looking at porn at work. One particular employee (no longer with the NSF) spent 20% of his time looking at porn and paying $40,000 on his credit cards for chat sites. Nature's blog refers to the NSF's porn-at-work problem as "systemic."
The ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee wants a full investigation of the extent of these abuses of government computers and taxpayer-funded salary before the NSF gets their fraction of the stimulus package... which will more likely result in the extra funding for NSF being cut out of the bill than stalling the stimulus package.
*sigh*
The very first problem I ever had in lab management was that an undergraduate I was supervising was using a lab computer to look at porn. I discovered this because it was his first day and he did not yet have his own account on the lab computers, and so he was using my login. I wasn't snooping on his activities, but the following day, when I began typing in a URL into my browser... a site that I hadn't visited, nor one that I thought was particularly work-appropriate popped up. It's apparently gone offline in the last 9 years, otherwise I would have provided the link. I quickly confirmed that it was a porn site, and since my PI was out of town, I decided to solve the problem by sending the undergrad a polite email that said that some sites are better viewed in the dorm than at work. The undergrad never referenced having received this email, and he got his own account, so I have no idea whether he repeated his salacious websearching.
When I asked the PI about it later, he said he would have not said or done anything about it. I don't think I overreacted, but what would others have done, especially in light of the computers having been purchased on federal grants?
Happy 2026 - Welcome back preventable diseases
4 months ago
2 comments:
I would absolutely say something. For one, that doesn't make for a nice lab environment and for another, that's just not something anyone should be doing at work, especially on the gov's tab. I can't imagine what people are thinking when they look at porn at work. Can you REALLY not wait until you get home? And if you work for the government, a university or most major companies, they have ways to flag that kind of activity in the system. I don't think it's too much to ask for people to keep their hands off their bits at work... unless your particular line of work demands otherwise.
I just don't get how people can think they aren't going to get caught if they look at porn at work. What they don't think the IT boys (and or girls) are going to know who it was or what computer you were using to do it on? I think you made the right call and I would do the same.
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