Top Ten “How To’s” Your IT Department Doesn’t Want You to Know
July 30, 2007 | No Comments »
The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) has compiled a top ten list of “How To’s” that IT Departments want to keep a secret. Along with the article is a video interview with a “security expert” from PricewaterhouseCoopers’s. The issue at hand (in a nutshell): should companies be able to monitor and/or limit your non-work activity in the office?
This seems to be a complicated issue that will never go away. I’m usually one to stand up for privacy and flexibility in the workplace. But then, it only takes one bad experience (spyware / virus / porn) for an employer to tighten up for a legitimate reason (even if often in an over-reacting way). In any event, see below for the video interview and the top ten workarounds:
*Update* We’ve updated the fake articles with today’s date and have made it easy for anyone to use this as a prank on office workers. “How to” at the end of the article.
A DJ in the Netherlands uses his Wii-mote (what fans call the Nintendo Wii’s remote control) to mix techno music at dance parties while a medical student in Italy has reconfigured his to analyze results from CT scans. More uses? You bet. A software engineer in Los Angeles controls a Roomba robot vacuum cleaner with his, and a formally trained conductor in Connecticut is showing classical musicians how to conduct a Beethoven symphony. The musicians use Wii-motes to control a digital section of an orchestra.
The apartment complex I live in forces me to use whatever Internet connection the whole complex is on. Since I moved here last year, it’s been a local provider until that company went bankrupt. Service stopped on January 25. Not to worry, the apartment complex switched to using Verizon DSL. But that service went live on March 22.
I grew up with the Webster dictionary as my guide to defining words. I remember homework assignments that started with “Webster defines…” followed by the definition of some term and a follow up question on which I would need to write a paper. Another classic use of Webster was at church. Someone preaching on love? The easiest way to begin is by stating “Webster defines love as…” and then moving on to a more eloquent expansion on the basic definition.
I’ve always been one to root for the underdog. In this case, I picked Musicmatch five years ago and even skipped out on the iPod craze by using another brand of digital music player. But for all my time spent with Musicmatch, I was somewhat disconnected from that group of friends big into using iTunes. So I decided to give iTunes a test run, and now I don’t think I can go back. Here’s why: