Way, way back when I started this blog I ranted a bit about the seemingly capricious nature of my company’s internet firewall and the fact that I could reach some sites and not others, and two sites that seemed to have equally high futz-factor scores might fall on opposite sides of the divide, and how I was just sort of learning to live with it and regard it as sort of a challenge to map out teh interwebs both off-limits and on-.
But that was August, and this is May, and since then I’ve gone from working at my corporate HQ to working in a government office on government equipment attached to a government network, which means it’s not my employer’s IT policy I have to reckon with, it’s Pentagon IT policy. I don’t believe I’ve talked much about that, because it’s pretty boring: slightly more restrictive than my employer, but at least logical and consistent.
Here’s the thing, though, about IT policies (good ones, at any rate): they are constantly evolving, to reflect teh interwebs themselves. Maybe not rapidly evolving, certainly not as fast as the online universe itself, and much slower if the institution owning the policy is large and encumbered (like, oh, say, just for instance, random example, the Department of Defense), but if a huge trend emerges and persists, eventually the policy will catch up.
So today I tried to get to the Blogger home page and was informed that “Blogs and Personal Sites” are being filtered. Of course this information was presented as flatly and unsympathetically as if it had been the Law of the Landlines for as long as anyone can remember, but I got to the Blogger home page yesterday without a blip of protest from the Pentagon routers. This is a brand new development.
I am absolutely incapable of getting bent out of shape about this. Yes, I blog from work, but I know quite well that I shouldn’t. I can rationalize it in the context of the fact that the nature of my position gives me a lot of free time, and I never neglect the duties of my contract in favor of blogging, but bottom line I know that it’s personal use of taxpayer-funded resources and a pretty straightforward no-no. Apparently some time overnight it went from a discouraged, frowned-upon no-no to an outright banned no-no.
Well, maybe not so outright after all. The page in my browser telling me that blogs are verboten under acceptable use policies also features a button which I can click in order to start ten minutes of “quota time” during which, I guess, I can get to Blogger and its kin? Apparently I’m allotted 50 minutes which I can use in 10-minute increments, and I presume those 10-minutes need to be an hour apart or something. I guess I’ll find out, because of course I’m going to play with this quota functionality and see what it’s all about. It feels like it has a vague Orwellian creepiness about it, but that just means I won’t be visiting The Blog of Provocative Whalebone Corset Advertisements at work anymore, I suppose.
So I’ve written this whole post in Word and now I’m going to try to use quota time to connect to Blogger and post it, which means if you’re reading this I’ve succeeded, and later I’ll report further on how the whole thing works out.
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