A Myspace Lockdown - Is It Possible?

Raxxon asks: "We (my business partner and I) were asked by a local company to help 'tighten up' their security. After looking at a few things we ran some options by the owner and he asked that we attempt to block access to MySpace. He cited reasons of wasted work time as well as some of the nightmare stories about spyware/viruses/etc. Work began and the more I dig into the subject the worse things look. You can block the 19 or 20 Class C Address Blocks that MySpace has, but then you get into problems of sites like "MySpace Bypass" and other such sites that allow you to bypass most of the filtering that's done. Other than becoming rather invasive (like installing Squid with customized screening setups) is there a way to effectively block MySpace from being accessed at a business? What about at home for those who would like to keep their kids off of it? If a dedicated web cache/proxy system is needed how do you prevent things like SSL enabled Proxy sites (denying MySpace but allowing any potentially 'legal' aspects)? In the end is it worth it compared to just adopting an Acceptable Use Policy that states that going to MySpace can lead to eventual dismissal from your job?"

The 2nd best way is random incomplete blocking...

I have customers who have asked us to do this, and we usually work to talk them out of it. As an employer myself, I have no problem with my employees "wasting time" on occasion, as long as their work is getting finished on time, and they're meeting their deadlines. Work takes more of our time than ever, so there is no reason why people can't take a recess for 5 minutes out of the hour to do personal things.

Nonetheless, the best solution that I came up with (I don't think I "invented" this, but I did come up with it after many days of contemplating) was to have a revolving DNS change for those 20 MySpace Class C addresses. We made it intermittent enough that the employees "thought" it was MySpace downtime, and eventually usage dropped significantly. Every 5-10 minutes a CRON job would add its own random address for one of the MySpace addresses, then 5 minutes later it cleared that and then did it to another address.

The only guy that I am aware of that noticed it is the guy who ran his own DNS on his workstation, but he was geeky enough to probably realize that it wasn't MySpace that wasn't resolving.

I still think that it is wiser to discuss WHY employees might be needing some downtime versus locking them out of applications. Happy employees are efficient, productive and fun to work with. I would never block my employees access to any sites (then again, I would never drug test, delve into their private lives, run a credit report, or any of the usual steps employers take).

Re:The 2nd best way is random incomplete blocking.

I did something similar to this except I blocked all access to the internet and told everyone that a Myspace virus had crashed the server. Then I spent the afternoon sobbing in my office to make them feel really guilty.

Re:The 2nd best way is random incomplete blocking.

I make no personal statement about what people should or should not be able to access from work. From a professional POV, if the customer asks for it I discuss the pro's and con's of filtering vs. log auditing (the vast majority of actual employees i spoke to prefer filtering - they feel auditing is too invasive), and usually the customer goes for filtering. It is important to point out that there is no fool-proof solution, and filtering has significant limitations. Having said that, if your customers insists on going the filtering route, try Surfcontrol or Websense.

Re:The 2nd best way is random incomplete blocking.

Any chance your looking for an IT Manager.

Seriously, I have left so many jobs simply because I wasn't happy being treated like a child. Give me a job and I do it, to the best of my ability... don't concern yourself with what I do when I'm not working, and certainly don't tell me that I am expected to spend every minute during business hours working.

Re:The 2nd best way is random incomplete blocking.

Bill Hicks put it best:

-Why aren't you working?
-'Cuz there's nothing to do.
-Why won't you pretend to be working then?
-Why won't YOU pretend that I am working? You are paid more than me, you fantasize.

Re:The 2nd best way is random incomplete blocking.

This is exactly the reason I started smoking.

I was in the US Air Force at the time... and sitting idle in our office was a sure way to be given some mundane task to perform... so one had to look busy, or be outside having a smoke break.

In my office, the average smoke break was somewhere near 1 hour as our job was hurry up and wait. (ground computer maintenance for an aircraft based radar platform called AWACS). We could see the planes land, and the crew head in for debrief, from the "smoke pit"... so we were always there when real work needed doing.

