One hell of a day at work today...

So I come into work and check my logs as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary. On a whim, I decide to grep a couple packet sniffing logs for the word "sex". Lo and behold, sometime yesterday during the workday someone was browsing pr0n. No big deal to me, and then the VP in charge of operations comes up behind me.

DOH!

He takes a look at my screen (a TTY console on a big ass 19" monitor). "What is clit8.sextracker.com?" he asks.

"Uh, a porn ad banner server I think." I answer truthfully. I'm glad he didn't ask how I knew that.

"Why are you looking at that?" he asks.

"I'm not," I say, "Someone else was yesterday."

"Who?" he asks.

"I don't know," I lie.

"During work?" he questions.

"Uh, yeah." I say.

"Find out who and tell me IMMEDIATELY." he says.

And now I'm the pr0n nazi. I went to the dude and told him to stop. Silly fuck tried to deny it at first. 'Cept programmers don't know shit (as a general rule) about computers -- networking especially. I showed him his cache from my machine. He apologized for lying. I told him I probably would have done the same thing -- lying in his situation that is.

Now my boss is all over me though. I don't want to rat the dude, because I think he'll get fired. But if it comes down to me taking shit cause some dumb mf can't surf pr0n on his own time... So far I've held them off by telling them that the DHCP server keeps me from telling exactly who had that IP. Bullshit of course (as that specific machine has a static IP addy).

In a related note, I found three other people who admitted to after hours surfing. I told them to stop. Again not cause I care, but because this is a conservative company (run by devout Muslims). Management will flip if this keeps up and ask me to install censorware. I can't ethically do that, and I'd probably have to quit. Man this shit sucks. If only I was faster on the Alt-F2.

Tell your boss that sometimes search engines load banner ads from outside sources. You can randomly load a pic from a sex tracking banner server and have no control over it. It wouldn't be that far from the truth except for the slightly important fact that the only time search engines load pr0n banners is if the cookies you cache on your machine show that you do most of your searches for porn related keywords. You can just omit that last bit though. ;)
I have to do the same thing at my workplace. No one knows that we just switched from an instant internet box to MS Proxy (we couldn't track before), so it makes it even worse. I must say, the worst part of the day is confronting people. I have heard it all - from the generic "I accidentally clicked on a banner" to the "I was searching for teen sites for my daughter" and of course the "I clicked on a link that said 'Click here for some cool pictures'". You can watch the suprise on their face while it turns red. The suprise then slowely turns to a grimace as they think of an excuse. Finally, they become extremely defensive and try to act normal as they convey the reason they were looking at porn. Its ugly. Its even uglier when someone else walks into the person's office (as you can imagine)...

The only reason I do it at all is to get the word out that we can track it, so I don't have an even worse situation when everyone is looking at porn. Once I have confronted the offender, I take whatever excuse they give and leave. But alas, there are often times when I really, really want to say "If you 'accidentally' clicked there, then how can you explain the 45 minutes spent on the site?" ...must have been quite a few windows to close...

For some reason, even though the company is pretty conservative, there are very, very few restrictions on this kind of stuff. Heck, there aren't any restrictions on web browsing or emailing. Not even any kind of written policy - eventually it will bite them, but until then I guess I will just keep trying to get those to stop.

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