From: rmtodd@servalan.servalan.com (Richard Todd)
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 95 11:03:53 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: SurfWatch for employees (ugh)
In-Reply-To: <199507180636.AA02056@ideath.goldenbear.com>
Message-ID: <m0sYGIp-00076GC@servalan.servalan.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


In servalan.mailinglist.cypherpunks Greg Broiles writes:

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>Web usage by users subjected to its reign of terror. :) WebTrack 
>is priced at $7,500 with an annual subscription to its list of 
>interesting (err, forbidden) sites priced at $1,500. The article in the

Bwahahahahaha.  You gotta admire them for sheer marketing chutzpah. 
Any internet-connected company is likely to have a firewall, with all WWW
access going thru a proxy on the firewall, and if I remember correctly, the
CERN proxy httpd can be set to deny access to whichever URLs you want; I 
suspect the other proxy httpds have similar features.  It takes hellacious
chutzpah to ask $7,500 for software that does what you can get for
free just by ftping to CERN's archives.  Barnum's principle does imply that
they'll probably find a buyer, though...

As for the wider issues involved in using this in a commercial setting, I'll
merely note that any corporation that treats its employees like children
will end up with only employees with the mental age of children.  This could
explain why much of the commercial software I see these days acts like it
was designed by a committee of retarded 10-year-olds.