It’s not censorship if the LAN and its gateway to the Internet is owned by one’s employer. The employer gets to do with his/her own LAN and its Internet connectivity gateway whatever s/he wants… even in America. Again, one is free to do as one wants on one’s own computer and Internet connection, on one’s own time.

And if one is living in a country where even THAT isn’t true, then one’s living in the wrong country; and one needs to become an activist for freedom in said country — and even die for it, if necessary — rather than spending all his/her time cowardly figuring out how to usurp controls. That said, I understand and acknowledge that if all Chinese citizens, for example, did that, none of them would EVER be able to communicate over the Internet — at least freely — outside their country. So activism, in that case, both can and should include usurping the system.

But we don’t live in a country like that in the US. Oh, sure, the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act might seem to make that statement less true than most of us would like, but even with those things, everyone is free to communicate whatever they want, however they want in the US… as long as they’re willing to live with whatever are the consequences. In a truly free country (and the Patriot Act, et al, not withstanding, that really is what we have in the US), those consequences may be dire because others have free speech rights, too, and so have the freedome to decry whatever we communicate as part of our freedoms; but at least the government is not censoring or putting anyone in jail over it.

And when I write that, remember, that even in a free society, there are still things we cannot say or write or otherwise communicate… defamatory speech, for example; or yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there is, in fact, no fire. There must be limits even to free speech in certain very narrow circumstances. The trick, as citizens, is to keep knuckleheaded right-wingers from using the “if you have nothing to hide, then…” mentality to broaden said circumstances. They must, in a truly free society, be very narrow circumstances, indeed — such as, for example, defamation and/or yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater — else said society really does begin to have censorship, and/or government-initiated dire consequences for otherwise protected speech…

…such as in China and many other countries.

But none of that — and this is important — has anything to do with an employer being able to tightly control what happens on computers and LANs and Internet gateways which s/he owns.

End-users need to get these concepts straight in their heads; and stop misusing terms like “freedom” and “censorhip” when having these kinds of discussions.

________________________________
Gregg L. DesElms
Napa, California USA
gregg at greggdeselms dot com

Of course, in a perfect world, the employer could afford to pay for all that bandwidth; and to pay for one IT support person per one (to three) end-users to, in effect, follow them around (like the poop-scooper guys who walk behind elephants in circus parades) and undo all the things they do which screw-up their machines and impede their ability to use them for that for which they were hired, or which somehow harm the network.

And then, speaking of “that for which they were hired,” they’re not being paid to surf to whatever web sites they want, and to allow themselves to become distracted and to lose focus. Their breaks should be REAL breaks… away from the computer, as well as their desk and that for which they’ve been tasked; and so, therefore, there should be no personal surfing, etc., from their company-owned workstations.

And speaking of “company owned,” end user employees always seem to forget that. They spend so much of their lives at work that they develop a sense of ownership about their computer workstations; and they forget that neither it, nor the network to which it’s connected, belongs to them. They don’t get to use it for whatever purpose they wish; to download and install anything to it that they like; and to access any web site for any purpose that they wish. They can do that with their own computers, at their own homes. But the one provided to them by their employer belongs to the employer. And that employer also owns the network to which the employer-owned computer is connected; and the Internet connectivity part of that network COSTS MONEY… and when we’re talking about a decent-sized company, it’s A LOT of money. If the employer can figure out how to pay relatively little for the Internet bandwidth, it usually means that s/he’s not getting very much of it; and so each end user’s use of it needs to be restricted and confined to that needed to perform his/her job, and no more… else the limited bandwidth gets all clogged-up with all that personal surfing, and emailing, and multi-media streaming… and VPN tunneling and remote desktoping, too, when/if the user knows how to do such things.

The employer also pays for the IT department to keep the desktop workstations and computers going. I’ll venture that not a single person who has posted here in favor of libertarian-style unlimited employee use of employer-owned computers and bandwidth has never run an IT department… or been in charge of making sure that every person sitting at every desk can get his/her work done without being hampered by machines behaving badly, or both LAN and Internet connectivity being bogged-down by overuse. Believe me, if any of them had, they’d be whistling a different tune.

When a network is wide-open, with no limits, end-users will download all kinds of crap which ends-up slowing-down their machines, or introducing malware to them (which can still get on their machines even with a company firewall if they download from certain kinds of web sites, or if they download, for example, certain kinds of cursors or screensavers or wallpapers, etc. When a network is wide-open, with no limits, end-users will bring their headphones or ear buds to work, plug them into their machines’ earphone jack, and then stream music all day long from Internet radio stations and/or web sites. End users forget that it only takes ten (10) people in a company simultaneously doing that user-up the equivalent of an entire T-1 circuit. T-1 circuits cost $600 or more per month. Who pays for that? Hmm?

Then there’s illegal behavior. We can hate RIAA and its draconian methods of keeping people from illegally sharing commercial (and copyrighted) movies and songs, but all the empassioned arguments in the world which assert that it’s not fair, or that copyright holders make enough money, or that we should have the freedeom to do whatever we want won’t influence a Federal judge in front of whom the end-user’s employer is defending himself in an RIAA-initiated lawsuit because of all the end-users who are filesharing using Napster-like or bit-torrent tools. And back to the bandwidth issue: It only takes ONE (1) employee running a peer-to-peer file sharing tool (such as uTorrent) full-time to use-up an entire T-1 circuit’s worth of bandwidth! Who, again, pays for that? Hmm? No… seriously… hmmm?

