BOBJ Goes Evil
Somehow this didn't shock me nearly as much as it should have. It was only a matter of time really. I laughed, jumped through their hoops, and proceeded to try and fuck up their filter as much as possible.
I've been at Business Objects for over two years now. A day after I started, I made a hotmail account specifically for work and set it up as my "work MSN" account. MSN is widely used by our devs to ask simple questions / resolve small issues. Its a heck of a lot less intrusive than standing up and going over to someone's desk (no loud voices screwing up the other cubicle code monkeys) and easier than email. Don't get me wrong though, I freely acknowledge that it also gets used for sending links to articles or videos, or other random things as well as for dev work.
So yeah, in those two years, I've not once seen a spam message on my MSN (how is it possible?) or received a virus, or even known someone who has received something along those lines. Yes the tool is used for amusement, but it also gets used for legitimate work purposes and things get done. Its the whole modern 'trust your employees' thing... you give them free reign and let them get things done their own way - only coming down on them when things go wrong.
On Thursday, IT rolled out their newest tool... Postini. It's essentially a proxy for IM, meant to "protect" the clients from viruses and spam messaging. (Says IT.) It also prevents file transfers and can be used to filter messages for content. Although they didn't say it in their high level email talking about the rollout, if you read their document, there are some pointed lines about also rolling out an official 'IM content policy'.
I have yet to get some stuff blocked by this thing, so I can only assume that said policy is en route - not yet arrived. Maybe they plan to get us used to using postini for IM and then roll their policy out once we're already used to this thing. *shrug*
I know that I can get around the filter. Even though IT claims that they have blocked all but certain IM clients, there are some you can download that aren't blocked (and still access the MSN account) and go right through the IM filter. Or there's the web client for MSN. Or there's RDCing into another box outside our network and using MSN from there. Some of the devs have gone to other clients, one is using RDC, and two of our ST are on the web client.
Personally, I've decided that it's my mission to fuck with them as much as possible. I spent time today swearing on MSN, describing how I might blow up the company's Executive Committee, talking about how shitty the company is, how stupid our IT is, and how I'm actually selling trade secrets to our competitors... all sorts of good (and totally not true - except for IT sucking) shit. Have fun with the logs you goddamned IT motherfuckers.
It's nice to know that the company claims one of its core values to be "Integrity". I guess that they don't think their employees are living up to that value, so they have to put in instant message filtering to enforce it. Even if they don't start blocking content in messages, they still get complete logs of everything ever said on a registered client. I guess they can log most of our traffic, but this seems to be pretty fucking blatent logging.
Just one more nail in the coffin.
I've been at Business Objects for over two years now. A day after I started, I made a hotmail account specifically for work and set it up as my "work MSN" account. MSN is widely used by our devs to ask simple questions / resolve small issues. Its a heck of a lot less intrusive than standing up and going over to someone's desk (no loud voices screwing up the other cubicle code monkeys) and easier than email. Don't get me wrong though, I freely acknowledge that it also gets used for sending links to articles or videos, or other random things as well as for dev work.
So yeah, in those two years, I've not once seen a spam message on my MSN (how is it possible?) or received a virus, or even known someone who has received something along those lines. Yes the tool is used for amusement, but it also gets used for legitimate work purposes and things get done. Its the whole modern 'trust your employees' thing... you give them free reign and let them get things done their own way - only coming down on them when things go wrong.
On Thursday, IT rolled out their newest tool... Postini. It's essentially a proxy for IM, meant to "protect" the clients from viruses and spam messaging. (Says IT.) It also prevents file transfers and can be used to filter messages for content. Although they didn't say it in their high level email talking about the rollout, if you read their document, there are some pointed lines about also rolling out an official 'IM content policy'.
I have yet to get some stuff blocked by this thing, so I can only assume that said policy is en route - not yet arrived. Maybe they plan to get us used to using postini for IM and then roll their policy out once we're already used to this thing. *shrug*
I know that I can get around the filter. Even though IT claims that they have blocked all but certain IM clients, there are some you can download that aren't blocked (and still access the MSN account) and go right through the IM filter. Or there's the web client for MSN. Or there's RDCing into another box outside our network and using MSN from there. Some of the devs have gone to other clients, one is using RDC, and two of our ST are on the web client.
Personally, I've decided that it's my mission to fuck with them as much as possible. I spent time today swearing on MSN, describing how I might blow up the company's Executive Committee, talking about how shitty the company is, how stupid our IT is, and how I'm actually selling trade secrets to our competitors... all sorts of good (and totally not true - except for IT sucking) shit. Have fun with the logs you goddamned IT motherfuckers.
It's nice to know that the company claims one of its core values to be "Integrity". I guess that they don't think their employees are living up to that value, so they have to put in instant message filtering to enforce it. Even if they don't start blocking content in messages, they still get complete logs of everything ever said on a registered client. I guess they can log most of our traffic, but this seems to be pretty fucking blatent logging.
Just one more nail in the coffin.