[Vivienne]

Following on from a small discussion in the General section, I would like to know how closely monitored you are at work?

We have "hot zones/spots", which mainly target the Wards, monitoring internet access. This was because one of the nurses, it seems, had been on the internet for hours on end planning holidays!!!

[Bonanzoid]

Pfft, work. Students ftw.

[Vivienne]

??

[Bonanzoid]

I mean, being a student, there's not much monitoring. I can't imagine many people try to get there porn on at uni/college.

[Console]

Unfortunately for most IT admins I've worked with, I know more than they do about network security, and can usually bypass any measures they take to block certain sites and record usage. This usually just involves creating an encrypted tunnel (via ssh) to my home computer and accessing everything through there; completely unlogable, unfiltered internet access.

[Vivienne]

hmmm... you're a useful individual indeed.

[Bonanzoid]

Unfortunately for most IT admins I've worked with, I know more than they do about network security, and can usually bypass any measures they take to block certain sites and record usage. This usually just involves creating an encrypted tunnel (via ssh) to my home computer and accessing everything through there; completely unlogable, unfiltered internet access.

Sounds clever, and probably too complicated for many, myself included.

hmmm... you're a useful individual indeed.

Thanks for that.

[MK Chris]

ftw.

What's FTW? (By the way, abbreviations are discouraged here..)

We used to ban emails containing profanities, but since we switched to Exchange, which doesn't natively support that, we have had to stop doing that. We also banned Facebook, MySpace and Youtube (we didn't want to do it, but people started taking the piss), but using IEs content filter (which is shit) was a nightmare and important other sites also got blocked. We have looked at internet restriction software, but nothing really seems to fit the bill for our network conditions.

We are also looking at software to restrict use of USB sticks.

[Console]

FTW = For the win (bad English, I know).

[Bonanzoid]

Yeah, I hate all that talk, so I tend to use it as a pisstake. If that kind of abbreviation is banned here, then it's all good.

[Zoot]

Unfortunately for most IT admins I've worked with, I know more than they do about network security, and can usually bypass any measures they take to block certain sites and record usage. This usually just involves creating an encrypted tunnel (via ssh) to my home computer and accessing everything through there; completely unlogable, unfiltered internet access.

I too can bypass any restrictions they have here at work, not by anything as fancy as you, but the IT guy here happens to be one of my best mates... I spend alot of my time on here or on gaming websites, but then he does the same (on gaming sites that is) and he's in charge of web access.

[Console]

We are also looking at software to restrict use of USB sticks.

Do you want to block them completely, or just who can access them and when? If you want them blocked completely, you may be able to disable the USB ports through the BIOS, which with password access enabled on the BIOS, will stop most people from using them. Failing that, if you're serious about stopping people using them altogether, just disconnect the ports from the motherboard.

[Bonanzoid]

I used to be able to bypass the school filters using a command prompt, but it wouldn't work all the time. Sometimes if you posted the URL into the Google Translate Page function it'd bypass it too.

[Console]

Sometimes if you posted the URL into the Google Translate Page function it'd bypass it too.

We used to do that too, although it was with Altavista's Bablefish translator, as Google's translator wasn't built at the time. Using the IP address instead on the domain-name used to get around a lot of domain-name only blockers.

[Bonanzoid]

Yeah, that's how the command prompt thing worked, you'd /ping the domain name, and then copy paste the IP into the URL bar. We thought we were the bollocks when we did that.

[Console]

I've got a web-proxy script that I wrote when I was still in school on my site still; with that, we could bypass any filters that our school and The Grid (or whatever the network thing our school used was called) put in our way.

We had numerous tools, like the command prompt and regedit, removed from our systems at school, but they had the XP stored on the harddrive for automatic recoveries and installations and they forgot to remove the copies from there; ah, the memories.

[Bonanzoid]

Nice yeah. Our uni computers don't allow command prompts, it probably became a bit too common.

I presume you work in IT?

[Console]

I presume you work in IT?

For now; a sort of jack-of-all-IT-based-trades.

[MK Chris]

We are also looking at software to restrict use of USB sticks.

Do you want to block them completely, or just who can access them and when? If you want them blocked completely, you may be able to disable the USB ports through the BIOS, which with password access enabled on the BIOS, will stop most people from using them. Failing that, if you're serious about stopping people using them altogether, just disconnect the ports from the motherboard.

Yeah, we considered this disabling through the BIOS (the BIOS is always password-protected anyway), but it would be too restrictive and a pain in the arse to re-enable for anything specific we needed to do and then disable again. We need to restrict it's use to either certain usernames or certain computer names.

[Vivienne]

For now; a sort of jack-of-all-IT-based-trades.

So, JACK OF ALL. master of NONE! heh heg [Fixed - Again!]

[MK Chris]

Viv, learn to quote. There's a button (in numerous places), you can use it!

[Vivienne]

Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. it's complex.

[MK Chris]

It only doesn't work if you mess it up. It's not complex.

[Bonanzoid]

It only doesn't work if you decide to type in the middle of the square brackets where it says 'quote'.

[Vivienne]

I'm a bonco at logical tasks.