The damage of content filtering

I have customers who have asked us to do this, and we usually work to talk them out of it.

I have no mod points, but I'm modding you up in spirit.

<soapbox>

I absolutely cannot stand it when employers filter content. The thing is, even if people are wasting too much time at work browsing MySpace (or the Internet in general), that is a management problem, not a technical one. If you take away their MySpace or whatever it is they're browsing, they're just going to move on and browse some other site. If you put a whitelist in place, they'll just find some other way to goof off. The problem isn't that the Internet is distracting, it's that the employee is easily distracted.

I work at a big company as a contractor. It just recently blocked access to the big Internet e-mail services (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc.) because it didn't like employees wasting time with their personal e-mail at work. Of course, being a contractor, it doesn't take into account that I use my personal e-mail to communicate with my contract agency about stuff that I'd rather not have stored on company e-mail servers. It's easy to say, "Well, you shouldn't use company resources for that type of stuff," but practically speaking, my ability to communicate effectively with my contract agency is essential to me doing a good job for them. It also totally ignores the fact that I keep personal stuff like vacations and such on my personal Gmail calendar to know when I should ask for time off, when my coworker's birthday is, and so on.

The company spends a fortune on content filtering. There's the hardware itself, the update service, the support contract, the personnel cost for the guy who maintains it, the internal support costs of handling trouble tickets related to it, the cost of Internet downtime due to it periodically failing, the cost of packaging the software end of it and deploying it to the workstations (so that you can't browse them at home on your laptop, of course!), and so on ad nauseum. Just as one example, some of our customers are casinos. So we can't just put a rule in that says, "block gambling sites," because our marketing and sales folks have to be able to access their sites. No, we have to have rules that say things like, "This group can access these sites, that group can access those sites, everyone else can't access any of the sites, ..."

Even in the extreme case of porn sites, the answer to controlling it is to make a company policy prohibiting browsing them, and if you catch someone doing it, fire them for it. If you try to block them all, you're just setting yourself up for someone saying something like, "Well, it wasn't blocked, so I thought it was okay to go there!" I've found that if you treat people like 12-year-olds, they tend to not disappoint you. When policies like this go into place, you're also going to have the contingent of people who deliberately goof off more as a form of passive-aggressive rebellion. It's just stupid, you're only causing more problems, and there's no need.

I know that some of you will probably reply, "But you have to filter content to avoid sexual harassment lawsuits!" No, you don't. As long as you make a company policy about it and you take the appropriate action when someone breaks that policy, you'll win any lawsuit that someone may file. The law does not require you to spend a fortune to be a babysitter, it only requires that you take reasonable action to prevent a hostile work environment. The reason we have content filtering in the first place is because managers, in general, are lazy and don't want to do it themselves. The people who would sue you for not content filtering will sue you anyway. The only important thing is whether or not you'll win. Besides, at my company, the cost of defending itself against such frivolous lawsuits is negligible compared to the cost of maintaining our content filtering services.

Content filtering is no substitute f

Re:I work for a state government IT department

A less aggressive method is public logs. Let every employee have un-editable access to the log files, things quite down if they know everybody will be able to see where they went (and it saves you having to look at them).

For troublesome sites, filter, it makes sense, just don't get carried away with it.

Re:The 2nd best way is random incomplete blocking.

Working for a .com, my company had a problem with people always checking fuckedcompany to see if we were on it, so the CTO resolved fuckedcompany.com to 127.0.0.1.

don't block the site...

...block the service. If you filter out any Javascript from websites (except perhaps those on a whitelist) you'll be able to keep nearly all the malware off your systems - with the bonus of killing a lot of the enjoyment on those productiveness-destroying websites.

Porn filters

You know, there are companies out there that specialize in network-level content filtering. Porn filtering mostly, but they generally have a filtering set for workplace issues available as well. If you can't talk the guy out of it, consider buying a product that's actually designed to do the job.

No.

