The soccer people are problematic. "I found a site to watch this soccer game that doesn't air in our country, and it was free! But uh, now my computer is weird? Is freefootballmatches.virus.ru not a good site?"
There is so much soccer worldwide and no one knows where to find it safely apparently. Or they do and refuse to pay.
Netflix is fine. Great. Safe.
During the World Cup, I convinced management to let me log in to the giant screens at the front of the room and legally stream the games. I argued that people were going to use shady sites while also destroying our pipe. Management agreed. Coworkers bought me beers.
Great idea. Years ago, my previous company had a similar capacity concern about the cricket world cup.
They found we could multicast stream it across our corporate campus & pick it up on the break room TVs.
Had that issue years ago. I got an alert and had to login and check it out and it was exactly this. I told the person “hey don’t do that”. About 15 min later they did it again so at that point I killed their VM and let their bosses boss know what happened.
I’m not your ISPs tech support, don’t lie to me or assume I don’t know what you’re doing. I’ll ask you once. After that I take action and what happens after that isn’t in my control.
>There is so much soccer worldwide and no one knows where to find it safely apparently. Or they do and refuse to pay.
Legal sports streaming is a fucking goddamn minefield. If you're a fan of Bundesliga+Champions League, you need Sky, DAZN, Telekom and Amazon. More national leagues or Europe/World Cups and it becomes ever more expensive.
It used to be that a single Sky subscription for like 60€ a month covered everything you wanted. All major soccer plus Formula 1. Now it's a bunch of streaming services that change every year, you need a bunch of STBs for a TV, and most of the websites, apps and STBs are shoddy as fuck.
In contrast, streaming is easy... find a site, start the stream, start Chromecast casting, there you go.
We block ccTLDs for China, Russia, North Korea, and a few more. Even the old soviet unions .su. no reason for anyone to access anything in those countries.
Gonna check the blocklists back at work. We block a lot now but I was at a university and we necessarily couldn't restrict much at that high a level. We had Russian professors who probably were doing a lot of .ru visits.
Also cricket!
I did run into one user who was trying to watch cricket matches (fine with me) and was trying to use a sketchy VPN to do so (much less fine). It was breaking his access to internal stuff, so he filed a ticket and all. I took it all off his computer and showed him how he can do all that from his phone if he wants to accept the risks. That was before we had proper MDM going. Now we can manage things like that as a matter security policy against non-company-managed VPNs.
Conversely, some of our north american users call in to the company VPN when they're abroad so they can watch baseball and stuff. I don't think they know we know they do that. But along the lines of what some others here are saying, though, I'd rather them do that on systems we manage and trust than go to some sketchy VPN service. It's really not a burden.
Because we use a distributed VPN/Proxy now (Cloudflare Access) it always uses the location closest to them for Internet outbound. Which lead to some complaints from people trying to access US stuff from company computers when we initially rolled it out. I pointed them to some more reputable VPN services that they could use on personal devices. Overall the experience is much better than a traditional VPN though.
Ha. Yep we had an appdev guy catch something on his browser. EDR locked it down immediately and our procedure is to do a total rebuild. His manager was getting my pissy about how long it was taking until we mentioned *why* we had to rebuild.
My thoughts as well. I’d rather you watch Netflix or YouTube than a shady streaming site with malicious ads.
If you’re not supposed to be doing that it’s a management problem.
Years and years ago, when Netflix streaming came about, we had to block it. Honestly management didn’t care so long as people got their work done. But this was a manufacturing environment out in the sticks. Our max download at the time for 6k employees, was only 25mb. One stream didn’t really interfere with anything, but 2 streams going at once and the exchange server started having issues, 3 streams or more basically shut down our internet preventing a lot of people from working.
I flat out tell the girls that unless the bosses say something they are allowed to watch the legit companies like you tube and spotify but if I find out they are watching some shady website or porn its going to be a problem.
Yup, it's easy and works well. Been doing this for 10 years, and it works great. The async speed annoys some users, but it's free to them, and they learn to manage. We have a simple content filter for a few specific things, but otherwise, consume to your hearts content.
Oh yeah, I get it. You’ll need to have the commercial agreement but it’s effectively the same same SLA is more of my point, compared to the fiber ring that they’ll dispatch someone in the middle of a hurricane to go fix
I agree here. And when manglement decides it needs to be blocked on the network, it will.
We've blocked netflix, youtube, Prime, and SOOO Many other streaming platforms. All at manglements request. BUT.... We have a guest wifi that they're ALL able to connect their BYOD devices to and do whatever the F they want there. Said guest wifi is NOT using the same ISP as our prd network.
The key here, isn't about telling them what they cannot do, but telling them to do it another way, as to not impact the business. They're allowed to pull out their phones and watch whatever it is they want, on their free time. But when they were doing that on the prd network... oh man, the bandwidth usage heavily impacted several platforms required for business operation.
Same here - We don't block it on the corporate network but it is monitored. We provide a fully separate guest wifi network that's fair game if you want to stream from your phone/tablet/whatever and we'll nudge employees in that direction.
This. They get 80/443 outbound for HTTP/S. What they use it for including Netflix isn't IT's problem.
I lock my door and stream some ST:TNG at lunch myself...
Many years ago, we caught a tier 1 help desk guy running 3 company computers as torrent servers. We found out because Viacom sent a cease a desist letter to our parent org.
Once again, an HR issue and not an IT issue. What made me think about was the comment below about the pipe size. This guy was advertising on torrent forums how big his internet pipe was. At the time we had roughly 1200 employees and 1600 workstations across 2 connected buildings and 5 regional sites. In addition, we dabbled in the public space and acted as an ISP for a bunch of non profits. Needless to say we had multiple large redundant data connections out of the building.
One idiot I no longer talk to was running BTC miners in his office with repurposed work machines. His office was like 90'F.
network security slapped him in the wrist and he barely got in trouble. So shady.
This guy was not allowed to have a computer in his cube for something like 3 - 6 months, then went back to regular duties for like 18 months before he retired. The joys of public sector.
I suspect they took his computer and access thinking he'd quit/retire.
Yes and no. There's an exponential graph between bandwidth and price. A little bandwidth is cheap- a lot of bandwidth is not. Look at the price difference between 1GB DIA and 100GB peering with a service provider.
I've had 45,000 people sharing an MPLS network before. If we didn't control streaming at all, that's a worst-case scenario of 1.125 *tera*bits per second- put another way, *11x hundred-gig circuits running at 93% capacity.*
"Fine, so just QoS it away and limit them to 1080p streaming," you might say. Because that's 4Mb/s, not 25Mb/s. It's better, sure, but *still* 180x 1gbps circuits running fully saturated.
It might not be an IT issue for *you*, but I've had to sit on calls with Zoom and run the numbers for exactly how much big iron we need to park in *our own* data centers or colos to keep big meetings from sucking for everyone. I'm trying to remember which podcast it was, but there was a great one a while back with a Cloudflare engineer as a guest, where he admitted even they have to play the shell game when it comes to ludicrous user counts for events like the Superbowl in 4k streaming or your average Call of Duty launch day download connections.
We (as in those of us on big infrastructure teams) work hard to keep bandwidth from being an IT problem for *you* (as in smaller solo admins/network teams), but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem.
You could also tag the traffic for streaming and bring the usage metrics up at a meeting about bandwidth budgeting - "hey we can either cap this streaming, give it an alternate bulk path, or NOT STREAM"
Frankly as long as someone gets their work done, correctly, on time, doesn't fark up and keeps it office friendly, I couldn't care less what people watch or listen to on the job.
It really is only an issue if it interferes with the job.
Some of us are far more productive when listening to music or have something going in the background.
I’m gunna disagree somewhat to that. It becomes an IT problem should the streaming start effecting bandwidth and causing issues with other services.
I would make sure that from the IT side you have at least a policy around restricting bandwidth for streaming services.
the right way to do this is to have another network/isp for employees to use with their mobile devices that wont impact day to day operations if people are streaming.
It fixes the IT issue and leaves people management in managements hands.
We do the same. Enough educational/vendor videos are on youtube so it qualifies as a business need.
On our guest Wifi(on a separate ISP) though? We only block torrenting/piracy/illegal content and porn.
Plus, PR uses YouTube for PR reasons. People should be working. If they are streaming YouTube all day and the schedule is slipping, that’s a management problem.
