So we’re in a bit of a budget crunch. Money is tight, and we’re trying to find ways to become more efficient. Salaries are being cut. People are facing layoffs.
But we can afford this:
The state of Vermont plans to spend $120,000 to buy Internet blocking software to prevent employees from accessing pornographic and other inappropriate Web sites while at work.
Really?
Look, I have nothing against stopping people from downloading porn with equipment purchased with my tax dollars, but… let’s be clear about this. The state already has software which can monitor your content. People do get fired on occasion for spending time at work surfing porn. But still, we apparently need to spend $120,000 on an outside consulting company to, I guess, be extra certain about it.
And let’s just remember: $120,000 for an outside consulting project is never just $120,000.
Can you say “Big Brother?” I agree the original “we know what you’re looking at” software should have been enough. $120,000 is two or three Human Service workers we could still be employing. At least some salesperson made his/her company some more money, and some paranoid, small person can now block the masses from what this person(s) deems harmful.
Why is the lounge so busy lately?…
Can you spell GMD, boys and girls?…
Who the hell looks at porn at work? Usually, porn watching often accompanies another activity which is most certainly something one can’t do in a cubicle. I don’t get it, as apparently some people are able to, er, pull it off.
Use exactly the same blacklist databases as everyone else, but add their own custom queries on top. If the state already has the ability to monitor internet use, then this outside contract will do only one thing: block a couple of more web sites, but probably no more porn.
Generally, these contract houses simply provide a service where IT admins from around the country can flag sites for blacklisting. Unfortunately, there’s often “collateral damage” – because some admins can be over-zealous or biased, so they will block sites unnecessarily, leading to the service blocking, for example, sites discussing breast cancer, because of they contain the word breast; or political blogs on one side of the political spectrum, but not the other; or the sites of software vendors they do not personally want their employers to consider. This overlaid data is distributed to ALL subscribers, so the sites blocked are blocked at all companies, not just the one where the IT admin was blocking things that did not need blocking. (I have had personal experience trying to get a software company unblocked. It’s a total pain in the neck, and there’s nothing to prevent re-blocking in the future.)
It’s a huge waste of money.
120,000 Bananas for something that will work only for those state workers who choose to allow it to work.
For 120,000K, the state probably gets a “better” product than your typical blocking software. Or maybe it doesn’t, who really knows the way this idiots fall for the marketing of consultants. Never underestimate a republican bureaucrat’s eagerness to spend $120,000.00 of our money on a product that doesn’t work as well as shareware, open-source software, a $200 Staples product, or a preexisting solution already in their desk drawer.
Assuming the software is so much better for the extra $119,750 (minus licenses) that the state pays for it, that basically translates into three extra clicks to access your favorite snatch site rather than the normal 2 mouse clicks.
This is not about filtering, this is about M86 finding an easy mark in David Tucker, commissioner of DII, and selling him a product that won’t work and which he doesn’t need.
Will someone please CHALLENGE this simplistic thinking and CHANGE the Douglas team’s naive wasteful spending.
No indication of what the update subscription fees will be. If it’s anything like the software our school district is forced to pay for, it will be a substantial fraction of the original cost. Each. And. Every. Year.
Nice. Nothing like spending local tax dollars to encourage local work, eh. Look, if you’re hellbent on wasting $120K on this futile exercise, could you at least use it as a stimulus package (no pun intended, given the context) and hire a local company to pretend to block whatever offends you, rather than send the money overseas?
If WPAACS (Watching Porn As A Civil Servant) is already a fire-able offense, then surely all they need to do is enforce the rules. Is wasting our tax dollars really the only thing they’re eminently capable of in Montpelier?