You make no sense Websense!

The computers here at work have always had a low level internet filter attached to it. I couldn’t ever access Facebook or Myspace and YouTube would occassionally come in but I couldn’t actually view any videos from the site.
But the boards and LJ worked perfectly fine all the time.

Then Websense hit.

I’m not sure if we’ve always had it and suddenly the AI woke up and remembered “hey yeah I have more filtering capabilities!” or if this is a newfangled intratubes device craftily installed by IT, but either way it came on and it was here to stay. Kinda. Sorta.

It started showing up about six weeks ago on a Monday. I freaked. No LJ! No SDMB! (And as a funny aside, Fark works just fine but the Fark forums off the main page are off limits) Gah! What the hell do I do with my day? Then by Tuesday it was gone. I could access the boards again. Good the rest of the week.

Next week it hit again on Monday. At this point I had the theory that the protocols reset over the weekend and kicked Websense into gear, but that someone in IT manually disabled it by Tuesday. Or maye Websense is just FUBAR.

Soon enough though, the filter would last all week long. Again, kinda sorta. Like knowing the frequency modulation on the Enterprise’s shields, Websense went down for random 30 second increments. If you timed it right you could float into the “banned” webpages and, like speedy Gonzales on PCP, frantically right click open as many pages as possible before the window closed again.
But what the hell was causing this? A web filter is a web filter, right? It shouldn’t just “forget” that it was blocking a site, should it?

And now this week it’s a completely new set of rules. Apparently SDMB works just fine. No problem. But LJ is still verboten. WTF Websense? Make some sense of your own rules!

Or just die altogether. I really won’t miss you.

[sub]No! It can’t die! My husband would be out of a job![/sub]

Aww, man, I knew he was evil.

I hate Websense, too. It blocked all the forums I liked to read, blocked plain text, which is the last of your worries when you’re trying to limit bandwidth usage, and blocked even news.google.com, at a university.

We’ve got Websense at work and they tried to block forum/message boards for a while, but since a lot of our tech solutions come from looking up tech forums, they had to stop blocking them. So I’m posting this from work where I read the Dope a large portion of the day between calls, on lunch (like now) or while I’m waiting for people to do things.

One thing I noticed with a customer on the phone. I was helping her with a problem where she was trying to listen to a radio interview link and not getting any audio. When I clicked on the link it was websensed.

HOWEVER; The interesting thing I found was that about once every 8 times I clicked on it (and I tried about 60-70 times), I actually got the interview!

So Websense isn’t perfect. Keep trying the link!

I used to be the Websense admin at my old job and one of the flags for a closer look was someone hammering away at blocked sites. It was usually a good indication that someone was spending way too much time on the net even if they weren’t actually getting anywhere. Of course, then there were the people who tried porn site after porn site until they would get through to one that websense hadn’t yet categorized.

C’mon people, if a company is going to pay big bucks to run websense, chances are they’re going to be looking at the logs.

Thankfully I now work somewhere where we don’t have filtering and I don’t have to play NetCop.

They block sites at a university? Is this just for clerical/admin staff, or are these sites blocked on library and lab computers as well?

This was in student housing. Every section of the university ran things differently, but that’s the only one I know used Websense, because of how frequently it blocked things.

GAH! :mad: You tell Mr. scout to find another job Right Now. He’s way too nice a guy to work for the enemy!

Sorry, man. HIS job is the secure one right now. He needs to hang onto it for dear life!