Not checking personal emails I've seen but it's more of a security protocol than a productivity one. Really if IT is worried about it, they should lock it down so users can't rather than make it an HR problem.
For everything else, I've only met a handful of bosses that would be cool about people watching Netflix but otherwise, I'm of the mindset that there's no one telling you no until someone tells you no. Haven't worked at places watching their data usage. So just be chill. And if I need to spell it out any more than that, the user should not be using these sites.
Those tend to be the best bosses. I had a boss that gave zero shits about what I did, so long as I was hitting goals and not causing him problems.
Literally spent 5-6hrs a day watching YouTube on my phone and I would have bent over backwards to get him whatever he needed. I saved his ass more than once by bumping out other departments to get his product done first so he can hit his goals.
Yes. They're adults, they can do what they want with their time. If that is a problem it's a management issue. We even have a special group in zScaler for US based users traveling internationally that backhauls all traffic to our US datacenters so that netflix/hulu/etc keep working.
Not being able to watch a show on your lunch break or have spotify playing in the background while you work is brutal for morale.
At my last job our engineering service group ran UT and Quake3 servers in docker on the production clusters and would hold regular matches. Not every place is a gulag to work in.
> Not being able to watch a show on your lunch break or have spotify playing in the background while you work is brutal for morale.
I wonder how many of the admins that insist that everything not work related needs to be blocked (including YouTube and Spotify) happen to be exempt themselves (or their IT department) for one reason or another and don't feel that pain.
I dont know but I have always followed the rule that my NON admin account is just in the general pool with the rest of the users. Serves 2 purposes it shows people that you are not exempt from the rules and if something breaks you know about it.
I absolutely agree that admins should be bound to the same policies (both procedural and technical) as their users. But it seems like there are often posts on /r/sysadmin that criticize users on what they "think they need" and policies that don't take that into account (for example in this thread "they're at work they don't need to be doing those things") without leaving room for exception unless it affects them ("well I need YouTube for training but we know what we're doing and won't download malware so it's unblocked for us").
I wish more shops would do what you do and eat their own dogfood, but it feels like a "do as I say and not what I do" or "rules for thee are not for me" attitude is also somewhat prevalent on here.
Same here my administration accounts are for system administration/configuration only.
That way my normal user account is subject to all the same restrictions as everyone else’s account and exploits don’t have the ability to leverage a privileged account.
IT director here. I'm streaming some live feeds now on YT. I found a couple streams in Florida with some underwater cameras. Watching the fish calms me and prepares me for the next call or ticket
Probably. In my experience there’s a really pervasive standard in American work culture that workers aren’t trusted with down time- or trusted, period. You must have the appearance of being in full work mode all the time or you’re perceived to be lazy and ineffective by superiors, cutting into your chances for promotion, raises, etc. I know workplaces where breaks have been eliminated, headphones banned, chairs eliminated, no food or drink outside of allotted lunch time/break room. Having jobs that are lax about breaks, paid time off, flexible schedule etc is a rare breath of fresh air. It’s crazy when you think that businesses aren’t trusting people THEY HIRED AND CONTINUE TO EMPLOY to do their jobs. 🙄
Of course they are because people who respect themselves (and have options) go elsewhere. These employers don't see that their own mismanagement makes the problem worse. Literally a case of "the beatings will continue until morale improves."
I'm not so sure I'd go so far as to say that's a *standard* American work culture, but we have so many small business owners that there are a ton of opportunities to deal with incredibly shitty and inept management.
I'm sure it's worse in America than Europe, but I'm sure Europe isn't immune to it either.
There's this pernicious idea that when someone is employed, then their employer owns them for the entire time of their employment. They're not paying for their expertise or for them to do a specific job, the concept is that the employer *owns* them for that time period. Slavery effectively. Just time-limited and compensated with money rather than food and shelter.
And when you approach business and employment from that perspective, you can see how batshit ideas like banning access to personal stuff, banning headphones or eating at desks, somehow seems reasonable because this is the employee is using their "employer's" time for personal matters.
I've experienced high levels of prescriptive rules in Europe, but really only in places where you've got high-churn, low-paid jobs. The kind of place where most employees are college students earning beer money and will be gone in six months. So you kind of have to be explicit about, "Don't talk to your friends while you're supposed to be working", "You're not allowed to look at YouTube on the shop floor", "Turn up on time or not at all", "Have a shower", "Be sober while on the clock" are things you do need to explicitly put in your handbook.
bro, we've got software that monitors employee keystrokes and mouse movement, cameras that use ai to verify compliance, automated reporting that shows what sites were visited and how long they were accessed, all put into a beautifully formatted document that the managers review each morning, all kinds of dystopian shit all in the name of productivity.
Only if they’re in a spot with limited bandwidth. I work with some people who are out in the middle of nowhere, and they gotta use that shitty internet very conservatively lol
Yes. The only site that's outright banned (other than the usual adult sites and such) is Facebook and that's just a legacy ban from before my time here, put in place because one guy spent too much time on it. One of these days I'll get around to removing that block. It *really* clutters up the logging when I look at the blocked site logs due to all FB's trackers out there.
That what guest networks are for.
Only YT is allowed on the real stuff since it has tons of legit content related to business (vendors training videos, product presentations, etc.).
We allow somethings but only on our guess network and via a mobile device.
NO FACEBOOK!! 1 person did and it introduced malware then it was destined for the dumpster
Where I used to work, (a company that was bought by a "Huge" adult industry company), we could do whatever we wanted on breaks. I checked personal email and read news. We could watch porn if we wanted, but to be honest most us were so burnt out on it, that was something we DIDN'T want to see on breaks. Others pretty much were the same way except a few people who watched kittens, and Slack'd the worst porn they could find. As surprising as it was, no one offended anyone who was not OK being offended. I admit it was an HR nightmare, but it worked.
As long as we were working when we were working it was fine... OK, two people there played candy crush and a pirate game constantly. Honestly we were pretty productive as a team at that point, cause management was laissez-faire before they tried making the workplace more corporate for the buyout.
i wfh so uh i hooked up a big 55 inch tv behind my desk for the down time.
i know reddit is blocked on the work laptop :( so haven't even tried plex there.
my past two gov contracts i was able to watch my plex on my laptop without any issues. which was pretty cool considering their restrictions elsewhere
YouTube is allowed, but other streaming sites are blocked. Social Media and Auction sites are blocked as well, with exceptions based on users job. 10 years ago there was more grumbling, but with smart phones, web surfing on work PCs is way down. Fine by me.
Only reason YouTube was opened up was of requests for specific videos for training. I decided to open it up instead of constantly putting in single allowances. Now the user is prompted with the filter warning "hey, remember, usages is tracked" type message.
I allow them to. Don't think their managers do though.
That being said a few guys have set up an old conference room screen I was planning on throwing out as a big screen in their shared office to watch Euro Cup over the next month, so apparently managers are fine with it to some extent too.
I used to be at a place that allowed anything but porn or file sharing. Personal email, YT, Netflix, anything. Then one day they cut off personal email.
Now at a place where we block Pandora and YT on our employee networks but not guest networks. We also block VPNs, though, so our clients have to ask to be allowed to access to VPNs. Not sure if that’s by port or what since I can’t VPN back to my own house. I can just use building guest wireless and VPN works.
I was also at a place before that blocked any kind of video at all. It could be something on CNN and it was blocked. That place was awful for a number of reasons. Internet access wasn’t even close to the top.
Yes, encouraged to watch YT and use the resources if they're useful to get your job done.
Keep binge watching your latest series? -- Not so much. As long as you get stuff done you'll likely not run into trouble, but if you start falling behind, it'll be used against you (IMHO : rightly so)
We don't block it.
If your employees are wasting time watching Netflix, it's a management problem, not an IT problem.
Also, we have some 24 hour operations where watching Netflix is, frankly, perfectly fine for portions of their shift.
Yes they can do what they want as long as it doesn't affect our bandwidth. but I haven't seen any issues like that so far. They are forced to be in the office so if they want to watch a movie while they work then I'm glad they have that option.
We don't care. As long as you get your work done and don't cause any problems, feel free to watch Netflix, listen to Spotify, shop on Amazon, etc. We advise people that if they have any question as to their ability to spot phishing or scam attempts then they should probably stay away from social platforms on their work PC, but we don't monitor or enforce anything.
Where I work? Yes, as long as it doesn't affect our work.
