Disappointing Day

[Warhoover]

Well, I could offer some advice to get around your businesses web-blocks.
~Yeti

Yeti,
Don't think for a moment your getting away with something. As a Systems Admin I can tell you, we know what "games" users try to get around things. As Archangel said you are observed. Logs are kept and checked, Gateway and NAT routers are monitored, believe me! I do it! Its part of my job. I get little alerts all the time from our system because of people trying to circumvent security.

You have to really want to ask yourself this, is it worth my career? Most companies can and will allow sites like Xmarks if you go through channels and access it on "your" time during lunch and such. But don't abuse this. We are having to even clamp down on some things even at a college.

Our students started believing that we were their personal ISP, heck I even had a student come into my office and asked that I allow gaming on the student wireless subnets so that he could could play to have something to do between his long wait between his two classes! Never mind doing classwork or researching an assignment, I politely refused and stated the reasons and policies and he still wanted to argue.

Remember your company, school, etc is paying for the bandwidth to do a certain functions. Being your personal ISP or portal to the outside is not one of them. It is a form of theft after all according to many companies these days and they do take it serious. Especially when security is involved. In this case it is better to be ask permission politely, rather than beg forgiveness, it may fall on deaf ears, ask the tenured professor that recently was packed up lock stock and barrel and shown the door at my college for violating this policy.

Kiltman, most of us don't think we are "gods" our job is to keep the company functioning. As you know if you were in the IT field it is a rather thankless job. We don't hear anything until a furball happens! No pats on the back for a good system just complaints. We are only making sure that the company does what it is supposed to do so that we can continue to have a job. Whether you believe it or not, the bandwidth is not free and it is not yours to do with as you will. It belongs to the company, cut and dried. Its there for the purpose of business and nothing else. What you do with your personal bandwidth at home is yours, how would you feel if your neighbors got your WAP keys and started using your bandwidth at home for what ever they wished and you could not do what you wanted be it "surfing" or gaming or what ever you do at home. A simple analogy but it makes the point.