Re: Proof of personal Internet Usage

Big Dave wrote:
Evening All,

I've had a friend contact me regarding a disciplinary problem she is
facing....

IT have told her departmental head that she has gone over the 17 hours
a month limit for the internet.

Now her boss has received a printout of the times she was on the
internet and a printout of all the sites that she visited. The
majority of the sites are links to images either in emails, images
linked from one site to another or pop-ups.

Now there are about a dozen that she visits in her own time and about
the same she uses for research as part of her job.

No one can tell her what time she visited these sites so they have
just assumed that she spent the majority of time on the personal ones?

Unless they can prove that the majority of the time spent on the
internet WAS on the personal sites have they got a case against her?

So what I have explained above make sense?

Do they have a case against her?

Regards

Big Dave

Realistically speaking, unless she needs to log into a specific profile to
access the internet, I don't see how they can accurately measure the time
she spends accessing it.
The only way they have of tracking her webactivities is through proxy server
log entries on her login. That will only show traffic to and from her
computer to the outside internet.
Those logs will show what pages she has viewed, and what requests for
resources such as images, embedded media files, cgi scripts, and other
things that the page requires to display correctly, along with the size of
the files in kb/mb.
This will give them an idea of her bandwidth usage, but I still don't see
how it can give an indication of time spent online.

For example, when you load a webpage, the page and all it's associated files
will download, usually in a couple of seconds.
You might then spend the next two hours reading that webpage, but that won't
show on any server, as it has already downloaded onto your computer.
The only way it would continue to show on server logs would be if that
person was watching or listening to an audio or video media stream, or if
the page had lots of adverts or content which kept refreshing or rotating.

On average, websites take between 5 and 10 seconds to load.
To hit the 17 hour limit, your friend would have had to download around 6000
websites.
That's assuming she visited 6000 different websites. The actual figure would
be a lot higher, because websites cache themselves on the local machine so
that they can load faster the next time you return to them. And chances are
your friend was making repeat visits to a lot of the same websites.

I'd personally ask to see the server logs and request that they demonstrate
how they have calculated she has exceeded her 17 hour limit. It seems very
implausible to me.


.

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