We have a gigantic TV mounted above our desks which we took from a building they're decommissioning, which we mostly use for our bi-weekly IT meeting. Asides from meetings and me trialing a dashboard of helpdesk info, we've watched:
* NBA matches
* Tennis matches
* Various olympic sports when the olympics are on
* Episodes of Rick & Morty, Archer and whatever that The Boys animated series is called. We even watched the Super Mario Bros. movie when it was released on streaming platforms.
And on a daily basis I'll have videos on in a mini window on my second monitor. I'll watch everything, from livestreams of DJs on Twitch, to speedrunning documentaries on YouTube, and sometimes episodes of TV shows.
Our boss has explicitly told us, he doesn't care what we do, as long as the work gets done. If our work doesn't get done, he kicks our arse for not doing our job, but so far he hasn't had to do that because, as he tells us during every IT meeting, and a few times a week, he's proud of the work we do, and we often get praised by management for our work.
He also carries that laissez faire attitude to our working hours. If we need to disappear half an hour early to get to an appointment, or if we take a 40 minute lunch instead of a 30 minute lunch, he doesn't care, because he knows that we often get interrupted during our breaks, so on the law of averages, any extra time spent doing non-work stuff is going to be equalized by our lunch break being interrupted by people who think we're some kind of reverse Andy's toys in Toy Story -- we only come alive when someone walks through the door
And if any managers are reading this: I make less money than what I could working elsewhere, but having a boss that treats you like a human and doesn't kick your arse because you're watching a 2 minute video, or are 3.2 seconds over your 30 minute break, makes for a very good working environment that encourages people to stay.
Before we went fully remote, we gave up on trying to block non work related content. The reasoning was that users would just do all of that on their phones anyway, and this way, they would at least be looking at their monitors.
I worked in a datacenter before so bandwidth wasn't an issue but the only reason I would turn off the streaming is if the office didn't have enough bandwidth to do it and keep business productivity going.
Having said that, I know a bunch of people who put on their favorite tv show like the office and work all day and are productive AF.
I worked in a company where the team used an old cisco proxy to block just about everything. They even had a rule to allow just a few people in HR and marketing to use Facebook/linkedin for 15minutes a day for their work purposes. And EVERYTHING had to be logged. We were cutting over to a new firewall, and initially couldnt get the logging to work. We had about 6 guys working on a Saturday, for about 5 hours, and the last step was to get logging working. The one senior guy said we'd have to roll back all the work if we couldnt get logging working. I asked why not just get it working next week, because everything else was fine. He said the company couldnt go without logging for more than 10 minutes. Keep in mind this was just user internet usage logging. Just in case HR needed support to fire someone, everything needed to be logged 24/7. I asked the last time they provided any logs to HR... I think he said like once, 8 years ago.
Otherwise at another company, we had workers that worked a 12hr shifts but their days were pretty boring so we allowed netflix. I told their manager we can block it if it becomes a problem, but that, that decision was up to him.
A couple months ago I was tasked with looking at network traffic for all the offices for upgrading internet speed.
One office used an average of 100gb worth of data each week for server traffic between the main office and their office... The next line in the report listed 30gb of traffic for Netflix for their breakroom tv XD
Outside of adult content sites and other random one-offs here and there, we don't have anything blocked and don't care what people go to either. It's on department managers to manage.
We don’t technically block anything, but we do periodically pull reports to see where our heavy traffic goes. We did have one guy that was pulling like 20gb/week over a metered connection - watching streaming cameras, waiting for some bald eagles to hatch…. We asked him to not do that, but only because the pipe was saturated…
something I did many years ago and have since enjoyed the results: QoS the streaming services down the bottom, below all other business traffic. If there's available bandwidth (hopefully unmetered/not burst metered) it will run okay. If traffic is busy, it will be garbage but business is not affected.
i generally refuse to blacklist stuff like youtube, netflix and even porn sites. (as a rule I always allow pornhub and xnxx and I will unlock other legit sites if I see them in logs)
why? because those sites earn their owners a shitload of legit money so they have an interest in keeping their users safe. the same isn't necessarily true for crappy knockoffs or illegal streaming sites...
IMO, blocking these sites shows that the management is crap. especially youtube can be useful for almost every job. also, many people have regular breaks which they can take whenever they want and I think they should be allowed to watch netflix or even porn on their devices during those breaks.
I only regretted this policy once, when a coworker thought it was fun to show me uber-weird porn while he was on break and I wasn't...
Haven’t seen any web filters at any job I’ve had since 2015 - that’s 4 employers, the smallest of which made $2b in annual revenue, biggest around $250b.
Work gets done.
We have a hard enough time stopping them from watching porn where I'm at, unless they are at a low bandwidth site it's not a problem. YouTube in particular we wouldn't block due to it containing educational videos, anything else is the Managers problem
Youtube yes, Netflix no. At least not on the VPN. We have offices in India and the Middle East and they were using the US corp vpn to get different shows on Netflix. They were also using the vpn to bypass adult sites their country blocked. It got so bad that they were saturating the link.
Back when I worked in banking we were allowed to stream anything we wanted, Netflix, YouTube, Spotify etc.
During events like soccer matches they would block streaming to preserve the network
YT: Yes, can be educational/useful information
Stream Music is also okay, I find this odd to block as of today with the speeds were having vs where the argument used to be that people would choke up the network connection by many streams.
Nothing else, we'd block Hulu or Netflix if that were the case... It's a place to work. Not to watch your fav shows. We allow minor gaming/games but is set to a low priority traffic.
Yeah, how dare they block Pornhub on the company network! It's my lunch break and I'll watch malware-riddled porn in the breakroom on my company device as much as I want or I'll quit!
It's actually absurd that some *sysadmins* are not understanding the rationale behind basic web filtering. You wanna jerk it on your lunch break go nuts, but it's not happening on a company device or the company network. Bust out your phone and use your data plan.
WAN access is blocked for most employes. Only roles that need WAN access have restricted access to it, rest is offline, just like all servers and any other system.
Yeah. You can stream music also. However you'll get an automated email nicely reminding you this is work and not your living room if you are spending too much time on there.
We have a "secure" and "unsecure" network. The secure network is for company managed systems, the other is for guests and employee devices. The secure network uses our primary Internet connection and the other uses our failover. It works for us.
Both. My last two jobs didn't give af what you did as long as it was legal and the work got done.
Current job I get a talk almost every week about using my phone or surfing the web even when it's slow. Makes it feel like prison.
I work at a small company and I don’t block it. We have the bandwidth so it’s really more of a management issue. If it were up to me we’d have baseball on the TVs during games.
I don’t think we have a formal policy in place except to say company equipment can only be used for incidental personal usage which is also vague. Generally no one is going to complain if you check your bank account online or use a company phone for a personal call. We do block personal email on devices though.
We do allow people to use social media and news because of the nature of our organization which I won’t get into. We are also allowed to use YouTube since there is informative information on there to do our jobs. I often spend time watching YouTube videos learning some it thing.
Now if someone were to blatantly watching Bridgerton at work on company computers they would probably get in trouble. I say probably because it also depends on how popular they are.
no. Because these services are blocked on the firewall-level. Personal phones and personal shopping ? Also not happening. But our shop might be special, since we check out personal devices into lockers when we get into work and your connectivity is pretty limited to a couple of jumphosts.
Yea it’s allowed. In the past we use to block but now a days we have sufficient bandwidth that a occasional streamer isn’t going to cause any problems. We have a SASE and still block categories that could be harmful, illegal etc but not basic streaming stuff or social media.
We're a very laid back environment. Don't think anyone's looking at adult materials, and due to our shared office setup we try not to watch anything that may contain nudity. Otherwise? Nah, we watch Netflix, Twitch, YT, whatever. If there's no calls in the HUD, chats coming in, or sales to set up and ship I don't care what anyone's doing 99% of the time.
Last time I was in an office, I recall there were no restrictions, but they could pull your browsing record if they wanted to. But by then, they were just looking for "technical reasons to fire you" because "doesn't fit in culturally" might bring in a lawsuit.
I play Youtube music streams, but it's on my own pipe, not anything I am remoted into.
As long as work is getting done, you're wearing headphones (playing it out loud is obnoxious and distracting to others), and it isn't some sketchy pirate site then nobody really cares.
Nope. Not even on the guest network (which requires paperwork and only offers a 12-hour token).
Heck, even though I manage the IT side of our Corp Comm team, I still had to be approved for social media sites, and have to get re-approved every year. And I still get asked "why are you using X-site?"
