While we have corporate Internet gateways, the local office has its own (to assist in communication with a major client). Sometime in the last couple of days, they’ve turned on some port blocking and content filtering on that gateway, which is causing me problems.
So, okay, I can’t exactly ask to have YouTube access reinstated, and blocking some gaming sites is difficult to argue against with a straight face (at least not without putting a big target on said face). But one of the things apparently blocked is Yahoo Instant Messenger.
Now, we don’t have a formal IM standard in the around. There’s a nascent pilot project going on using internal Exchange servers, but that never got a lot of traction. There are a variety of concerns, but, surprisingly, the biggest is not that people will fritter away their time chatting with their SOs and buds, but that company-sponsored and -sanctioned IM tools could be considered subpoenable business records. So folks do it, but without any sort of formal approval or standard setup from IT or anything like that.
My department — including my boss and his — tend to use YIM as the IM client of choice (I prefer GTalk, but they didn’t consult me first). But now that I’m cut off, I can’t make use of it.
But that’s the lever I have — I’ve put in an inquiry about whether YIM is blocked, citing it as a legitimate (if not official) business purpose. That at least gives me the appearance of asking about such things without sounding like I’m grumpy because I can’t look at YouTube or stream audio from Amazon or stuff like that. And, in fact, it is a legitimate inquiry, and the thing causing me the most fits right now..
Stay tuned.
So digging a bit further …
1. The YIM stuff had nothing to do with the firewall. Or, rather, I just needed to tell YIM to use the “Normal with Firewall” (HTML) setting. Not sure why that changed, but it’s now working, huzzah.
2. The firewall blocking stuff was explicitly for streaming content, since during the recent Rockies games we took a major hit in local performance as everyone was recently streaming radio to their desks (ah, for the days of folks actually listening to the radio on, well, radio). That’s blocking streaming video, too (pushing my viewing of YouTube material to evening hours). Until I come up a legit business reason, that’s the way it will stay.
Though there may be short-term hits on productivity from certain events, and some individuals may have focus problems, the idea of commanding someone’s undivided attention for 8 hours seems to invite 8 hours of seriously degraded undivided attention. Except for maybe people with certain neurological ‘defects’ our brains don’t work that way.
The concern expressed wasn’t so much that folks were listening, as that the network was taking too heavy of a hit from it. There was, in fact, a perceptible slow-down in network access for a couple of days when the game came on.
Most other web sites and other distractions are still available to those who can get their being-paid-for work done (QED).