Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Sending out an S.O.S.

The, ahem, IT gurus here have decided to block access to webmail since last week. Until this idiocy is resolved, if mega-value readers wish to contact me during normal business hours, please do so here. (I have Gmail set up to forward to this account, but it doesn't seem to work so far. I suspect that it is clever enough to recognize that I also have my work account forwarding to my Gmail account, and thus refuses to get involved in a circular forward. Impressive, but not exactly what I want it to do.)

UPDATE: It turns out that this little exercise in backward-looking internet policy is being driven, not by the lovable people in IT, but by the internal audit and compliance police at the mother ship. I can understand why they would want to restrict certain communication channels in the interest of best practice, especially where those involved are conducting financial transactions, but that's not me. Looks like we have another example of a "one-size fits all" internet policy in need of some fine-tuning by job function and affiliation. No doubt I will have an interesting conversation or two with some important person in coming days, to explain why blocking sites like the Skype Forums is counterproductive for someone like me - who allegedly adds value by researching just this sort of thing...

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