We’ve had an internet filter at work for a long time. It blocks questionable content, and monitors where and how much you go. Go to anything inappropriate that’s not blocked and you get warned. Similarly, spend all day hitting hundreds of web sites and don’t get your work done, get warned.

I’m cool with that. It’s company time, computers, and bandwidth. But one of the perks of an office job is being able to show you are responsible enough to get your work done, and have access to various communication mediums with the outside world (friends, family, etc.) This includes the phone, e-mail, the web, etc.

This week though, they killed off IM connectivity. No more Yahoo!, AIM, or MSN Messenger. Talking to people, we all used it about 70-80% for communicating with people at work (rather than walking across the wing of the building to find out someone’s not there) or to talk to 3rd party vendors like Orbitz.

And today is the icing on the cake. They have categories of filtered sites. Yahoo! Mail is now blocked (along with other major web mail providers) under “Web Mail”. So I tried to find an anonymizer, but it is blocked under “Proxy Avoidance”.

If they’re going to do this, they need to be fair and block the phone from making any outside calls other than 911 or an approved list of vendors. This is just stupid. If you don’t trust me to do my work, well then, I’m going to go to my personal site that’s not blocked and check my e-mail and blog all day!
UPDATE: Funny, we got this e-mail just a few minutes later after I griped to management. You have to wonder if hundreds of people freaked out and then IT decided to send this out. They did it for a virus, but it’s convenient they already have web mail and proxy avoidance categories set up in the internet filter.

IT Security Advisory

ITS Security has identified a major email virus affecting several US companies. To manage the potential impacts to our environment we have disabled the use of internet email accounts for the next 2 hours. We will evaluate service re-activation at that time to determine if the risk has been minimized. This includes email sites such as Yahoo Mail, GMail, Hotmail, AOL Mail, MSN Mail ,etc.