[wolverine876]

From another perspective (perhaps not popular here): How does allowing access to restaurant websites help the bottom line? What is the risk? One malware outbreak can be enormously damaging.

How much time should IT employees spend unblocking restaurant websites instead of, for example, developing new applications that increase productivity? Arguably, an IT employee who is spending time unblocking restaurant websites might be viewed as negative ROI for their salary.

And users have phones, so there is an easy workaround.

[donatj]

Not restaurant specifically, but I suspect the loss of innovation from the general chilling effect is pretty high. When I have trouble researching something, that’s money lost for them in time I am wasting, and potentially worse from the side effects.

Every time an engineer doesn’t look into something at all, because they know odds are good they’re not going to be able to, that’s potentially millions lost.

[GekkePrutser]

Yeah imagine a developer not being able to use stackoverflow or one of the many similar sites that just happen to have the bug that they're struggling with. Could cost hours of extra work.

[kortex]

It's not blocking restaurants per se. It's doing some heuristic based match and seeing entries on the site with words like "wine" "whiskey" "cocktail" and determines the website is "alcohol and tobacco" and bans or limits it.

Ran into this at $lastco, as a chemist. Used to look up alcohol water azeotrope charts and half would be on homebrew sites and got blocked.

I just used my phone to email the charts to myself.

[whatshisface]

>How does allowing access to restaurant websites help the bottom line?

Humans need to eat to survive, and one consequence of survival is that tickets are closed.

[GekkePrutser]

> From another perspective (perhaps not popular here): How does allowing access to restaurant websites help the bottom line? What is the risk? One malware outbreak can be enormously damaging.

Just visiting a website shouldn't be a major risk. Any code injection exploits can be mitigated in the proxy (those MITM proxies are not just for logging!). And proper patching.

Really if you run browsers so old that they can be exploited in this way you have a bigger problem than banning unknown websites solves.

[torstenvl]

Yes. Exactly. Which is why they shouldn't be blocked, forcing people to spend time and energy unblocking them.

[vkk8]

Indeed. Somehow people managed to eat lunch before the internet.