If employees have to be policed so strictly then I would surmise that proper hiring was not done to begin with.
In all my years the biggest abusers of the internet at work tend to be the managers and not the employees.
I have full internet access and enjoy the 5 minutes a day i spend outside of work sites to get caught up on news. its how I spend my break.
Um...You realize these programs are easily defeated, right?
Originally Posted by sharpstick777
And that process can be easily reversed as well.
Ophthalmic Optician, Society to Advance Opticianry
Must........resist..........joke.........
:cheers::D
TOO LATE!
(just watched Clue, the movie)
DragonlensmanWV N.A.O.L.
"There is nothing patriotic about hating your government or pretending you can hate your government but love your country."
If someone is told not to use the net for personal reasons, and software is put in place to prevent that, and someone circumvents the software, that someone is looking for a new job. Period.
DragonlensmanWV N.A.O.L.
"There is nothing patriotic about hating your government or pretending you can hate your government but love your country."
if we want to have professional employees, we must begin with treating them like professionals, not little children.
guidelines are good, but gestapo tactics can only the consequence of a control feak mindset or poor hiring to begin with.
i phone or blakberry all have internet and you can take everywhere...
that is how I check my facebook. I do not want to use the work computers :)
Today our entire network was attacked by the lupper.B worm. Several computers were unusable. Hundreds of dollars in IT fees. Seems that one of our techs had visited hundreds of risky websites during her lunch hours and the infection started from her computer. I asked her to limit her surfing to email, checking her bank statements, ebay, Amazon, airlines etc. Only mainstream, essential Internet services. No entertainment, chat groups, forums etc.
I would bill her for the cleaning.
DragonlensmanWV N.A.O.L.
"There is nothing patriotic about hating your government or pretending you can hate your government but love your country."
We have a very relaxed atmosphere in our office. We are all allowed on the internet when we want as long as we dont have a patient waiting and our work is done. Our boss (the Doc) is very easy going and that's why we all stick around so long! Im the Optical Manager and I just let everyone know that there is no downloading of files and your work better be done if your sitting on the computer! We dont babysit anyone here because we know that everybody knows their job and responsibilities.
Calirider,
An admirable sentiment. As an employer striving to foster the same kind of atmosphere I was very loathe to limit my employees' surfing or to make them feel like children. And, for the most part, 5 of them were very responsible. But there are two employees who have continued to visit very risky sites and they have caused 4 virus/worm infections over the last two years. These attacks have cost me about 100 hours of my time as I struggle each time to save the network. Ultimately, on each occasion I have had to take the computers in for complete reinstallation of the operating system. I then have had to reinstall manually about 10 programs and integrate everything back into the network. If you have avoided this problem at your place of work then either the employees are behaving or you've been lucky. I, for one, tried it the first way but am now going the second way. Starting next week there will be very rigid limits built into the system which will block any site that has not been pre-programmed as "safe".
In the Systems32/drivers/etc their is a file called the hosts file which will translate sites to ip addresses locally, this could be used to block sites. Set the sites to an internal ip address, 127.0.0.1 local host and whalla they get nothing when trying to open that page. This is also a must for mobile professionals as you can disable ads in sites and other data mining sites that waste bandwidth, on a mobile conection bandwith costs money. It's a simple solution to implement and you can update and change sites as you wish.
If you set up a web server for internal purposes this hosts file is a way to redirect everything to the internal web server as well and can allow you to keep the office updated on new procedures, devlopments, etc. As well as to allow them to access an internal web document that can be programmed to grab data from databases, connect to visionweb, and a whole slew of other procedures.
I am looking for some blocking software as we speak. I don't mind the occasional peek at MSN home page but sites such as Facebook and MySpace are like crack to some otherwise good employees. I would add internet instant messaging to that as well.
I have had in the past a worm virus damage my medical software database resulting in the loss of several hundred or thousand patient records in the computer. The worm came from an email attachment opened at the office by an employee despite warnings to never do so.
I don't think it's a serious problem for me right now but I know I have a couple that check out their Facebook daily and several that click off their screens when I come by the front desk. We have a busy office and it's not fair to the ones that are busting their tails off to have some surfing for fun.
We have low background music piped in over speakers throughout the office ("soft hits") via the local cable network so I don't get any of my competitors radio ads booming throughout my office. I had that happen a few times with regular radio and I made the change. The music helps the whole attitude of the office in my opinion and it doesn't seem like a tomb when someone walks in.
Just my 2 cents,
Russ
I just put this in place on one puter here to try it out. So far, so good.
http://www1.k9webprotection.com/
I am not affiliated with them in any way.
