'Come on, everyone – block US govt staff ogling web smut at work' A US congressman wants to take hard action against government staff viewing grumble flicks at work. House Rep Mark Meadows (R-NC) said that his proposed Eliminating Pornography for Agencies Act would task the White House's Office of Management and Budget to "issue guidelines that prohibit the access of a pornographic or other …
It is a firing offense to view porn on government work computers. Banners are displayed for users before they are allowed to log in. They are told and reminded that this is not acceptable behavior at work - don't do it. And yet some few still manage to get caught looking at smut every year. Surely, passing one more law, adding one more layer of rules, letting everyone know one more time that this just won't do will put an end to these unwanted acts. Yep, that ought to do it.
But this bill is to give the various government agencies the funding, and permission, to put content firewalls in place. His aim is to switch from a passive approach to an active approach to prevent one-handed-computing in the government.
Of course it could never be fully effective. People that want to view pornography will always find a way to do so. If you block it on the internet, they'll find proxies. Block the proxies and they'll use their phones. Then they'll go to USB storage devices, CDs/DVDs, and even magazines. If you manage to block all those methods, they'll just go find a job elsewhere.
Porn in gaelic?
Wouldn't be any good. I holidayed in the Gaeltachts of Donegal in my youth.
It'd be like Emerdale crossed with craggy island.
Of course the link just documents comenting youtube posts in gaelic to avoid youtube censorship, and not even created by a natural speaker, full of bad grammer, so about Irish Politician level in terms of fluency.
The real problem surely is that this is a waste of public resources - the computer capacity and staff time involved; is someone wasting half an hour surfing Playboy.com any worse than them wasting the same time and bandwidth on Facebook, eBay, or YouTube?
(Conversely, I'd say personal use in breaks should be allowed: if someone's allowed to go outside to smoke, why not let them stay inside to surf the web instead?)
For the same reason as putting up posters of naked women (or men, for that matter) is worse than putting up a drawing by your 3-year-old, or a Dilbert cartoon: because it creates an unpleasant, not to say creepy, atmosphere in the workplace, which quite a few people find downright intimidating.
I don't care if the guy who sits behind me spends all day on Facebook. That's between him and his manager or team leader. But, and you can call me a puritan if it makes you feel better, if he's spending even half an hour a day on ChicksWithDicks, I really don't want him doing it there.
"But, and you can call me a puritan if it makes you feel better, if he's spending even half an hour a day on ChicksWithDicks, I really don't want him doing it there."
But why should your personal hangups be the basis for restricting the freedoms of others? There's nothing wrong with pornography. Or sex. Or genetalia. Or chicks with dicks. Or dicks in chicks. Of chick dicking dick chicks with added porn and some additional porn.
You're a sack of chemicals and then you die. So is everyone else. We're all just looking for the chemical reactions and interactions that make life a little less shit. So why - oh why - should the fact that you have insecurity issues/social inhibitions/whatever the hell the problem is determine what means the rest of us can employ to get some happy chemicals into our brains?
It doesn't harm you, or anyone else. But apparently the knowledge that someone is doing something that makes you uncomfortable is enough to give you the right to control that person. Nice. The logic behind that one will be wonderful.
I'm sure those terms were chosen exclusively because they fit the editorial line on the subject matter, eh ? (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).
But more seriously, the day that anyone finds the way to "prohibit the access of a pornographic or other explicit web site" without impacting any other sort of material is the day we have finally found a functioning AI.
Won't happen tomorrow.
me thinks damsel doth protest to much!! surprise! republican from the bible belt complaining about maybe sex / porno on computers.
but he and his ilk have no problem with folks viewing murderous us army troops attacking and murdering folks all over the world!!! violence and murder are ok,
...and they blocked everyone from Middlesex, New Jersey. It's not that filters don't work; rather, it's that they work too well. Porn-again politicians don't comprehend the concept of unintended consequences.
If current regulations aren't adequately hard on staff, instead of implementing filters, perhaps they should just post a sign:
Masturbation at your workstation might result in your discharge.
" It's not that filters don't work; rather, it's that they work too well."
No, it's that the people who write the regex cascades needed to implement them are lazy buggers who don't design robustly and fail to test the false-positive cases intelligently.
Had a major problem myself some years ago in the same area when I forwarded myself an e-mail from a major vendor of long and good standing (in order to circumvent a really annoyingly dumbf*ckstupid printer issue I couldn't get fixed and had insufficient permissions to fix myself) and was accused of sending a racist e-mail when I went looking for why it never arrived.
When I tried to suggest the filter was being stupid - for why would a major vendor with so much money they would surely pose an attractive target for the insulted to sue for their last Licorice Allsort be stupid enough to hide a racist term in their invite to come see their latest and greatest? - and suggested a possible reason was the presence of a word such as "companyid" somewhere in the web-clevers I was told that was impossible.
My colleague was a person of color and was responsible for the filters in question, so was feeling sensitive on two counts and not ready for a discussion by any middle-aged racist to excuse his behavior.
So he was appalled when I dumped the web-friendly invite to notepad and found the word "propertyid" loud, proud and entirely innocent of meaning other than an identifier for the hotel shown on the map thingy nestled in the map object descriptor. I imagine it hurt double I had actually called the problem in my original suggestion.
A few days later in a conference call I got yelled at by a vendor who wanted to know why *her* mails weren't getting read and answered. What mails asked a bewildered audience but I asked her to send me her innocent e-mail about a COBOL picture clause to me with the subject inside the mail body and "to Stevie" in the subject.
Sure enough, the Genius Mail Filterer had trapped PIC XXX and flagged it as obscene. COBOL is many things, but obscene isn't one of them (unless you get clever in the Data Division but you can get into Big Trouble for doing that as was explained to me by the chief programmer as she broke my fingers). I called the genius and told him he'd scored another false hit, a biggie, but when he demanded I show him I told him to do his job and examine the logs.
I was tired of his "You're over 50, what do *you* know" attitude by then, and his incompetence was getting the better of my good nature. You'd have thought that my nailing the exact nature of what he'd got wrong the first time around might have clued him in that I'd seen this sort of thing a few times before.
There's no such thing as a filter working "too well". It either works or it doesn't and if it is trapping false positives, it doesn't work and neither did the person who authored the regex.
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