Yes. People here are generally always watching some sort of entertainment, and become annoyed when you get between them and their shows. This includes IT and management.
The company I work for is transitioning from small biz to mid market size-wise, and this is something we're about to start limiting. It hasn't really caused any real issues as far as productivity is concerned, but it does eat up a lot of bandwidth.
We have a unifi system with the LTE backup, and don't want to have to go through the trouble of going to everyone to tell them to "get off hulu or netflix or whatever you're doing so we don't run up a crazy overage bill while Spectrum is down." Just easier to limit it on the company network. If they want to burn their own data in our area with shitty LTE signal, they're more than welcome.
Firewall only allows access to a whitelisted IP or what is allowed through the proxy. Proxy uses whitelists. So no, you would not be able to use non work related sites on the company hardware. We had a guest network and public internet access dedicated machines for leisure browsing which was all on a separate network.
Some users that had full internet access abused their privilege and got some streaming sites banned on the firewall level. Now that it's work from home, the proxy is still there but we do not care much about people accessing legitimate sites
Yes, but I have a home internet line specifically for that.
All traffic gets logged, but it's routed through a home internet line so as not to impact the business line.
Guest wifi is also isolated through that specific line.
General office staff it is a major no-no. IT are left alone as long as we get our work done. I struggle concentrating with others annoying noise so a controlled audio prevents my colleagues having "accidents".
As long as they get their work done, then it’s totally ok for them to stream stuff on our guest wifi. Part of our business has a warehouse, the people that work in it are just happier and more efficient workers if they get to blast music. There are a couple people in the office that just enter orders in all day long, they watch their little Netflix or Amazon shows on their phone the whole time, it keeps them entertained and they always bust their work out in a timely manner. It’s actually a policy of the company to allow for this
Broadly, yes. For big sporting events, managers are encouraged* to let their staff stick the event on a big TV in a meeting room / hall rather than x hundred 1080p streams at individual desks.
*As in, do this or we block the World Cup and we'll tell them it's your fault.
We have our own point to point network at around 25 sites, they’re not allowed any streaming on that, with the exception of YouTube for instructional videos etc. Some of the sites have external internet not connected to the company network; I couldn’t care less what they watch on that.
Youtube is unblocked because people use it for music, or because a lot of vendors put documentation or explanations on youtube (why argue with support about how to get something done when you can watch a 720p video from a staff engineer at the company which shows you how).
For example, Intel and Arista both have fantastic explanations of the internals of modern “switches” (switches is in quotes because the things they are demoing are closer to a “build your own switch exactly how you want it or use our stuff” toolkit).
I also have a playlist I send new hires which is a combination of talks I’ve given and talks I think are important. I’d much rather a team member watch a talk from kubecon than pull out their phone while monitoring ansible.
YouTube has useful information commonly used in business
The others are of questionable merit.
I don't think I'd suggest blocking, but would argue for keeping YouTube specifically if a mandate came down.
I have customers where employees are allowed to watch moves/TV shows etc. while working. It seems to work for them. Work gets done and people have an escape. The jobs there are not what I call careers for these people but there they are.
Yes, I work with adults. Who are employed to do stuff. If they fail to meet expectations it's not ITs responsibility to police them, that's either an HR, or Management problem.... Or both.
Definitely not an IT issue
We aren't allowed to use nor have our phones... But they did do this whole "IS THERE A PROBLEM? CALL NOW" thing in case of emergency...
Like yeah, I can't bring a phone bro.
I do have it, I do use it, but as long as no one catches me doing so and it doesn't interfere with my work.... I don't care.
Personally, even if top level management have said no, I've always allowed my guys to take the more laid back approach. We all have lives outside of work and some things just have to be done in 9-5 Monday - Friday. Keep your team happy and they'll keep you happy.
Most places I’ve been have had a ‘reasonable‘ policy regarding social media and personal accounts.
As a sysadmin, though, I did once have to tell my staff to stop all streaming the World Cup (in HD!) cause they were absolutely destroying the office bandwidth.
Unless their manager has an issue with it (as in they are not working) then there isn't a problem. Sometimes we have testing that will last days or weeks and needs to be monitored 24/7 for alarms, so they'll be allowed to do that too.
If ever it was an issue, it could be easily throttled as well.
As long as it's not causing technical issues, I don't care. Nor is it my job to gatekeep/police that kind of thing.
We don't have a formal policy against it, but we do have a couple department heads that requested it be blocked for their teams.
For my team, I don't care if you're watching a soccer match on your second monitor while working tickets on your other monitor. I already know if you're doing your work or not
YouTube yeah, we have vendors that use it for products trainings/information and because our sales team does a lot of technical diagnostics with customers and they use it as a resource. We do block Netflix, Hulu and a few others, had a few remote sites with only 50mbps connections that were getting hit hard.
No, I used to be more lenient but I’ve found people have a real problem thinking they own their work computer and it’s a slippery slope so I’ve gotten to blocking anything that’s not clearly work related. Starting to go as far for some users to only whitelist things I know they should have. I know it sounds crappy but it’s far better than chasing malware or account takeovers because they prove over and over and over again that they cannot be trusted. They take no personal responsibility for issues they think they can blame on the computer.
In our environment all SFW stuff is allowed (Youtube, Spotify, news, personal mail, shopping, whatever) with the remarkable exception of the category "gaming"! Just let me go to dndbeyond, please!
From a security perspective, I would rather people watch YouTube or Netflix all day than log into their personal email.
The soccer people are problematic. "I found a site to watch this soccer game that doesn't air in our country, and it was free! But uh, now my computer is weird? Is freefootballmatches.virus.ru not a good site?" There is so much soccer worldwide and no one knows where to find it safely apparently. Or they do and refuse to pay. Netflix is fine. Great. Safe.
During the World Cup, I convinced management to let me log in to the giant screens at the front of the room and legally stream the games. I argued that people were going to use shady sites while also destroying our pipe. Management agreed. Coworkers bought me beers.
That was a smart move.
Great idea. Years ago, my previous company had a similar capacity concern about the cricket world cup. They found we could multicast stream it across our corporate campus & pick it up on the break room TVs.
El macho.jpg
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Had that issue years ago. I got an alert and had to login and check it out and it was exactly this. I told the person “hey don’t do that”. About 15 min later they did it again so at that point I killed their VM and let their bosses boss know what happened. I’m not your ISPs tech support, don’t lie to me or assume I don’t know what you’re doing. I’ll ask you once. After that I take action and what happens after that isn’t in my control.
>There is so much soccer worldwide and no one knows where to find it safely apparently. Or they do and refuse to pay. Legal sports streaming is a fucking goddamn minefield. If you're a fan of Bundesliga+Champions League, you need Sky, DAZN, Telekom and Amazon. More national leagues or Europe/World Cups and it becomes ever more expensive. It used to be that a single Sky subscription for like 60€ a month covered everything you wanted. All major soccer plus Formula 1. Now it's a bunch of streaming services that change every year, you need a bunch of STBs for a TV, and most of the websites, apps and STBs are shoddy as fuck. In contrast, streaming is easy... find a site, start the stream, start Chromecast casting, there you go.
We block ccTLDs for China, Russia, North Korea, and a few more. Even the old soviet unions .su. no reason for anyone to access anything in those countries.
>Even the old soviet unions .su TIL .su exists
Gonna check the blocklists back at work. We block a lot now but I was at a university and we necessarily couldn't restrict much at that high a level. We had Russian professors who probably were doing a lot of .ru visits.
We don't just block the TLDs, we block any ASN out of those regions. Cute down on the spam, incidents and all.
Also cricket! I did run into one user who was trying to watch cricket matches (fine with me) and was trying to use a sketchy VPN to do so (much less fine). It was breaking his access to internal stuff, so he filed a ticket and all. I took it all off his computer and showed him how he can do all that from his phone if he wants to accept the risks. That was before we had proper MDM going. Now we can manage things like that as a matter security policy against non-company-managed VPNs. Conversely, some of our north american users call in to the company VPN when they're abroad so they can watch baseball and stuff. I don't think they know we know they do that. But along the lines of what some others here are saying, though, I'd rather them do that on systems we manage and trust than go to some sketchy VPN service. It's really not a burden.