DragonlensmanWV N.A.O.L.
"There is nothing patriotic about hating your government or pretending you can hate your government but love your country."
We used Slacker.com for music. Its free, its online, and you can choose the station "Top hits" "90's" etc and its commercial free. We just hooked up our computer to some speakers. ** I just mention this for those looking for a music solution beyond CD's or traditional radio.
~Crazy
I guess this is my theory. If there is work to be done and they are not doing it, then that is the problem. I talk to them about not getting their work done. There are many reasons their work may not be getting done. They could be listening to the radio, talking to someone else in the office about non-work related activities, talking to a friend on the phone, playing cards, day dreaming, the internet, ect. But the problem is not that they are doing those activities. The problem is that they are not getting their work done.
So if a customer is by his/herself and someone is on facebook, well then that employee should get in trouble for not helping the customer out
I'm sorry to say, but internet access has to be restricted, especially in a larger office. I too have had employees introduce spyware and viruses that literally brought several computers to a halt. Rules and company policy don't work. You can't go firing everybody that breaks a minor rule, or develops a bad habit because sometimes you are slow.
It's amazing what staff will do with unrestricted access to the office computers. Actually, we just had a case of an employee useing the office computers to type her resume and print 5 copies of it.
Internet filtering software does work. There are a few free products out there...Open DNS and K-9, that can prevent abuse. For the less computer savy, try K-9 first.
We have about 20 computers in the office that are restricted. We keep one in the employee lunchroom with no restrictions.
One simple check that can be done is to check the "history" tab on both Internet explorer and Firefox. This will tell you exactly what sites were visited over the last few weeks. If you see that the history has been "cleaned" or deleted it gives you an indication that someone is trying to cover one's tracks. If the history is not deleted and you see mainstream or work related sites it means that people are being responsible. The last time I checked this I found that my employee had logged in 400 times to a chat group within the last month. She had also visited dozens of peer to peer sharing groups, messaging sites, fan club sites, online poker, online music sharing etc etc. I researched some of these sites and found that they were rife with hackers and other threats. I am now muzzling this computer with webprotect software (based on some of the reccos I got on this thread).
Incidentally, I am planning a surprise party for my wife and am doing research on the topic online. Every time I finish a session online I delete all cookies and history from the computer. It's not hard to cover one's tracks.
Ilahn,
I highly recommend Avira Anti-virus. Its expensive, but would have prevented what you described. The main stream anti-virus's that everyone knows kind of suck. I knew one office that used a free anti-virus to save money... well, it didn't.
Sharpstick,
I have an excellent IT guy who firmly believes that you don't get much more with the paid antivirus programs. I use Avast (free) for both my home and my office and am quite happy with it. I used to use PCcillin which I paid for, but it missed a lot of malware. Avast is much more effective and is free. If you do a google search on the subject you'll see that many of the paid programs offer a few more bells and whistles but their actual antivirus protection is no better. I do not use a firewall either at home or work other than the windows firewall. Once again, my IT guy believes that software firewalls are of limited use when you already have a router since routers function as hardware firewalls. I am very concerned about malware and am more than willing to spend to protect my computer systems, but sometimes one can add instability and complexity to one's system without necessarily protecting it any better.
Many of the free versions of antivirus do scrimp on features, such as scheduled scans, rootkit protection, compressed archive scanning, or even auto-updating.
Many malware infections are caused by uninformed users, especially recently with the proliferation of the Personal Antivirus attacks. They see the popup that says there has been an infection found and you need this program to clean it. You click OK, you give them permission to install, and you're toast!
Someone here got two puters infected with browse-bys perusing Fox News' website.
So beware! Your employees can give complete access to all your records and patient's records with one click.
DragonlensmanWV N.A.O.L.
"There is nothing patriotic about hating your government or pretending you can hate your government but love your country."
Precious. That must have been the dreaded "No Spin Virus".
-Tony
No. it was the Fair And Balanced 32.worm.
DragonlensmanWV N.A.O.L.
"There is nothing patriotic about hating your government or pretending you can hate your government but love your country."
1. Setup up a pc outside of your network.
2. Go to Logmein.com and install the software and setup the passwords.
3. From the office networked computers go to logmein.com and remote manage the outside computer.
4. tell all employees all web surfing must be done through logmein.com
This does 2 things for you, only 1 employee at a time will be browsing so in essence they will watch each other, secondly all viruses will be on a pc outside of your network.
If you have any technical skills the same can be done using VNC. Logging in with VNC would be a matter of clicking on a desktop item.
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