[thrownawaynw]

I'm working for a tech firm in one of these two related areas. The idea of bringing the work computer home sounded good until IT added a number of high-bandwidth sites to the IT-mandated DNS blacklist software to keep traffic down for remote workers.

I could see things like Hulu and Pandora being less mission critical than other sites but then they blocked YouTube and, probably because google mixes domains a lot, gMail got caught in the net. People were not happy about that.

[mypalmike]

I don't understand the problem. Use your personal computer for personal stuff, and your work computer for work stuff. What am I missing?

[thrownawaynw]

I don't know either. The backlash has been really amusing.

It's ranged from engineers claiming they can't work without streaming music to backend office staff saying they need YouTube to help them understand how to work Microsoft Office.

gMail is an interesting edge case, though. I keep a tab open all day long as well as do probably a lot of people. But it's not for company business so it seems like that's not a place to complain. But people are.

Seriously, to any of you CEO/CTOs tuning in out there: the next time you're lining up a RIF just block Netflix for an afternoon and tag the people that complain to IT. There's your low-hanging fruit.

[scottmcf]

we're all mostly technical in here

why the hell are you logging into personal accounts from work devices

[blaser-waffle]

+1.

like sometimes you need to check something on your personal accounts, but that's usually a one-off to do with a private browser. anecdote: i applied to grad school and got a reference from my boss but there were some issues and had to log in to the school account to check things.

that said, unless you're in a secure or radio-free facility use your damn phone.

[radicaldreamer]

Can't you use a split tunnel to do this without a blacklist?

[thrownawaynw]

Not a VPN. DNS blacklist at the O/S level. Mostly as an antiviral/antiphishing defense.

Virtualbox gets around it just fine. =)

[swsieber]

Yes. OpenVPN makes it simple enough that I could figure out how to modify the default configuration I was handed.

[brown9-2]

Why does IT care about traffic to non-corporate sites on an employee's home network?

[koenigdavidmj]

Some of the FedRamp standards require a VPN and prohibit split tunneling (i.e. Spotify goes directly out to the internet and the VPN only exposes routes to internal company hosts).

[pedasmith]

AFAICT, most of them allow split tunnels for work VPN -- most work VPNs are set up to allow access to corporate resources, not block normal usage. Some places have very high security requirements.

[dudleypippin]

I’ll assume that they’re VPN’ing into work and their IT doesn’t allow split tunneling. As a result, all traffic has to flow into the VPN concentrator as a bottleneck.

[pmorici]

If the laptop is setup to route all traffic through the corporate VPN as many businesses do it doesn't just affect your home network.

[pts_]

Gmail on phone corp mail on vpn.

[zdragnar]

No split tunnel vpn?