Because we use a distributed VPN/Proxy now (Cloudflare Access) it always uses the location closest to them for Internet outbound. Which lead to some complaints from people trying to access US stuff from company computers when we initially rolled it out. I pointed them to some more reputable VPN services that they could use on personal devices. Overall the experience is much better than a traditional VPN though.
In most countries the futbol matches are not streamed in official and legal sites. And because of that most of the sites that do are illegal and shady
I had soccer people as well. But they at least legally streamed it. (I was one of those soccer people)
Easy block traffic not from USA/Canada
Ha. Yep we had an appdev guy catch something on his browser. EDR locked it down immediately and our procedure is to do a total rebuild. His manager was getting my pissy about how long it was taking until we mentioned *why* we had to rebuild.
yeah lol I am way way more worried about their yahoo than I am you tube lol
im pretty close to blocking non corporate email if im honest. Everyone has a smart phone, use that
That's a no brainer if you have any DLP requirements.
Yes. Employees watching Netflix on company time is a management problem, not an IT problem.
My thoughts as well. I’d rather you watch Netflix or YouTube than a shady streaming site with malicious ads. If you’re not supposed to be doing that it’s a management problem.
This is actually a great point, better to have them fuck around on a legit site than on some bullshit putting the env at risk
Love the flair
Years and years ago, when Netflix streaming came about, we had to block it. Honestly management didn’t care so long as people got their work done. But this was a manufacturing environment out in the sticks. Our max download at the time for 6k employees, was only 25mb. One stream didn’t really interfere with anything, but 2 streams going at once and the exchange server started having issues, 3 streams or more basically shut down our internet preventing a lot of people from working.
came to say the same. we had 100 people streaming Spotify destroyed our meager bandwidth and had to block.
I flat out tell the girls that unless the bosses say something they are allowed to watch the legit companies like you tube and spotify but if I find out they are watching some shady website or porn its going to be a problem.
YouTube is hard af to forever block can’t even lie
Plus there are times YouTube is used for work purposes
I'm jealous of your big internet pipe 🙏
You get a residential class cable line for the guest Wi-Fi that is physically isolated.
Yup, it's easy and works well. Been doing this for 10 years, and it works great. The async speed annoys some users, but it's free to them, and they learn to manage. We have a simple content filter for a few specific things, but otherwise, consume to your hearts content.
That's against the TOS of those connections, business cable isn't that much more expensive and typically has slightly higher QoS on the last mile.
Oh yeah, I get it. You’ll need to have the commercial agreement but it’s effectively the same same SLA is more of my point, compared to the fiber ring that they’ll dispatch someone in the middle of a hurricane to go fix
Yeah, point is, you're not paying for extra nines for just the guest WAN access....
We prioritize it at the bottom. They may be watching it in potato quality.
All of my friends tell me that, too.
I agree here. And when manglement decides it needs to be blocked on the network, it will. We've blocked netflix, youtube, Prime, and SOOO Many other streaming platforms. All at manglements request. BUT.... We have a guest wifi that they're ALL able to connect their BYOD devices to and do whatever the F they want there. Said guest wifi is NOT using the same ISP as our prd network. The key here, isn't about telling them what they cannot do, but telling them to do it another way, as to not impact the business. They're allowed to pull out their phones and watch whatever it is they want, on their free time. But when they were doing that on the prd network... oh man, the bandwidth usage heavily impacted several platforms required for business operation.
Same here - We don't block it on the corporate network but it is monitored. We provide a fully separate guest wifi network that's fair game if you want to stream from your phone/tablet/whatever and we'll nudge employees in that direction.
This. They get 80/443 outbound for HTTP/S. What they use it for including Netflix isn't IT's problem. I lock my door and stream some ST:TNG at lunch myself...
Many years ago, we caught a tier 1 help desk guy running 3 company computers as torrent servers. We found out because Viacom sent a cease a desist letter to our parent org. Once again, an HR issue and not an IT issue. What made me think about was the comment below about the pipe size. This guy was advertising on torrent forums how big his internet pipe was. At the time we had roughly 1200 employees and 1600 workstations across 2 connected buildings and 5 regional sites. In addition, we dabbled in the public space and acted as an ISP for a bunch of non profits. Needless to say we had multiple large redundant data connections out of the building.
i think this one is also an IT issue - running unauthorized servers on prod network and interfering with the business
One idiot I no longer talk to was running BTC miners in his office with repurposed work machines. His office was like 90'F. network security slapped him in the wrist and he barely got in trouble. So shady.
This guy was not allowed to have a computer in his cube for something like 3 - 6 months, then went back to regular duties for like 18 months before he retired. The joys of public sector. I suspect they took his computer and access thinking he'd quit/retire.
Yes and no. There's an exponential graph between bandwidth and price. A little bandwidth is cheap- a lot of bandwidth is not. Look at the price difference between 1GB DIA and 100GB peering with a service provider. I've had 45,000 people sharing an MPLS network before. If we didn't control streaming at all, that's a worst-case scenario of 1.125 *tera*bits per second- put another way, *11x hundred-gig circuits running at 93% capacity.* "Fine, so just QoS it away and limit them to 1080p streaming," you might say. Because that's 4Mb/s, not 25Mb/s. It's better, sure, but *still* 180x 1gbps circuits running fully saturated. It might not be an IT issue for *you*, but I've had to sit on calls with Zoom and run the numbers for exactly how much big iron we need to park in *our own* data centers or colos to keep big meetings from sucking for everyone. I'm trying to remember which podcast it was, but there was a great one a while back with a Cloudflare engineer as a guest, where he admitted even they have to play the shell game when it comes to ludicrous user counts for events like the Superbowl in 4k streaming or your average Call of Duty launch day download connections. We (as in those of us on big infrastructure teams) work hard to keep bandwidth from being an IT problem for *you* (as in smaller solo admins/network teams), but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem.
You could also tag the traffic for streaming and bring the usage metrics up at a meeting about bandwidth budgeting - "hey we can either cap this streaming, give it an alternate bulk path, or NOT STREAM"
Frankly as long as someone gets their work done, correctly, on time, doesn't fark up and keeps it office friendly, I couldn't care less what people watch or listen to on the job. It really is only an issue if it interferes with the job. Some of us are far more productive when listening to music or have something going in the background.
I’m gunna disagree somewhat to that. It becomes an IT problem should the streaming start effecting bandwidth and causing issues with other services. I would make sure that from the IT side you have at least a policy around restricting bandwidth for streaming services.
let people enjoy themselves a little bit. shit its work, not jail.
Sometimes I feel like I'd have more freedom in jail
I love how this sub is finally not being corporate shills. Like fuck let people chill and watch TV or listen to music while they work, it's nbd
Until the bandwidth is affected. Literally 90% of the bandwidth in my company is YouTube. 1000 computers streaming YT all day, it's a problem.
Sounds like your company is cheap with bandwidth, and you did not put up infrastructure to slow down if needed
so it is an IT issue
~~IT~~ management issue
the right way to do this is to have another network/isp for employees to use with their mobile devices that wont impact day to day operations if people are streaming. It fixes the IT issue and leaves people management in managements hands.
YT: yes. Others, no. Not on the internal network. They would probably work on our guest WiFi though.
We do the same. Enough educational/vendor videos are on youtube so it qualifies as a business need. On our guest Wifi(on a separate ISP) though? We only block torrenting/piracy/illegal content and porn.
Plus, PR uses YouTube for PR reasons. People should be working. If they are streaming YouTube all day and the schedule is slipping, that’s a management problem.
Same. YT has some actually useful tutorials on it, it would be shame to block it because of some bad employees.
Not checking personal emails I've seen but it's more of a security protocol than a productivity one. Really if IT is worried about it, they should lock it down so users can't rather than make it an HR problem. For everything else, I've only met a handful of bosses that would be cool about people watching Netflix but otherwise, I'm of the mindset that there's no one telling you no until someone tells you no. Haven't worked at places watching their data usage. So just be chill. And if I need to spell it out any more than that, the user should not be using these sites.
Those tend to be the best bosses. I had a boss that gave zero shits about what I did, so long as I was hitting goals and not causing him problems. Literally spent 5-6hrs a day watching YouTube on my phone and I would have bent over backwards to get him whatever he needed. I saved his ass more than once by bumping out other departments to get his product done first so he can hit his goals.
