So, it's happened again.
We've all been there; for whatever reason companies decide that censorship and limitation is a good thing for their workers. I know all the excuses....internet usage is too high, somebody complained about so-and-so looking at site X, our bandwith usage is too high, etc.
There's more than enough companies out there that offer offices a "web solution" that ends up blocking everything. I've never been able to figure out how Websense categorizes things...one of my podcasts (albeit a religious one) has a companion website that I'd occasionally visit, but they're now categorized as "Non-Traditional and Occult" and are blocked. Our humble abode is considered a social site, and those are of course eliminated.
Fortunately, the major news sites are allowed - I can still get at the BBC, places like the local news channels, and of course Fox News. (I checked.) Curiously though, because a lot of the radio stations have streams, they all seem to be blocked. (Which eliminates WBZ as a news source now.)
It's been my experience that blocking the internet is counter-productive. Especially if it was had before, people will spend more time trying to circumvent the blockage than actually working, but that wasn't my decision to make.
But I recently upgraded to one of those smartphone thingies - I can still get at everything I could before, only with a different tool. We've also been informed (by our own manager, no less) that we can all tap into the wi-fi network at the office so we don't use up our data plans; nothing is blocked through that...yet.
Curiously enough, it's been very busy these past two weeks - one process has blown up, and we've been scrambling to fix things and get through the backlog that built up, and then we're testing for a new project going live in a few weeks. Our IT boys thought it would be a good time to refresh the test database, so we're desperately skimming through data before it's wiped out.
But you know, skimming by the blog for a few minutes, or checking out a headline or two during the business day is a bad thing now.