth leave it wide open for that vast majority of people, and if there’s the occasional thing that you absolutely have to see (like, say, the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic / Sh:t F*ck Stack mash-up, we want people to be able to do that. It’s just those few that are sucking down 400MB+ a day on a regular basis that are giving us grief.
*Relatively hip, that is - not indie record store hip, but… you know… real estate management office hip.
Man, It would suck to work in a place where you couldn’t even stream audio to your desktop.
I can’t tell if that’s meant to be ironic or not, so pardon the woosh, if that’s appropriate.
The last time I did a detailed traffic analysis, about 20% of our traffic appeared to be work-related. The problem we have with abuse of streaming media is that our fat pipe gets saturated and the people we have working remotely (or the couple employees we have in the office that are hitting a database on our remote-hosted webserver all day) find that life starts to suck real hard.
In a lot of ways it’s great that the internet is wide-open, but the people who are abusive are mind-boggling abusive. (I remember a few years back answering a support call for an admin who complained that her desktop wouldn’t lock-on-idle when she went to lunch if she left internet radio streaming, and this bothered her because she didn’t want people snooping through her e-mail.)
Once you have a certain number of employees, you can pretty much count on the internet access being strictly curtailed. Entertainment website? Forget it, slacker! That sucks.
Tragedy of the Commons - there is nothing new here.
But I like the way your own email got cycled round back to you. You are on your way to being a meme. 
(as opposed to being mean).
Si
Is paying for bandwidth by the byte standard for large-scale connections? I’ve only paid for personal/home connections but the protocol has always been to pay for a certain transfer rate and get unlimited bandwidth, i.e. as much as I can suck down @ 20 Mbps. I guess I just assumed if I was shelling out for an OC-12 (or whatever) that it would work by the same principle.
Why not just make it where the remote connections have priority?
Blocking sites has never seemed like the optimal solution to me. If the above didn’t work, I’d just throttle bandwidth. They can still watch what they want to watch, if they wait for it to buffer, if it’s all that important.
All blocking websites does is encourage people to find a way around the blocks. And there almost always is one, unless the Internet is locked to only specific sites–which makes it pretty much unusable even for legitimate use.
And, yeah, I wouldn’t expect people to listen at all. Not because they are mean or selfish, but because so many people have a complete knowledge gap, and can’t fathom that what they are doing hurts, even if you spell it out. I mean, look at your message: you apparently got sent it from someone who thought it was a joke.
Your ISP would probably send you a nastygram if you did. ISPs work on a per user average bandwidth, and it isn’t the 20Mbps that you pay for. They don’t have that much bandwidth available. That is why they throttle traffic on high bandwidth usage like bittorrent, and sometimes on excessive bandwidth users during business hours.
Si