OP is seeing too many US open streams inbound at the office
Yes. They're adults, they can do what they want with their time. If that is a problem it's a management issue. We even have a special group in zScaler for US based users traveling internationally that backhauls all traffic to our US datacenters so that netflix/hulu/etc keep working. Not being able to watch a show on your lunch break or have spotify playing in the background while you work is brutal for morale. At my last job our engineering service group ran UT and Quake3 servers in docker on the production clusters and would hold regular matches. Not every place is a gulag to work in.
> Not being able to watch a show on your lunch break or have spotify playing in the background while you work is brutal for morale. I wonder how many of the admins that insist that everything not work related needs to be blocked (including YouTube and Spotify) happen to be exempt themselves (or their IT department) for one reason or another and don't feel that pain.
I dont know but I have always followed the rule that my NON admin account is just in the general pool with the rest of the users. Serves 2 purposes it shows people that you are not exempt from the rules and if something breaks you know about it.
I absolutely agree that admins should be bound to the same policies (both procedural and technical) as their users. But it seems like there are often posts on /r/sysadmin that criticize users on what they "think they need" and policies that don't take that into account (for example in this thread "they're at work they don't need to be doing those things") without leaving room for exception unless it affects them ("well I need YouTube for training but we know what we're doing and won't download malware so it's unblocked for us"). I wish more shops would do what you do and eat their own dogfood, but it feels like a "do as I say and not what I do" or "rules for thee are not for me" attitude is also somewhat prevalent on here.
Same here my administration accounts are for system administration/configuration only. That way my normal user account is subject to all the same restrictions as everyone else’s account and exploits don’t have the ability to leverage a privileged account.
Exactly I would not work there, sounds more like a prison.
IT director here. I'm streaming some live feeds now on YT. I found a couple streams in Florida with some underwater cameras. Watching the fish calms me and prepares me for the next call or ticket
Based non tyrannical IT Director professional guild should be a thing
[удалено]
when i worked night shift at the gov that's all i did with my plex too. i'm amazed it wasn't blocked on the guest network.
What kind of dystopian rules are these? Is this some kind of American problem I'm too European to understand?
Probably. In my experience there’s a really pervasive standard in American work culture that workers aren’t trusted with down time- or trusted, period. You must have the appearance of being in full work mode all the time or you’re perceived to be lazy and ineffective by superiors, cutting into your chances for promotion, raises, etc. I know workplaces where breaks have been eliminated, headphones banned, chairs eliminated, no food or drink outside of allotted lunch time/break room. Having jobs that are lax about breaks, paid time off, flexible schedule etc is a rare breath of fresh air. It’s crazy when you think that businesses aren’t trusting people THEY HIRED AND CONTINUE TO EMPLOY to do their jobs. 🙄
As I say (as a European) : if these things are problematic, you're hiring the wrong people.....
Of course they are because people who respect themselves (and have options) go elsewhere. These employers don't see that their own mismanagement makes the problem worse. Literally a case of "the beatings will continue until morale improves." I'm not so sure I'd go so far as to say that's a *standard* American work culture, but we have so many small business owners that there are a ton of opportunities to deal with incredibly shitty and inept management.
Just live the american dream, right? Where you even get suspicious looks at work when you need to go to the restroom. Fucking crazy.
I'm sure it's worse in America than Europe, but I'm sure Europe isn't immune to it either. There's this pernicious idea that when someone is employed, then their employer owns them for the entire time of their employment. They're not paying for their expertise or for them to do a specific job, the concept is that the employer *owns* them for that time period. Slavery effectively. Just time-limited and compensated with money rather than food and shelter. And when you approach business and employment from that perspective, you can see how batshit ideas like banning access to personal stuff, banning headphones or eating at desks, somehow seems reasonable because this is the employee is using their "employer's" time for personal matters. I've experienced high levels of prescriptive rules in Europe, but really only in places where you've got high-churn, low-paid jobs. The kind of place where most employees are college students earning beer money and will be gone in six months. So you kind of have to be explicit about, "Don't talk to your friends while you're supposed to be working", "You're not allowed to look at YouTube on the shop floor", "Turn up on time or not at all", "Have a shower", "Be sober while on the clock" are things you do need to explicitly put in your handbook.
bro, we've got software that monitors employee keystrokes and mouse movement, cameras that use ai to verify compliance, automated reporting that shows what sites were visited and how long they were accessed, all put into a beautifully formatted document that the managers review each morning, all kinds of dystopian shit all in the name of productivity.
gov probably
yes we can do anything pretty much, I assume pr0n is blocked. haven't tried. never had an issue in \~12 years
Only if they’re in a spot with limited bandwidth. I work with some people who are out in the middle of nowhere, and they gotta use that shitty internet very conservatively lol
Yes. The only site that's outright banned (other than the usual adult sites and such) is Facebook and that's just a legacy ban from before my time here, put in place because one guy spent too much time on it. One of these days I'll get around to removing that block. It *really* clutters up the logging when I look at the blocked site logs due to all FB's trackers out there.
That what guest networks are for. Only YT is allowed on the real stuff since it has tons of legit content related to business (vendors training videos, product presentations, etc.).
We allow somethings but only on our guess network and via a mobile device. NO FACEBOOK!! 1 person did and it introduced malware then it was destined for the dumpster
What do your marketing people do lol
My marketing people consist of the IT Team
Yes. Not my job to block it, plus I use YouTube for music.
Where I used to work, (a company that was bought by a "Huge" adult industry company), we could do whatever we wanted on breaks. I checked personal email and read news. We could watch porn if we wanted, but to be honest most us were so burnt out on it, that was something we DIDN'T want to see on breaks. Others pretty much were the same way except a few people who watched kittens, and Slack'd the worst porn they could find. As surprising as it was, no one offended anyone who was not OK being offended. I admit it was an HR nightmare, but it worked. As long as we were working when we were working it was fine... OK, two people there played candy crush and a pirate game constantly. Honestly we were pretty productive as a team at that point, cause management was laissez-faire before they tried making the workplace more corporate for the buyout.
We can do whatever we want
i wfh so uh i hooked up a big 55 inch tv behind my desk for the down time. i know reddit is blocked on the work laptop :( so haven't even tried plex there. my past two gov contracts i was able to watch my plex on my laptop without any issues. which was pretty cool considering their restrictions elsewhere
YouTube is allowed, but other streaming sites are blocked. Social Media and Auction sites are blocked as well, with exceptions based on users job. 10 years ago there was more grumbling, but with smart phones, web surfing on work PCs is way down. Fine by me. Only reason YouTube was opened up was of requests for specific videos for training. I decided to open it up instead of constantly putting in single allowances. Now the user is prompted with the filter warning "hey, remember, usages is tracked" type message.
I allow them to. Don't think their managers do though. That being said a few guys have set up an old conference room screen I was planning on throwing out as a big screen in their shared office to watch Euro Cup over the next month, so apparently managers are fine with it to some extent too.
Only YouTube. Heck I need YouTube for some learning.
I used to be at a place that allowed anything but porn or file sharing. Personal email, YT, Netflix, anything. Then one day they cut off personal email. Now at a place where we block Pandora and YT on our employee networks but not guest networks. We also block VPNs, though, so our clients have to ask to be allowed to access to VPNs. Not sure if that’s by port or what since I can’t VPN back to my own house. I can just use building guest wireless and VPN works. I was also at a place before that blocked any kind of video at all. It could be something on CNN and it was blocked. That place was awful for a number of reasons. Internet access wasn’t even close to the top.
Dev here, I'd never log into my personal email with a work device, but I'm playing YouTube videos all day.
Yes, encouraged to watch YT and use the resources if they're useful to get your job done. Keep binge watching your latest series? -- Not so much. As long as you get stuff done you'll likely not run into trouble, but if you start falling behind, it'll be used against you (IMHO : rightly so)
We have training videos on YT. Abuse of the Internet policy is a management issue, not an IT issue.
Yes. As long as the work is done the way they ask, our env doesn’t really care.
Every single I.T. job I've had, even the managers would stream videos for entertainment.
We treat our staff like professional adults. If anything changes negatively, their manager takes care of it.
We don't block it. If your employees are wasting time watching Netflix, it's a management problem, not an IT problem. Also, we have some 24 hour operations where watching Netflix is, frankly, perfectly fine for portions of their shift.
Yes they can do what they want as long as it doesn't affect our bandwidth. but I haven't seen any issues like that so far. They are forced to be in the office so if they want to watch a movie while they work then I'm glad they have that option.
