No more hiding in the server room
Does The IT Guy Spy On Everyone? http://bit.ly/QzxBh
Does The IT Guy Spy On Everyone? – Hanging With Hayes on Conan O’Brien http://bit.ly/QzxBh
So what do you think? Is this a fair representation of the IT person? Do you take offense to Conan’s implication that IT people read everyone’s email and snoop on employees?
So what do you think? Is this a fair representation of the IT person? Do you take offense to Conan’s implication that IT people read everyone’s email and snoop on employees?
Views: 20
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by John McGrath on -
The people I work with in IT have integrity and respect for others.
So, no.
I think that Conan, and his ilk like to make jokes about something of which they would do perhaps. Thats why he's a comedian, and not in a position of responsibility for others data.
-
Permalink Reply by David Campbell on -
I'm going to say 'no'. But that doesn't that IT staff don't look at your traffic. Here's my example:
Pretext: At my last job we had a gentlemen who was renting office space. He was tied into our network and relatively a small problem.
One day we had a complaint of slow bandwidth and really our network was just gridding to a halt. We really had no choice but to 'spy' (I prefer investigate) on internal user traffic. There were not host names or usernames attached the Snoop output, only IP addresses. Once we found a high utilization of bandwidth from a user surfing porn(!) at the office we escalated it to the owner of our company and limited that users bandwidth to 10%.
In general we're FAR to busy to sit there and spy on people all day long.
-
Permalink Reply by Matt Simmons on -
Indeed. "People would worry far less about what others thought of them if they realized how infrequently it occurred"
-
Permalink Reply by Tsahy Shapsa on -
David,
I guess what you're saying it's a 'Yes', but the kind of 'Yes' that's done for the business and on behalf of the business. What Conan describes is a 'Yes' that's motivated by the fact the 'I can' therefor 'I will'...
-
Permalink Reply by David Campbell on
-
But is it really spying if there is no connection to whose traffic it is? We only had IPs and had to track that down to the host to find the owner. So is looking through connection logs on your server the same as spying on your users?
-
Permalink Reply by Wesley "Nonapeptide" on
-
It depends on the privacy policies at your work. Even without privacy polices, what people are browsing on the web using company equipment and paid time isn't snooping from a moral standpoint and probably not from a legal standpoint. In fact, I've never heard any suggestion that monitoring bandwidth usage in an office was intrusive even if traffic is tied to a user account.
All in all, check with your HR department and your employee policies. I feel very comfortable checking firewall usage statistic data, switch sflow data and and OpenDNS blocked domain data. Maybe I'm desensitized... ?
-
Permalink Reply by Matt Simmons on
-
It's a joke bit. It's not representative of the IT guys in general any more than it is of drummers and their choice of websites.
-
-
You obviously don't know drummers very well. =)
-
Permalink Reply by Matt Simmons on
-
Now who's spreading wide and slanderous tales?
I know some drummers who would take a lot of offense at your comment, if only they could read it ;-)
-
-
Or this timeless classic I spied in the Quarantine folder today:
"Хотите знать чем занимаются ваши друзья?"
-
Permalink Reply by Paul Stoklosa on -
Wish i had the time to even consider snooping! Not that i would.. Most things that i could read are really of no interest to me.. Some things are better left unknown.. I don't take offense though.. I think I've joked about it myself..
-
-
The one thing that strikes me about this thread so far is that everyone responding has denied doing it and also seems to believe that admins are typically too busy to do such a thing. Either there are liars among the group or those kinds of admins aren't likely the ones who would feel compelled to join a group like this.
Personally, I lean more towards the latter. I posit that most slimy admins that would wantonly read people's email for personal thrills aren't like the ones interested in professional development.
Either that or I'm a really good liar.
© 2012 Created by Elizabeth Ayer and Michael Francis.
Powered by
