Banned from FT by my work!
 

*pout*

I just tried to get on this morning and got:
While I am contemplating emailing the websecurity address and explaining how flyertalk serves a legitimate business need, I'm not sure whether that will fly, considering that we usually only go to 2-3 conferences per year.

I'm part of a research group that has office space in a hospital. While I don't think we're strictly subject to all the hospital policies, all our network access goes through their firewall and thus their filters.

Has anyone else had a situation like this? How have you dealt with it? My first thought is to lay low for a while and hope someone higher up complains and access is restored (some of the senior doctors here travel a lot!). I can still read FT through an xwindow on a machine that is elsewhere on campus, but it's pretty slow.

*pout*

Ethan

Get a new job !!

Set up a squid proxy on your other machine and get to flyertalk through there.

http://www.anonymizer.com should do the trick. It's essentially a ready made proxy server...

That's okay... while I can get on FT from work now, we have just (today) been restricted from using Yahoo Mail and HotMail.

GREAT (not) for those of us who are frequently on the road for 5 or 6 day stretches. Oh, and our company policy restricts the use of our business e-mail for "business purposes only".

If the content firewall they run is any good then it will be able to block that kind of stuff too, plus any proxy traffic will get banned as well. These proxies are there for a purpose. And as the OP said, FT isn't really needed for work (a few trips). Corporate Internet access is far too often used for personal use, so for many emplyers it's only logical they block it. I'm sure many 100's of people post from work every day here.

Since the new computer system was put in at work, we cannot access any websites to collect mail - as in hotmail, or even sign on to our private mail servers (ntlword / btinternet - UK).
Also several sites where I was looking for an apartment in the US were blocked too.

So far flyertalk has survived (thank goodness else what else would I do in my lunch hour ? !)

Original poster here.

What an uproar! They blocked a ton of other sites today as well, including ebay and parts of yahoo. I feel really bad for some of the technologists that have night shifts with really low patient loads.

Anonymizer.com and nearly everything of its like is blocked by the web firewall as "anonymous proxies." The network security people are extremely anal - many ports are blocked at the firewall because of HIPAA privacy requirements.

Right now I'm sshing into a machine elsewhere on campus, starting up an xterm, and running mozilla through that. It's fairly slow - perhaps I'll investigate using a proxy on my home machine (though it has dynamic IP). I might also just switch to reading flyertalk with a text-based browser on an outside unix machine. Or I could just read it at home. ;-)

Ethan

At my old High School we were banned from Flyertalk. I have no idea why as the higher-up's usually only blocked us from porn sites or ones dealing with violence, I am not sure which one of those FT falls into.

------------------
DC-10's Forever!
"This is the weirdest Routing I've seen in all my 16 years"
-LGA Check in Agent upon seeing LGA-BOS-JFK-LAX

Get a Palm or a Blackberry. No need for proxies and neither device can be blocked.

you mean a wireless device? There's no wireless ethernet here. We're not even allowed to plug personal laptops into the network. Thanks HIPAA!

Ethan

I usually get my porn fix from FT http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/eek.gif

HIPAA is responsible for all sorts of nonsense but this isn't one of them http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif FWIW, there is no HIPAA mandate that prevents laptops from accessing hospital networks. Click here if you want to be informed about what HIPAA does and does not cover

I'm not a lawyer and not one of the ones responsible for figuring out what needs to be done about HIPAA. I doubt there is a HIPAA mandate that this be done, but our network guy mentioned that this would be happening soon due to HIPAA concerns. The impression that I get is that HIPAA is very vague and there is a great deal of confusion about what is required to be compliant.

To be honest, I'm not entirely convinced laptop restrictions are a bad thing. The firewall has protected us from most of the internet worms going around. Allowing people to bring laptops in and plug them into the network is a way that worms can get through the firewall.

As I see it, the ideal solution would be to have ethernet ports that were outside the firewall (or at least outside part of it), or to detect "outside" machines when they DHCP and treat them differently. Obviously they hospital would still want to block much of their access to the outside world, but access to the rest of the hospital protected network could be limited.

In any case, I'm not even an employee of the hospital - we just get space from them.

Ethan


[added]
In case anyone is interested, here is the website that I keep seeing linked when it comes to HIPAA:
http://www.hipaaadvisory.com/

[This message has been edited by ethanb (edited Feb 16, 2004).]

HAHAHAHAHAAH.... You have obviously never tried browsing FT on a Blackberry http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/biggrin.gif