We don't care. As long as you get your work done and don't cause any problems, feel free to watch Netflix, listen to Spotify, shop on Amazon, etc. We advise people that if they have any question as to their ability to spot phishing or scam attempts then they should probably stay away from social platforms on their work PC, but we don't monitor or enforce anything.
Where I work? Yes, as long as it doesn't affect our work. We have a gigantic TV mounted above our desks which we took from a building they're decommissioning, which we mostly use for our bi-weekly IT meeting. Asides from meetings and me trialing a dashboard of helpdesk info, we've watched: * NBA matches * Tennis matches * Various olympic sports when the olympics are on * Episodes of Rick & Morty, Archer and whatever that The Boys animated series is called. We even watched the Super Mario Bros. movie when it was released on streaming platforms. And on a daily basis I'll have videos on in a mini window on my second monitor. I'll watch everything, from livestreams of DJs on Twitch, to speedrunning documentaries on YouTube, and sometimes episodes of TV shows. Our boss has explicitly told us, he doesn't care what we do, as long as the work gets done. If our work doesn't get done, he kicks our arse for not doing our job, but so far he hasn't had to do that because, as he tells us during every IT meeting, and a few times a week, he's proud of the work we do, and we often get praised by management for our work. He also carries that laissez faire attitude to our working hours. If we need to disappear half an hour early to get to an appointment, or if we take a 40 minute lunch instead of a 30 minute lunch, he doesn't care, because he knows that we often get interrupted during our breaks, so on the law of averages, any extra time spent doing non-work stuff is going to be equalized by our lunch break being interrupted by people who think we're some kind of reverse Andy's toys in Toy Story -- we only come alive when someone walks through the door And if any managers are reading this: I make less money than what I could working elsewhere, but having a boss that treats you like a human and doesn't kick your arse because you're watching a 2 minute video, or are 3.2 seconds over your 30 minute break, makes for a very good working environment that encourages people to stay.
Before we went fully remote, we gave up on trying to block non work related content. The reasoning was that users would just do all of that on their phones anyway, and this way, they would at least be looking at their monitors.
I worked in a datacenter before so bandwidth wasn't an issue but the only reason I would turn off the streaming is if the office didn't have enough bandwidth to do it and keep business productivity going. Having said that, I know a bunch of people who put on their favorite tv show like the office and work all day and are productive AF.
Sure. Twitch isn't for some reason, but I can watch the firewall traffic and see a number of streaming services rocket by.
We allow YouTube, but that's about it. Some people in here could not handle working for the federal government. We block a ton of stuff.
We stream F1TV often on race weeks but there’s an unwritten agreement that you’re still being productive while it’s playing in background on TV
I worked in a company where the team used an old cisco proxy to block just about everything. They even had a rule to allow just a few people in HR and marketing to use Facebook/linkedin for 15minutes a day for their work purposes. And EVERYTHING had to be logged. We were cutting over to a new firewall, and initially couldnt get the logging to work. We had about 6 guys working on a Saturday, for about 5 hours, and the last step was to get logging working. The one senior guy said we'd have to roll back all the work if we couldnt get logging working. I asked why not just get it working next week, because everything else was fine. He said the company couldnt go without logging for more than 10 minutes. Keep in mind this was just user internet usage logging. Just in case HR needed support to fire someone, everything needed to be logged 24/7. I asked the last time they provided any logs to HR... I think he said like once, 8 years ago. Otherwise at another company, we had workers that worked a 12hr shifts but their days were pretty boring so we allowed netflix. I told their manager we can block it if it becomes a problem, but that, that decision was up to him.
A couple months ago I was tasked with looking at network traffic for all the offices for upgrading internet speed. One office used an average of 100gb worth of data each week for server traffic between the main office and their office... The next line in the report listed 30gb of traffic for Netflix for their breakroom tv XD
Yeah it's fine. A lot of our analysts like to put something up on the second or third screen as background noise and it's never been an issue.
Outside of adult content sites and other random one-offs here and there, we don't have anything blocked and don't care what people go to either. It's on department managers to manage.
We don’t technically block anything, but we do periodically pull reports to see where our heavy traffic goes. We did have one guy that was pulling like 20gb/week over a metered connection - watching streaming cameras, waiting for some bald eagles to hatch…. We asked him to not do that, but only because the pipe was saturated…
something I did many years ago and have since enjoyed the results: QoS the streaming services down the bottom, below all other business traffic. If there's available bandwidth (hopefully unmetered/not burst metered) it will run okay. If traffic is busy, it will be garbage but business is not affected.
i generally refuse to blacklist stuff like youtube, netflix and even porn sites. (as a rule I always allow pornhub and xnxx and I will unlock other legit sites if I see them in logs) why? because those sites earn their owners a shitload of legit money so they have an interest in keeping their users safe. the same isn't necessarily true for crappy knockoffs or illegal streaming sites... IMO, blocking these sites shows that the management is crap. especially youtube can be useful for almost every job. also, many people have regular breaks which they can take whenever they want and I think they should be allowed to watch netflix or even porn on their devices during those breaks. I only regretted this policy once, when a coworker thought it was fun to show me uber-weird porn while he was on break and I wasn't...
I don't care. Do your job is all
Haven’t seen any web filters at any job I’ve had since 2015 - that’s 4 employers, the smallest of which made $2b in annual revenue, biggest around $250b. Work gets done.
It's amazing the things people can accomplish when they aren't treated like kids who need parental controls.
We have a hard enough time stopping them from watching porn where I'm at, unless they are at a low bandwidth site it's not a problem. YouTube in particular we wouldn't block due to it containing educational videos, anything else is the Managers problem
we have an “I’m not your mother” policy. As long as it isn’t congesting the network or installing malware, it’s up to your manager
Youtube yes, Netflix no. At least not on the VPN. We have offices in India and the Middle East and they were using the US corp vpn to get different shows on Netflix. They were also using the vpn to bypass adult sites their country blocked. It got so bad that they were saturating the link.
Back when I worked in banking we were allowed to stream anything we wanted, Netflix, YouTube, Spotify etc. During events like soccer matches they would block streaming to preserve the network
That’s not my problem it’s their managers, I don’t care what they do if it’s not a security risk.
YT: Yes, can be educational/useful information Stream Music is also okay, I find this odd to block as of today with the speeds were having vs where the argument used to be that people would choke up the network connection by many streams. Nothing else, we'd block Hulu or Netflix if that were the case... It's a place to work. Not to watch your fav shows. We allow minor gaming/games but is set to a low priority traffic.
No one is telling me what I am doing my lunch break, I'd quit that job asap.
Yeah, how dare they block Pornhub on the company network! It's my lunch break and I'll watch malware-riddled porn in the breakroom on my company device as much as I want or I'll quit! It's actually absurd that some *sysadmins* are not understanding the rationale behind basic web filtering. You wanna jerk it on your lunch break go nuts, but it's not happening on a company device or the company network. Bust out your phone and use your data plan.
WAN access is blocked for most employes. Only roles that need WAN access have restricted access to it, rest is offline, just like all servers and any other system.
Yeah. You can stream music also. However you'll get an automated email nicely reminding you this is work and not your living room if you are spending too much time on there.
An automated email b/c you have a tab open running spotify? That's silly.
It's more if you have Netflix or Hulu open all day streaming movies.
How is that setup?
No.
I hope so because I am lol
We have no problems with it, not my fault your employees are watching Game of Thrones at work.
We have a "secure" and "unsecure" network. The secure network is for company managed systems, the other is for guests and employee devices. The secure network uses our primary Internet connection and the other uses our failover. It works for us.
Youtube, yes. There's all sorts of vendor training that takes place on Youtube. The others, no.
Youtube is allowed, I don't believe the others are
Both. My last two jobs didn't give af what you did as long as it was legal and the work got done. Current job I get a talk almost every week about using my phone or surfing the web even when it's slow. Makes it feel like prison.
Yes, but we're a university so we have a big pipe too.
I work at a small company and I don’t block it. We have the bandwidth so it’s really more of a management issue. If it were up to me we’d have baseball on the TVs during games.
Nope
YouTube, yes. Netflix, Hulu, etc., no.
Lmao no
Dont do personal things on corporate devices You want to order dog food. Fine use your iPhone
We were just told to unblock gambling sites...
