Access Blocked!!

[WhiteLight]

Damn! My office has a pretty humorous yet irritating policy of blocking websites based on keywords like adult, entertainment, etc.
Based on traffic to certain websites as well websites can be manually blocked..
And that's what happened last evening.. Nikonites has been blocked
am pretty certain am the only person in the entire damn building using this forum (and loving it) & they have blocked it!
Grrrr. Time to throw my weight around and undo this nonsense... hopefully

:hopelessness:

 

[pedroj]

Damn! My office has a pretty humorous yet irritating policy of blocking websites based on keywords like adult, entertainment, etc.
Based on traffic to certain websites as well websites can be manually blocked..
And that's what happened last evening.. Nikonites has been blocked
am pretty certain am the only person in the entire damn building using this forum (and loving it) & they have blocked it!
Grrrr. Time to throw my weight around and undo this nonsense... hopefully

:hopelessness:

Bugger!!!!They might want you to work...LOL

 

[WhiteLight]

Now how didn't i think that could be why
LOL

 

[BackdoorArts]

Happened to me several years ago when my company blocked 100% of php-based forum sites. Took two days for them to reassess after all the complaints, particularly since two of our largest user forums were php-based.

 

[§am]

We get this all the time at work - why did you block this, why can't I get onto here, etc etc.
And the official stance/policy is you're at work to work, and unless you can provide a justifiable business reason for access to said site, it will remain blocked.

IMHO - too right it should be like that
(Unless you work in IT and know how to circumnavigate the blocks, in which case, one rule for us, and another (strict) rule for everyone else!!)

 

[jdeg]

I would just run things through a proxy or vpn. Or better yet, just remote into your home computer. I doubt they block the port used for remote desktop.

 

[§am]

LOL - way ahead of you on that jdeg!!!

For security purposes, most ports are blocked on external firewalls, and you'd have to know which ports are open to configure remote desktops or VPN at our place (and probably a lot of other companies too).

Where I've worked, user desktops are locked down, so changing proxy settings etc are disallowed too.

 

[jdeg]

LOL - way ahead of you on that jdeg!!!

For security purposes, most ports are blocked on external firewalls, and you'd have to know which ports are open to configure remote desktops or VPN at our place (and probably a lot of other companies too).

Where I've worked, user desktops are locked down, so changing proxy settings etc are disallowed too.

\

Yeah, I'm sure it depends on the company and how strict things are, but a little port forwarding in your home router and problem solved

 

[WhiteLight]

\

Yeah, I'm sure it depends on the company and how strict things are, but a little port forwarding in your home router and problem solved

Yeah.. we did do that.. when i was new in the company (around 4 years back), they used Win XPs on the machines & Sonic Wall.
That's pretty easy to circumvent.. we used this super popular, super useful & super amazing little app called UltraSurf.
This went on for a while but somehow Ultrasurf screwed something on the network & the entire organization was disconnected for an entire day
Then they upgraded to Win7 & Websense.
This made it everything very complex cos the rights on Win7 are very clearly defined & we cant do jack sh*t about it.
We can't run any software, download anything for that matter without admin access.
Websense was okay with some loop holes which allowed a few websites not being blocked.

Now they've just installed Fortis Guard which seems to have blocked the entire net almost....


PS: Apologies for responding late.. as you can now understand no access at work is quite depressing...

 

[WhiteLight]

The funny part yet, though is that amongst the famous websites, DP review, nikonians, DPS open..
nikonites, cambridge in colour & a few others don't.

Jdeg- would you know if nikonites has any meta tags or html linked to 'entertainment'.
Cos that's the category nikonites shows under..

 

[§am]

Ahhh Websense categorisations - always hit and miss when it comes to the good sites.

You could ask your IT administrator to reclassify Nikonites in Websense and you should be able to get access.... or discover that they decide DP Review etc are 'entertainment' too and block those!!!

As an IT administrator though, I still think lock down of PCs is the best way forward, and we've been able to do since XP...