Untangle the internet
As I sat down to type this idea up, it occurred to me that this post would be the second in a row to deal with the topic of censorship. It is just a coincidence I assure you.
A few years ago they (yes them) banned Facebook at work. Ok I understand facebook can waste a lot of time but more importantly, from the perspective of the network nazis administrators, bandwidth. The pictures take up too much, they said. And in South Africa bandwidth is far from cheep.
Ok I get that. I even get it from a time wasting perspective. I can understand a company protecting itself from legal issues by blocking other websites.
What really bugs me is that they recently installed “untangle” and I am pretty sure they indiscriminately checked every box that was available to check. So almost the entire internet is now blocked. The issue I have is that I need to use the internet in order to do my job. A software developer that can write all the code he needs to without the internet is either writing mickey mouse applications or has a rain-forest depletingly large library of reference manuals (yes I made up that word). The programmer’s Bill of Rights includes a fast internet connection.
Ours is neither fast nor does it include the internet, just a watered down version.
I had a good laugh today when I tried to follow a link and saw this:
Are those advertisements I see. Nothing work related there (except perhaps the blog I was trying to have a look at). I wonder who receives the revenue for these links (probably Untangle), I wonder if the bosses know that they are sponsoring someone else’s advertising on the companies internal network?
Oh and I know the guys will open this site for me if I asked them to. It might take them 3 days, and by that time I would have found what I was looking for elsewhere or I could have figured out that although http://…wordpress.com is blocked, the https version is still available.
Oh and I would have pressed that neat green button near the top of the post to tell everyone on twitter that I had written a new blog post, but alas… Twitter is blocked
retweeted for you
.-= Phillip Gibb´s last blog ..Advertising: Would you be Interested =-.
Thanks Man