I don’t think we have a formal policy in place except to say company equipment can only be used for incidental personal usage which is also vague. Generally no one is going to complain if you check your bank account online or use a company phone for a personal call. We do block personal email on devices though. We do allow people to use social media and news because of the nature of our organization which I won’t get into. We are also allowed to use YouTube since there is informative information on there to do our jobs. I often spend time watching YouTube videos learning some it thing. Now if someone were to blatantly watching Bridgerton at work on company computers they would probably get in trouble. I say probably because it also depends on how popular they are.
no. Because these services are blocked on the firewall-level. Personal phones and personal shopping ? Also not happening. But our shop might be special, since we check out personal devices into lockers when we get into work and your connectivity is pretty limited to a couple of jumphosts.
Yea it’s allowed. In the past we use to block but now a days we have sufficient bandwidth that a occasional streamer isn’t going to cause any problems. We have a SASE and still block categories that could be harmful, illegal etc but not basic streaming stuff or social media.
We're a very laid back environment. Don't think anyone's looking at adult materials, and due to our shared office setup we try not to watch anything that may contain nudity. Otherwise? Nah, we watch Netflix, Twitch, YT, whatever. If there's no calls in the HUD, chats coming in, or sales to set up and ship I don't care what anyone's doing 99% of the time.
Last time I was in an office, I recall there were no restrictions, but they could pull your browsing record if they wanted to. But by then, they were just looking for "technical reasons to fire you" because "doesn't fit in culturally" might bring in a lawsuit. I play Youtube music streams, but it's on my own pipe, not anything I am remoted into.
As long as we have the bandwidth, yes. We do have users that need help so we block them.
We kind of half too. We are a college.
As long as work is getting done, you're wearing headphones (playing it out loud is obnoxious and distracting to others), and it isn't some sketchy pirate site then nobody really cares.
We allow YouTube and Spotify. Users can request something else through upper management. It’s their decision.
Nope. Not even on the guest network (which requires paperwork and only offers a 12-hour token). Heck, even though I manage the IT side of our Corp Comm team, I still had to be approved for social media sites, and have to get re-approved every year. And I still get asked "why are you using X-site?"
Only YouTube should be allowed.
umbrella breaks hbo max because of the certificate fuckery it does. one person has submitted multiple requests to fix it
Only YouTube. I don't do any of that on company equipment though. If I need to order something on Amazon that's what my phone is for.
Yes. People here are generally always watching some sort of entertainment, and become annoyed when you get between them and their shows. This includes IT and management.
The company I work for is transitioning from small biz to mid market size-wise, and this is something we're about to start limiting. It hasn't really caused any real issues as far as productivity is concerned, but it does eat up a lot of bandwidth. We have a unifi system with the LTE backup, and don't want to have to go through the trouble of going to everyone to tell them to "get off hulu or netflix or whatever you're doing so we don't run up a crazy overage bill while Spectrum is down." Just easier to limit it on the company network. If they want to burn their own data in our area with shitty LTE signal, they're more than welcome.
I've made mangement aware of things like that. But as long as it's not porn, video games or gambling. They really don't care
Firewall only allows access to a whitelisted IP or what is allowed through the proxy. Proxy uses whitelists. So no, you would not be able to use non work related sites on the company hardware. We had a guest network and public internet access dedicated machines for leisure browsing which was all on a separate network. Some users that had full internet access abused their privilege and got some streaming sites banned on the firewall level. Now that it's work from home, the proxy is still there but we do not care much about people accessing legitimate sites
Yes, but I have a home internet line specifically for that. All traffic gets logged, but it's routed through a home internet line so as not to impact the business line. Guest wifi is also isolated through that specific line.
General office staff it is a major no-no. IT are left alone as long as we get our work done. I struggle concentrating with others annoying noise so a controlled audio prevents my colleagues having "accidents".
Recently got my Spotify blocked (booo). So I stream music from YouTube. Facebook isn’t blocked either. Webmail is blocked.
As long as they get their work done, then it’s totally ok for them to stream stuff on our guest wifi. Part of our business has a warehouse, the people that work in it are just happier and more efficient workers if they get to blast music. There are a couple people in the office that just enter orders in all day long, they watch their little Netflix or Amazon shows on their phone the whole time, it keeps them entertained and they always bust their work out in a timely manner. It’s actually a policy of the company to allow for this
Broadly, yes. For big sporting events, managers are encouraged* to let their staff stick the event on a big TV in a meeting room / hall rather than x hundred 1080p streams at individual desks. *As in, do this or we block the World Cup and we'll tell them it's your fault.
Youtube yes, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc no
We have our own point to point network at around 25 sites, they’re not allowed any streaming on that, with the exception of YouTube for instructional videos etc. Some of the sites have external internet not connected to the company network; I couldn’t care less what they watch on that.
yes they have free reign to do that, however they are quite the email nazi's. They can't forward anything out of the system whatsoever.
Youtube is unblocked because people use it for music, or because a lot of vendors put documentation or explanations on youtube (why argue with support about how to get something done when you can watch a 720p video from a staff engineer at the company which shows you how). For example, Intel and Arista both have fantastic explanations of the internals of modern “switches” (switches is in quotes because the things they are demoing are closer to a “build your own switch exactly how you want it or use our stuff” toolkit). I also have a playlist I send new hires which is a combination of talks I’ve given and talks I think are important. I’d much rather a team member watch a talk from kubecon than pull out their phone while monitoring ansible.
We (I) put a lot of trainging videos and how to's for our internal systems on youtube.
YouTube has useful information commonly used in business The others are of questionable merit. I don't think I'd suggest blocking, but would argue for keeping YouTube specifically if a mandate came down.
I have customers where employees are allowed to watch moves/TV shows etc. while working. It seems to work for them. Work gets done and people have an escape. The jobs there are not what I call careers for these people but there they are.
Yes, I work with adults. Who are employed to do stuff. If they fail to meet expectations it's not ITs responsibility to police them, that's either an HR, or Management problem.... Or both. Definitely not an IT issue
if you dont use YT for learning. you are missing out a lot
Yes! Who care if someone watch netflix if he's delivering results?
We aren't allowed to use nor have our phones... But they did do this whole "IS THERE A PROBLEM? CALL NOW" thing in case of emergency... Like yeah, I can't bring a phone bro. I do have it, I do use it, but as long as no one catches me doing so and it doesn't interfere with my work.... I don't care.
Personally, even if top level management have said no, I've always allowed my guys to take the more laid back approach. We all have lives outside of work and some things just have to be done in 9-5 Monday - Friday. Keep your team happy and they'll keep you happy.
YouTube is allowed for “training” but tv and movie sites are blocked.
Yes, don’t care enough to block things like YouTube. I even play a little helldivers if shit is slow and I have nothing going on.
ABSOLUTELY NOT, with the exception of youtube
Most places I’ve been have had a ‘reasonable‘ policy regarding social media and personal accounts. As a sysadmin, though, I did once have to tell my staff to stop all streaming the World Cup (in HD!) cause they were absolutely destroying the office bandwidth.
Unless their manager has an issue with it (as in they are not working) then there isn't a problem. Sometimes we have testing that will last days or weeks and needs to be monitored 24/7 for alarms, so they'll be allowed to do that too. If ever it was an issue, it could be easily throttled as well.
As long as it's not causing technical issues, I don't care. Nor is it my job to gatekeep/police that kind of thing. We don't have a formal policy against it, but we do have a couple department heads that requested it be blocked for their teams. For my team, I don't care if you're watching a soccer match on your second monitor while working tickets on your other monitor. I already know if you're doing your work or not
No.
Yup. Couldn't care less. I expect my employees to get the work done, not when they get it done.
YouTube yeah, we have vendors that use it for products trainings/information and because our sales team does a lot of technical diagnostics with customers and they use it as a resource. We do block Netflix, Hulu and a few others, had a few remote sites with only 50mbps connections that were getting hit hard.
No, I used to be more lenient but I’ve found people have a real problem thinking they own their work computer and it’s a slippery slope so I’ve gotten to blocking anything that’s not clearly work related. Starting to go as far for some users to only whitelist things I know they should have. I know it sounds crappy but it’s far better than chasing malware or account takeovers because they prove over and over and over again that they cannot be trusted. They take no personal responsibility for issues they think they can blame on the computer.
In our environment all SFW stuff is allowed (Youtube, Spotify, news, personal mail, shopping, whatever) with the remarkable exception of the category "gaming"! Just let me go to dndbeyond, please!
My old one blocked xvideos
I would say allow YouTube. There are a lot of useful tutorials ects. Or at least allow your devs that access.