At work (a large municipal government), the IT department has implemented WebSense, a Web content filtering package.
If you visit a site that isn’t considered work-related, you’re greeted with a page from the employer’s acceptable Internet use policy. You have three options; note the page in a log and visit later, surf on to the site despite the policy (if it’s lunch, after-hours or it really is work-related), or go back to the last page.
Porn and hate sites only permit two options; note the page in a log, or go back; you can’t go forward. Oh … there’s one other site that’s completely blocked, too. The Straight Dope.
Computer related Web sites? Not filtered. Sites of interest to IT professionals, like Slashdot, Ars Technica, or any anime or Star Trek-related site? Not filtered. Sports Illustrated? Well, kinda’ blocked, but you can surf on through if you really want. Straight Dope? BZZT! BZZT! BZZT! BZZT!
Anyone else work someplace where the SDMB is filtered, while other time-wasters are unfiltered?
Fortunately not yet but Websense is a thorn in my side too. I cannot order gunsmithing supplies because Brownell’s is a “weapons” site as it a safes. Aside from the obvious categories “political activism” is also prohibited.
The blocker at my old job filtered all kinds of sites. It did not, however, filter Wikipedia - a collaborative encyclopedia-writing site - which I consequently spent hours on.
WebSense also filters the Church of the SubGenius’ wonderful site, much to my dismay when I was in high school. Somebody try www.chick.com to see whether they treat all religions equally. (They very well could filter that too; I dunno)
Whatever it is that’s what the Irish Civil Service run. A friend of mine has exactly the same problem. I mail him a good article every now adn then just to keep him going.
We have WebSense at my Federal government office. Obviously it can be tweaked to be sensitive to different things, because here it doesn’t block the boards, or anything else I feel I ought to be able to get to. I can’t get to sites with high sexual content, but OTOH, I can access sites with tasteful partial nudity. (IIRC, hate sites and the like are also blocked, but I don’t tend to go thataway.) I think they’ve done a good job.
I’m government as well, but I’ve only ever had a problem with the boards once. Just one day it wouldn’t let me on with the little “WARNING!” and I almost shit, but it let me on the next day.
I’m carefull with what I look at at work, but we have fairly free reign because we often have to look up some unusual stuff.
I can get here from work OK, but a lot of strange things are blocked. Just standard sites. I never try for porn from work though, Ms UnwrittenNocturne and I d/load that from home
Content filtering packages are usually tweaked. For those of you who’ve had access blocked, isn’t it more likely that your employers want to restrict all potentially non-work-related surfing, rather than just porn and other “obviously bad” websites? I would certainly understand if employers wanted to crack down on the SDMB; for the vast majority of us, how is it contributing to our work?
Maybe there’s a debate somewhere on the degree to which internet access for non-work reasons is a privilege or a right. I’d probably lean towards the former (with the odd reasonable exception like occasional email checking, online banking and so on).
The Straight Dope is blocked because it is a message board, and we think all such boards mean the pupils will a) waste a lot of time chatting and b) possibly give out personal details they shouldn’t.
Incidentally, because the Randi Foundation has a front page of news, Websense allows access to the board there.
Our Websense also blocks all chess sites, because they are ‘games’.
The SDMB is not blocked, but Yahoo! gets it sometimes. Personals sites get blocked. I can do a Google image search on people and end up with porn thumbnails (unintentionally–I do the occasional search on celebrities mentioned here to see what all the ruckus is about), but I haven’t tried clicking on them to go to the actual page…
A lot of web pages for the Society for Creative Anachronism get blocked because they either list contacts for people named Master or Mistress, or because they have images for the date of the society in roman numbers; given that we’re in our fourth decade, they all start with XXX…
Etisalat/Emirates Internet shite national telco here fortunately doesn’t block SDMB (if it did, I could access it from the Free Zones anyway, where there’s no proxy) but it does do keyword blocking in the URL.
This is only a problem if you do a search, eg for +breast +cancer, when your results will contain something like +higlight=breast,+highlight=cancer in the URL, and it will be blocked. I found that modifying the URL (by deleting all the highlight and other info after the actual thread number) did the trick.
Why is it, then, that non-work related anime, computer modding, Monty Python, gaming,and SF related Web sites aren’t blocked? It’s interesting that those categories are interests that have a disproportionately large following among IT professionals. Hmmmmm …