It's generally agreed that it's impossible to effectively block web sites without taking drastic and draconian measures. No, it's not possible. With proper policies and monitoring it shouldn't be a huge problem.

I mean, like, duh.

is there a way to effectively block MySpace from being accessed at a business?

Stop hiring teenagers?

Internet on an "as needed" basis...

I worked at a place (~200 employees) that had a really crappy policy.

There were about 20 people in management type positions that had absolutely no blocks set on the websites that they could visit.

The rest of the employees had a whitelist of work related websites that they could access. Everything else was strictly verboten. No checking personal email, no checking the weather or news.

To me it seemed somewhat Draconian, but that was the policy in place.

God I'm glad I left that job.

Re:Definition of Draconian

American Heritage Dictionary - Cite This Source
draconian (dr-k'n-n, dr-) Pronunciation Key
adj. Exceedingly harsh; very severe: a draconian legal code; draconian budget cuts.

Words evolve. Deal with it.

Websense

Install websense. Blocks the proxy sites AND Myspace as well as anything else you want.

Hosts File

Assuming it is a windows environment, use policy/login scripts to update the hosts file on the client to map the myspace domains to yahoo, or something else harmless.

We went the Squid route

We went the Squid route and it worked fine. Large orginization too (100K+ employees). This is done a lot in the industry.

Waste of time..

You're going to spend more time implementing blocks for myspace, not to mention all the other sites you then might think you want to block, than you would spend writing a corporate policy draft outlining acceptable use - plus installing efficient anti-virus and firewall software/hardware at appropriate places in your infrastructure.

Not to mention you'll come out of it looking less like a triggerhappy censoring dictator of some (not-so-)long-gone communist or fascist state.

If you have to block, block all and allow access only to those sites your employees need. That way it's not "selective censorship" anymore. Blocking a service is fair, blocking content is not.

One way

Squid+SquidGuard

I had to do this for a school. Basically, set up Squid to act transparently. Set up an acl like:


acl myspace dstdomain .myspace.com
acl work_hours MTWHF 09:00-12:00
acl work_hours MTWHF 13:00-17:00
http_access allow myspace !work_hours
http_access deny myspace


That would allow access during lunch and before and after work.

If you want to block against proxies, use SquidGuard plus some blacklists. The ones at urlblacklist [urlblacklist.org] are good, as is the isakurldb [gplindustries.com] list (it's based on dmoz). Another one is the one from shalla.de [shalla.de]. All have social networking categories as well as proxy sites, though shalla's proxy and spyware lists tend to overblock.

I'd recommend merging urlblacklist's lists with isakurldb, and also shalla (but remove yimg.com from the redirector list manually) for both proxy and social networking. Then use SquidGuard to restrict the access.

You already know the answer.

In the end is it worth it compared to just adopting an Acceptable Use Policy that states that going to MySpace can lead to eventual dismissal from your job?

In short, no. Technical measures will always be circumventable. If you really want to stop employees using Myspace, you'll have to filter the content via the keyboard/chair interface, as in telling them to stop doing it.

Block the Class C

So block the class C's. Things like Myspace Bypass are not your problem, the average user probably won't know about that. At a certain point, you'll find a user who will just run an SSH proxy, and is it really worth the hassle for locking out the more advanced users like that?

Policy

By developing an 'acceptable use' policy you can define unequivocably the sites that an employee is allowed to access while in normal working hours. Rather than blocking any content, it's better to log all accesses through a pass-through proxy or some other mechanism. This way you can screen the users and see their adherance to policy, flag those for follow up and arrange time to discuss their opportunities for change. The real truth in IT management is that it must be mandated from the top down. If 'the powers that be' define a policy limiting company resource use, then it's easier to track than to prevent. Having all users reminded at each log on of their duties and responsibilities with respect to network access is also trivial and given such daily notices they would have little wiggle room with an 'I didn't know that was wrong.' defense. In the short term, you'll experience a small amount of pain with the unlimited access, but with a sound policy, you'll soon be reaping the benefits with lower administration times.

