Posted on 01/22/2008 10:51:20 AM PST by abb
Topic: Memos Sent to Romenesko Date/Time: 1/22/2008 1:02:54 PM Title: Zell removes the Internet filters Posted By: Jim Romenesko
Memo to Tribune employees from Sam Zell
From: Talk to Sam Sent: Tue 1/22/2008 11:03 AM Subject: Censorship, the First Amendment and the Fourth Estate
Everyone, I learned on the first leg of our tour of Tribune's business units that some of them were filtering Internet content. I do not see how a member of the Fourth Estate, dedicated to protecting the First Amendment, can censor what its own employees and partners can see. I have instructed that all content filters be removed. You are now exposed to the dangers of You Tube and Facebook. Please use your best judgment.
Let's focus on what is important, and go for greatness. Sam
ping
Now that the filters are gone, the idiots might even learn why it is that they’re despised and on their way to being totally irrelevant.
***I do not see how a member of the Fourth Estate***
They really do think they are a part of the government.
LOL. Wonder how many had Free Republic filtered out?
New job benefit at the Tribune: free porn at your desk.
And in three months when one out of every ten machines has a root kit running on them and all the hard drives are filling up with porn, Mr. Zell will understand why CEOs shouldn’t make IT decisions.
Would that be funny if LA TImes employees check on FR they sue FR long time ago back in da day LOL!
Hey Monk or dead one of you have photo of that nerdy guy with terrorist asking what next bombing be
Post it here instead like LA Times employeee
Funny thing one of you posted it that one of terorirst post on E-harmony.com that was funny
I don’t think the decision of what employees can access should be an IT decision. It is up to IT to carry out the direction given by management in terms of what is blocked. I’m noticing a dangerous new trend of IT thinking they have a role in determining these sorts of policies. That’s bass-ackward.
IT should not be in the business of deciding who goes where and it should be a management decision. HOWEVER - since the filters were already in place I would hope that Mr. Zell at least asked the IT group what the ramifications of removing said filters would be before making his decision, since IT will be the group charged with cleaning up the mess.
"Let's focus on what is important, and go for greatness. Sam"
LOL. Wonder how many had Free Republic filtered out?
Knowledge is one of the ultimate powers in any organization. Control of that knowledge has been a dark secret of many if not most organizations.
Control of the computer system and then the internet allowed a few people to control the flow of knowledge into these organizations and then in the organization.
My wife and I were discussing this very issue this morning. The company I used to work for in the last ten years before I retired didn't want real information interchange re needs and realities from the customers and the sales reps. They lived in a dreamland where an elite group of about a dozen people in December of each year planned the entire next year with no real input from customers, providers, salesreps and observations about competition. Then, when those whacked out strategies went wrong, the sales force and support forces for the sales forces were blamed for reality. Anyone daring to point out the divergence of reality from the wet dream plans was placed on the heretic list. The organization my wife works for is in the process of decentralizing and putting the computer power in hands of people in the various offices that make up the organization. The young man now in charge of this program is fighting dogmas that were set up over 20 years ago by the power hungry witch, who set them up then and passed them on to her hand picked prince before leaving 10 years ago. Now the prince is gone and most of the home office drones of the witch and prince are gone. This week the young may be driving wooden stakes in the vampires left hanging around.
Apparently, the Trib, did the same to its employees and filtered out the realities of the real world.
A classic characteristic of a bureaucratic organization. It's human nature. Knowledge is power and humans crave power.
No filtering doesn't mean no logging. Just because there's no block on a given site doesn't mean that you can't be fired for accessing it every day.
Anyone can make a typo, accidentally hit a porn site, and then hit 20 more through pop-ups and pop-unders. But if you're hitting gambling and porn sites every day, it's gonna set off red flags.
That was my first thought.
Very true - and since every company has someone with nothing to do all day except pour over firewall logs, and run a dns lookup against every outgoing IP request to see what sites every employee is going to it should be a snap.
It's not going to set off any red flags if someone isn't watching. That's why companies place filtering software on their firewalls - to block and track who is requesting. Now I suppose you could run in tracking and alerting mode only, but he ordered the filters removed.
And yes, anyone can make a typo or follow a bad link - it happens to everyone and I'm not trying to say that all the employees are going to go nuts. I work for a company that doesn't have any filters in place and you would not believe the amount of time that has to go into re-imaging systems because of the amount of crap on them.
And lastly, I just voiced an opinion - I wasn't trying to pick a fight with anybody.
Nobody has a right or need to browse hardcore, play party porker, or "cyber" in the workplace. Aside from "hostile workplace" exposure, porn sites spread spyware and virii. Dude dumb enough to gamble real money online, is too dumb to employ.
Hang out at Emmit's, met a couple drunks fired for browsing porn at the Chicago Tribune printing plant, clearly immoral sites were uncensored.
No, I'm not one of them (the fired guys, I admit drinking at Emmits).
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