Comments on: Atheist Sites Blocked at Work: What Do You Do?

By: Pamela

Pamela — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 14:57:23 +0000

Some of you commentors are harsh. I’d hate to work for you or your company.

My org is great. No blocked sites at all. Very progressive, very lenient and laid back and we still bring in the big bucks and do our jobs without BB looking over our shoulder.

By: martymankins

martymankins — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 17:28:14 +0000

I am happy to report that my place of business does not block this site. Of course, I am one of the 3 people that control web access company wide, so that kind of helps.

As for the comments related to “when you are at work, you need to work”, I understand this and we do block sites like MySpace and Facebook and other sites that people spend hours on. I seriously doubt Friendly Atheist is a site people spend hours on (no offense, Hemant) and should never be considered as a site to be blocked, unless you are an uptight religious kook that labels this site as “occult”

By: InsertCotku

InsertCotku — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:54:40 +0000

I am proud to say that I recently started reading friendlyatheist.com because the military UNblocked it. GOGO Air Force!

By: MikeTheInfidel

MikeTheInfidel — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:58:36 +0000

Yes, Daniel, I have. You made no reference to them at all. Instead, you implied that people who surf the web AT ALL at work have no right to complain when the sites they want to visit are blocked.

I visit this site and others only during my lunch break. Should I be doing my job right now, or eating my lunch?

By: Guest Pest

Guest Pest — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:54:02 +0000

Why is there a Scientology “Dianetics” Flash advertisement near the top of this page? Perhaps it’s the real reason this blog gets tagged with the “occult” label.

By: Stephen P

Stephen P — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:03:24 +0000

I’m glad at least a few people think that you’re at work in order to work. I do sometimes spend a bit of time on non-work-related sites, if things are really quiet in the office, or at lunchtime. But I see no grounds whatsoever for complaint about blocked sites (unless they are blocking sites you need to do your job, which did happen to me once).

By: Philbert

Philbert — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:07:30 +0000

Atheist sites are blocked at your work: what should you do?

How about your job?

Hehe – true, and a good reason not to complain about such things at work in the current economic climate.

I would note, though, that some filtering software allows users to “suggest” that sites be tagged with a particular filtering category. Unscrupulous individuals might label a site incorrectly in order to get things they don’t like blocked.

If you can find out who is filtering the site, you can try to contact them directly. I’ve heard that Websense is pretty good at dealing with misclassification issues.

By: Miss Addict

Miss Addict — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:05:44 +0000

Hiya,

I had a similar problem at my work with the exact same “occult tag” I discovered using an RSS Reader like Google Reader will get around most web traffic blocking software

Only issue is that some blogs dont publish their whole posts in RSS however Friendly Atheist does So you should be able to get around this filter issue with a minimum of fuss.

Miss Addict aka an RSS Lurker

By: eL_sTiKo

eL_sTiKo — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:28:37 +0000

Looks like Websense has rendered the site text-only for me today, too!

Anyway, I was going to say:

Occult
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The word occult comes from the Latin word occultus (clandestine, hidden, secret), referring to “knowledge of the hidden”.[1] In the medical sense it is used to refer to a structure or process that is hidden, e.g. an “occult bleed”[2] may be one detected indirectly by the presence of otherwise unexplained anaemia.

The word has many uses in the English language, popularly meaning “knowledge of the paranormal”, as opposed to “knowledge of the measurable”,[3][4] usually referred to as science.

So… There’s blocking a site about REASON by saying it looks PARANORMAL…

Ha!

By: bigjohn756

bigjohn756 — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:48:16 +0000

Ever read the other comments, Mike?