Restricted Access
Today I stumbled over an error message when I tried to visit a site with IE. Suddenly a error message came up instead of the site. "Company IT security policy blocked access to this site. See blah, blah, blah...".
A link directs to a notice which explains why there is a block. "Not all traffic on the * network is business related." You tell me. "Some of this traffic is less than professional and [not acceptable]." Hell yeah, but you forgot to block boingboing.net. "The extend of this traffic is not great, however, I'm certain you agree [anything is too much]." Surely because we need bandwith to connect Outlook to our central US mailservers and have all mails travel around the world every time I want to show them on the screen. And if I have to wait only two-and-a-half minutes instead of three when I just want to have a look at my Inbox this is a leap forward even if it takes another coffee-break if I click on a mail to actually display it.
So the companies clever IT heads have decided that I must not visit certail sites using their proxy. Well, I'm not using their proxy for that non-business stuff because I use Firefox and our local internet access for that normally. Just had to use IE for a certain MediaPlayer-enabled site showing a dancing Citroen robot.
I guess they will get rid of such backdoors somewhere in the future...