Failing that being workable, it's always best to 'deny all' and whitelist the sites that are acceptable, further containment of this concept is possible by group restrictions. This method would allow you to tune internet access by employee type(s) giving unfettered access to R&D but limit access to clerical who may just be spinning their productivity away on a myspace romp.

It's important to remember that these network services are paid for company assets, and the disposition of assets REQUIRES policy.

It's just a like a fence.

I remember once being at some old ruined castle with my parents when I was, hmm, perhaps about 10 years old.

There was a small wooden fence around an area containing the moat and some potential dangerous ruined stonework.

I said: "what is the point of that fence, it's tiny, I could climb over it easily? it really doesn't do anything to stop me ending up in the moat"

They said: "well, the thing with fences is that they're not there to stop you getting somewhere. They're there to make you KNOW that you're not supposed to go somewhere. If you just fell into the moat, the castle owners are in trouble. If you climb over a fence and fall in the moat, the castle owners can say, 'well, come on, he climbed over the fence that clearly marked that area off limits. You can hardly blame us, and he can hardly claim he didn't realise he wasn't supposed to be going into that area'."

Likewise with your problem.

Yes, technical measures can always be defeated by the determined myspacer, such as via a proxy. However, I would say some technical measures are worth considering hand-in-hand with the AUP, as a sort of 'fence'. If myspace is banned by the AUP, but not blocked, then everyone will go there, and when they do, they can claim they didn't realise it was against the AUP, or they clicked a link which took them to myspace without realising that's where the link led, "honestly"... etc, etc.

If myspace is blocked, on the other hand, then you force people to "climb over the fence". Yes, they can still get to it via a proxy - but the fact they've gone to it via a proxy means it is explicitly, unarguably obvious that they knew they weren't supposed to be going there, and deliberately went out of their way to get around the rules. This, imho, means you will be able to enforce the AUP more stringently.

Automating invasiveness is not in itself invasive

Install squid. Having a program be invasive for you is no more invasive than trying to do it by hand. I don't see how you could think otherwise.

Of course, there's the obvious solution of: give up, your goal is technically impossible.

Instead of Blocking the Bad, Allow the Good

Assuming your employees only "need" a finite, relatively small number of web site to do their jobs, why not approach this problem from the other direction and avoid a lot of the hassle.

Instead of trying to keep up with every potential "myspace bypass" and blocking every site like it, just block all access to the internet by default, and then allow them out into only those few sites they actually need.

I can't imagine actually working at a company that did this, I treasure my ability to mindlessly surf from time to time when I get stuck/bored, but I believe this would solve your issue. This way you'd only occasionally need to allow access to another "good" website, instead of trying to keep up with countless "bad" ones.

Don't actually block it

I'd say the best way to take care of the problem would be just to passively monitor their Internet access, and give them *kind* warnings in their email when they go to (insert forbidden site here). Also, you could inject little "Big Brother is watching you" messages at the top of web pages on occasion, just to keep people on their toes

Privacy

As much as I'd hate to carry a banner in this direction, I think leaving the doors open and clandestinely monitoring your employees' habits is far more illuminating on the quality of people you hire than just blocking it off.

If I were in charge of that sort of thing, one who spends more downtime in the office on myspace versus, say, wikipedia is someone I might be less inclined to give a project with challenges and forces one to learn and aquire skills. Likewise, I would be suspicious of giving high sensitivity projects to employees to frequent lots of forum sites, as they might be more inclined to share things.

Don't judge a book by its cover, judge a book by the qualities of books that are around it.

Short answer? No.

