Web Filtering

I've got a question for you... How many of you work in an Office environment, you work at a desk and you have a computer & paper work around you... if you don't, and you're sat at home reading this... DO YOU KNOW HOW LUCKY YOU ARE?... But if you do... have you got a draconian IT department?

I'm in an interesting place, because I have experience of a very nice, complimentary IT Department, they're good guys and work with us not against us... However, they do have some silly things... one of them is that they employ WebSense which monitors and tracks our web activity and stops us doing naughty things...

They say a picture speaks a thousand words, so here's one of WebSense in action, stopping me wasting company time browsing to www.TheHunter.Com

Now, I have no problem with them blocking this site, as you can see I can choose to allocate my daily quota time to looking at the site anyway, so all's fair in love and war... but what happens when I run out of quota time? What happens if I bypass this filter all the time? What efforts will I go to to get around this?

Now, I'm quite a tech savvie person, I can get around this tool of Ming the Merciless sat on his IT Throne above me, but I choose not to, because it's there for a reason, and recently the company I work for met just such a reason; we have a massive Virus out break, which cost us three down days! Or beau coup dollar as it's known in economic circles.

But, it makes me ponder, what lengths will someone with less morals (yay me) go to to get around such tools... I believe actually that instead of saving the IT Department a shed load of work load in checking us users are not going behind their backs, it actually makes their job harder. Because people are going to be going off of the beaten track across the savannah of bandwidth to get their fix of sites deemed unsuitable for work.