End-users don’t stop to think that EVERYTHING (they do) has a cost. Everything. And so, all that libertarian freedom that they want at work is fine in theory, but SOMEONE’s GOT TO PAY FOR IT. Even if some of them would be willing to pay their employers for their personal bandwidth usage, employing tools to ferrit out which is which ALSO has a cost… of both acquisition and implementation, as well as ongoing maintenance… and so the costly IT department just grows and grows.

Plus, I gotta’ tell ya’… so clueless are most end-users regarding what things actually cost that if their employers ever actually DID deduct from their paychecks what their pursonal both bandwidth usage and personal Internet time actually costs…

…they’d end-up cashing teenie, tiny paychecks every two weeks. They would, in fact, be SHOCKED what a simple hour of their personal surfing (and other things) costs their employers. They’d be, I tell you, shocked!

Shame, though, on the IT department for which any of this is even an issue. If each both workstation and the overall LAN (local area network) within the company is properly configured (and by that I mean LOCKED DOWN), then no one, believe me, could “get around” the system…

…not with proxies, not with VPN tunneling, not with remote desktop, not with pages-by-email, not with an anonymizer, and not by any other means which has been mentioned, here. Believe me, if any of you were end-users at a company where I was the IT Director, three things would be true:

1) You would not, no matter what you did, or how clever you were, be able to do anything on your computer, or on the Internet, which your employer did not want you to to do; and,

2) if you DID figure out a way to ursurp those controls, it would only work for a few moments; and,

3) a few moments after whatever you did to ursurp the controls was locked back down again, personnel would be summoning you to its department to collect your last paycheck and be escorted out of the building (er… well… assuming it was your second offense… I believe in a one-stern-warning type of system).

I’ve been at this for 35 years. I know every trick in the book. I know how to both block anything and everything which clever end-users think they know how to do without my notice, as well as to actually and immediately notice it. And I know how to so configure their machines that they can’t get at how to change any of its settiings… not even the wallpaper. Nothing. I’m so good at it that I can even stop hackers and others who’ve worked in IT departments.

And through it all, each user is still able to get his/her job done, unhampered, because what they need from their computer workstation and both LAN and Internet connectivity works flawlessly.

By setting things up this way, I can operate, even in a huge company, a relatively tiny IT department… one which almost never gets calls to come and undo something stupid which the end-user has gotten himself/herself into, and one which can support a relatively huge number of users on a relatively tiny amount of Internet access bandwidth.

Employwers love me. Employees hate me. That’s how I know I’m doing it right.

You wanna’ stream music in view whatever sites you want to view? Do it on your own time, on your own machine, using your own bandwidth. But when you come to work were I’m the IT Director or CIO, you play MY way… and there’s not a thing you can do to get around it… not on MY network, at least. Believe it.

_______________________________________
Gregg L. DesElms
Napa, Californnia USA
gregg at greggdeselms dot com

However I see no need for a VPN or a proxy back home.

if you wnat anonymous surfing in the Internet use this VPN Service would be really useful.

Thanks,
bartman2589

I access my gmail (blocked by company firewall) thru pageflake.com

complaining that you are talking about ways to get around measures…

Shouldn’t that admin, be glad that you gave him this information, so he can test it in his own environment, and adjust or suggest changes be made.

It is a very irresponsible attitude for an admin to have, to simply complain about the information being made available, rather than see if he can protect against it.

anyways, thanks for the information, even though I pretty much knew it all, it was fun to see the interesting conversation revolving around it.

You must try and see the issues from both sides of the fence.

Can someone please help me on this? This is really a helpful site for me. Thanks so much!

Not sure if you have an FTP account you can access and download files from (if they are there), but you could try “transloading” the exe you want to the FTP server and then fetching it from there.

This is how WebTV users used to save images, since they had no storage in their TV.

Try this site, if you have FTP access…just enter URL of exe file you want then click the button to Step 2 and enter in the FTP server info. The service will fetch the file & upload it there for you.

http://www.transloader.com

Should have been “which I believe operates more or less…”

Google is presenting their own mobile versions of most pages on the internet. They load fast, no scripting on them (much safer), no flash or java applets, you can turn off images, and all links you click on them go to same mobile format type of pages.

The only real problem you may have with them is most forms are broken (you can’t comment on blogs or login to sites), you can’t download binaries (you can peek & see file names inside archives, though), but you can still read the content on the pages, and that’s the important part.

I put a bookmarklet on the sidebar of my blog that will allow you to switch from normal version to Google mobile version quickly & easily, if anyone wants to try it.(just drag it to your bookmarks toolbar and you are good to go)

I also have an input box for you to type in URL’s directly, to visit the sites, if you just want to test it.

I originally put it on my site for owners of old slow computers that can’t handle some sites, and people on dialup that just want things a bit faster. But the more people that it can help and the more useful it can be for other situations, the better.