As previously stated, the only way to truly block Myspace is by only allowing specific sites to be accessed. I am a high school student in a relatively large school system. My peers are complete Myspace addicts. No measure taken thus far has succeeded in preventing the general populace from accessing Myspace. It usually goes something like this: -Proxy being used to access Myspace gets blocked. -Bored nerd gets on Google. -New proxy is found, and has circulated the student population within 48 hours. My school system has even gone so far as to block any URL with the string "myspace" in it (including news articles on sites such as The Register). This only makes things slightly harder by requiring the use of a proxy that encrypts the URL (which also makes any kind of logging filter pointless, because you can't read the URL being visited). Google searches for any search with the string "proxy" in it have also been blocked, but again, it only requires a little more creativity. In essence, an AUP that you actually enforce is the only way you're going to discourage people from visiting Myspace and other social networking sites. A determined enough individual, especially one with a computer literate friend that knows how to set up and/or find web proxies.

Proxy

The only real way to do it is to proxy all outbound http/s. Then you can selectively block by domain names and so on. And the reason you have to proxy is so that the browser have to use *your* proxy rather than an offsite proxy.

Just a thought...

Why not just block out the MySpace domains and try to get MySpace Bypass too? If they're sophisticated enough that they resort to doing a lookup for the IPs and things like that, they're probably not the sort of employee who would be using MySpace anyway. Chances are, if they are blogging, it's on their own server anyway.

If you wanna be really nasty...

Sniff passwords for anyone that logs into Myspace then sabotage their accounts. Declare this policy a couple of days before it takes effect.

I know how to block Myspace.com from everyone

Run an internal DNS server and create a "Forward lookup zone" for Myspace. Create a new Host record for the zone and give it a bogus address that doesn't go anywhere. Or do set it up like I do and have it point to a page on my webserver that explains why Myspace isn't allowed.

Quick & dirty

I had an employer ask me to do this for them as well. Since it was a Windows AD environment, I just set the internal DNS server to point myspace.com to 127.0.0.1 and set DHCP to hand out only the internal DNS server, which is what you want in an AD environment anyways. Obviously, it'd be fairly easy to circumvent (manually plug in an ISP's DNS server - problem solved), but it kind of ties into that "fence" idea mentioned in an earlier reply here, in that, for someone to figure out why Myspace wasn't working, they'd need to troubleshoot it, at which point they'd discover where Myspace was pointing and realize, "Hmm, someone probably intentionally did that."

I will point out that this was for a smallish company (25 people), not a school or anywhere else where the end-user can basically be assumed to be at least somewhat malicious. But, it does get the job done if you're in a hurry.

If you're blocking sites that eat time ...

... better block Slashdot while you're at it.

DNS blackhole

I was asked to do this, too. The network had its own DNS server, so I redirected myspace.com to the company's own intranet website.

It was a dirty hack, and wouldn't be too hard for a technically-inclined user to work around, but they didn't need an airtight blockage. They just needed the misbehaving employees to know that management saw a problem, that the gentle measures taken before that had not produced the desired corrections, and that much blunter enforcement instruments were available.

It got the message across loud and clear.

You need to...

hire Terry Tate: Office Quarterback!

Here's a crazy Idea:

Fire people that aren't doing their job.

easy solution

You don't need to be quite so heavy-handed about it.

Put Linux, Flash, Java, VLC and assorted codecs on a few machines in the canteen. Make it known that those machines, and no others, are to be used for accessing non-work-related sites. Then have the IT department invoice employees for computer repairs necessitated as a consequence of visiting any NWR sites on their workstations.

Depending on your local laws ...

Okay this is a no-brainer but of course there is an easy and convenient
way to put a stop to Myspace. If your employees are a dime a dozen then
simply audit employees web usage and then fire those who continue to visit Myspace.

Now of course if you for some reason value your employee because they're
from a hard to get group that actually does real work at the low wages or
petty salaries you're paying and you'd still like to keep them, then perhaps
you will just have to ignore the fact that they're "wasting" some of the
precious time for which you pay so little.

And on the other hand you value your employees and want to keep them and
you're paying them decent salaries then why don't you just ask them to keep it down?
For the most part these folks tend to listen.

Create a MySpace Phishing site!

Make a MySpace Phishing site, capture people's logins, reek havoc on their account!

