Re: restricting sex oriented material

On Wed, 4 Jun 1997, Steve Green wrote:
> This kind of access restriction is really blatant censorship. You guys
> had better check that what you're doing is actually legal.
>
> It probably wouldn't be here in Australia.

I suspect it's legal for a bank to restrict its employees from whiling
away the hours looking at naked women over a miniscule 28.8k shared
internet link. I have enough trouble waiting for the web at home, and I'm
the only user of that 28.8k link.

I probably wouldn't take this particular approach, however -- I would be
inclined to establish an appropriate use policy, get management buy-in,
and then communicate it to the users. It would inform them that the
Internet link is a mere drinking straw worth of bandwidth and that they
should use it with consideration to other people kept strictly in mind,
and that erotic websites generally have very little to do with bank
business, and also inform them that the logfiles are being monitored.

Then, I'd write up a little Perl script to scan the logfiles for various
sex-related regular expressions, and mail each user a list of their erotic
and other frivolous website accesses, along with time of day and amount of
time elapsed.

If the problem didn't drop off sharply after that, I'd suggest to them
that their manager and manager's manager would be cc:'d on the next usage
summary, and then do so on the following mailing if that didn't have the
desired effect.

        -Mike Pelletier.
Received on Wed Jun 04 1997 - 07:07:45 MDT