Maybe taunt them mercilessly asking why Backstreet Boys is their guilty pleasure, why they like Chinese Food over Mexican, how they're too scared to try homo/bi-sexuality but secretly want to, and why Chuck Norris #18234 is one of their featured friends.

Then you also have a nice list of who has been using MySpace. Watch those people like a hawk, and at the first sign of trouble, out the door they go!

Keyword filter?

Why don't you just filter anything that has *myspace* in the URL? I've seen this work before and while it can occasionally cause problems, it generally works.

As the old saying goes...

Locks only keep honest people honest.

If you block MySpace succesfully, the people who visit MySpace during their work time will just find another way to waste time and expose the company's computers to spyware/etc. risks. It's a losing battle. Think of it as DRM for your employee's time.

In a URL,

http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/products/web-f ilter-overview.php [barracudanetworks.com]
Works quite well for me!

Recommend against even trying

I would recommend against even trying to completely block it for employees. Having a policy to deal with major offenders is better than creating such a restrictive environment.

Firstly, the virus/adware problem the employer is worried about would be better solved by making sure the machines have up-to-date virus definitions, that the browser is configured properly: disabled Active-X, blocking popups, to not be Internet Explorer... the usual suggestions. Make sure their IT people are keeping the machines in order, and that the employees can't disable or otherwise futz up the antivirus software. And secondly:--

You can block the 19 or 20 Class C Address Blocks that MySpace has, but then you get into problems of sites like "MySpace Bypass" and other such sites that allow you to bypass most of the filtering that's done.

This makes me think of what happens when a government tries to outlaw something they know that people want: all it ends up doing is creating a new black market and more crime; beyond the tautology of new law = new lawbreakers, you end up with people doing all sorts of bad things they otherwise wouldn't have to do, just in order to get around a law that shouldn't've been passed in the first place. You start out by outlawing something you think people ought not have, and pretty soon you find yourself spending $40 billion a year with no end in sight, just to use one example [drugpolicy.org].

So right now they've employees wasting a little time each day on MySpace. Do you want to create a situation where instead some of these employees waste an hour or two trying to come up with creative ways to evade proxies and firewalls? Or where an employee ends up infecting his computer with all sorts of malware because of some shady site he came across while trying to find, say, open proxy lists? Or he ends up accidentally divulging a whole bunch of private data by setting his browser to use an open proxy, not realizing all his HTTP traffic is now being routed through who-knows-what in Russia? And how much productivity will be lost when some employee gets fired over 15min of slacking off and it takes the company two weeks to find a replacement candidate?

And consider the morale impact -- and thus productivity impact -- when you start getting employees grumbling about being treated like prisoners at their workplace.

I'd recommend that the employer A) not worry about the employees who spend a few minutes a day browsing MySpace, and B) only come down on the people having major productivity issues because they're spending half their day slacking off, or the people who've caused severe security problems by getting their computers breached by malware.

Transparent Squid proxy, SARG and Dansguardian

I spent some time trying to effectively block MySpace from our organisation. Firstly, how to detect MySpace being accessed - obviously one blocks 'myspace.com' but then finds that people are still using it. Use SARG to analyse the Squid logs and look in the top sites accessed - you will see google images, YouTube and whatever proxy they are using for MySpace listed in your most accessed sites. One starts banning proxies (tip: try monitoring web accesses for phproxy and you will be amazed at what you find) but ultimately realises that one is fighting a losing battle as for every proxy one blocks, two more will spring up.

The absolute best way I have found of banning MySpace no matter what proxy is used is to block it's content using DansGuardian - look in the HTML of MySpace pages and find strings that appear in every MySpace page, but not in others. Put the strings into DansGuardian's banned phrase lists, and voila - blocked no matter what proxy is used.

Obviously this will not work for SSL encrypting proxies, however only a lunatic would allow a free SSL proxy meaning that SSL proxies are usually pay services, and are easy to spot if you look in your logs. Use SARG regularly to monitor access and you will easily see how your users are finding a way to it if they manage that in the future. Also set up a block page where your users can ask for sites to be unblocked - when the regular 'PLZ UNBLOCK MYSPAZ KTHXBY' messages stop arriving, be suspicious and look for how they are getting to it and take appropriate action.

Did I mention I am Evil®?

Myspace is Always Having an Outtage Here

I have a DNS record for the myspace.com, which directs all queries to an internal IP address, which my apache web server answers with an ever rotating, badly written excuse of a massive internal myspace calamity. No one buys it, but no one gets to myspace from my network either. Just have your DNS server answer queries for myspace.com and anything under it as if it has authority to do so, do whatever ya want at that point. Just make sure you force your users to use your DNS server, lest they start using one from your ISP and get right around this. I suppose you could work around it by accessing myspace in a way other than myspace.com, but I would venture a guess that for every myspace user that knows how to do that, there are two hundred who don't.

You notice any trends, start seeing lots of people going to www.gettomyspaceatwork.com, do the same thing for that.

What would be cool is a route list of social networking sites IP addresses, advertised like route servers advertise BGP bogons. Null route it at the IP level, and not have to maintain the bastard by hand for every time one of them gets a new allocation of addresses from ARIN.

Don't treat employees like children

Validate your client's concerns about viruses, but make sure that your client realizes that an outright block on sites like MySpace is equivilent to treating employees like children. Content blocks also create problems from real work because they end up creating a huge mess of red tape when someone really needs to use a blocked site.

there is

>Other than becoming rather invasive (like installing Squid with customized screening setups) is there a way to effectively block
>MySpace from being accessed at a business?

If the job gets done, well and on time - then stop bitching about people surfing. Being productive for 8 hrs straight (short of 1 hr for lunch) is a utopia many employers dream of, especially if it has to do with doing the same task(concept) repetitively. You never get a different result by doing the same thing, so naturally, you will eventually get bored, whether you're a programmer, analyst, whatever....

If someone, on the other hand, provably surfs the net (check your company's network logs, you do have them, no?) so much so that his performance is consistently impeded by his, at this point, internet addiction - then apply your company's disciplinary policy appropriately (you do have policies too, no?).

Blanket statements like "web surfing impedes productivity" and designing unrefined policies around such statements can only discourage/anatgonize productive employees who are able to surf as well as work productively, if they happen to ever get caught in the HR policies net. Most office space/white collar computer-related type of work can get incredibly boring. Whether management likes to look good by appearing curt and managerial and reprimanding everyone for anything slightly in violation of the policy, or be relaxed and only deal with problems as they arise instead of being dickheaded about it, will set the tone, overall mood and atmosphere of the company you work for.

Instant example - I'm writing this between bouts of programming a GE Fanuc PLC with Ladder Logic - something I had to learn on the job, and have only done in a single class in college. Once you get the gist of Ladder Logic programming - it becomes a mind-numbingly boring task having to write LL functions that process input, apply the function and produce output. I'm gonna get what I need to get done regardless of whether I surf, reply to /. or anything, because that is what I agreed to do when they started depositing monthly paychecks into my checking account. Now if someone chooses to call me "unproductive" because I am on slashdot in the meantime in spite of a job well done - well, that is entirely their problem.

Not making these employee/manager behavioral distinctions leads to two extremes - the sweatshop and the ideal company... Depending on your lucky stars, you are somewhere inbetween, hopefully more toward the ideal company than not.

G'day.

How about...

Blocking myspace from say, 9:20 on (assuming the office "opens" at nine) and unblocking it in the last hour of the day, so people can check their messages, maybe arrange a date after work, or get a group of coworkers together for drinks? Maybe just leave it open all day on Fridays, because nothing really ever gets done then anyways :) Comprimise, compromise.

right under your nose? or: idiotic.

what about a remote server/site/whatever that has this "squid" and will help to block myspace. i am technically retarded, so i have no idea if this is even a viable idea.

You know the answer

Become "invasive".

- Install Squid with customized screening setups.

- Adopt an Acceptable Use Policy that states that going to MySpace can lead to eventual dismissal.

P