Silly story

The Dom Post reported:

Public servants illicitly downloaded thousands of applications – including shoot-’em-up games – on to Labour Department work computers, placing its IT system in danger.

Illicit sounds really bad, but merely means not authorised, and that includes 99.999% of applications. Those illicit downloads may have been Firefox browsers.

The breaches, revealed in a email obtained by The Dominion Post, could bring down computer systems and cause damage costing “hundreds of thousands” of dollars to fix, Labour MP Trevor Mallard said.

They “could”. They also could cost nothing at all. Trevor needs to learn not to get excited because of some IT manager’s anal retentiveness about what applications are allowed on a corporate network.

It also indicated staff were playing when they should be working. “You shouldn’t have time to play these games.” The email sent to Labour Department staff this month from deputy chief executive (business service group) Craig Owen said more than 2000 “unsupported, unlicensed and unauthorised” software applications had been loaded on to the department’s workstations.

I guess Trevor has not heard of meal breaks. Wait  didn’t he pass a law making meal and rest breaks mandatory?

Now the article tells us that the “thousands” of unauthorised applications are in fact 2,000. What they don’t tell us is how many staff do DOL have. If it was say 100, then maybe you would be worried.

It turns out they also have 2,000 staff, so on average each staffer has one unauthorised application – which could be a copy of a solitaire card game, to a copy of Firefox etc etc.

“This exposes the department to considerable risk including the threat of viruses and malware and having unlicensed software on departmental equipment.”

More than 400 of the applications were games, he said.

So only one in five staffers have a game on their computer. That’s pretty low I’d say.

A spokesman identified sci-fi game Halo and first-person shooter Doom as among the downloaded games.

They should place Doom on the server and unlock it during lunchtimes and after work. Nothing builds team morale like blowing each other up.

Some of the applications were work-related and nobody had been reprimanded over the downloads.

All non authorised software has some risk, but in my opinion best to have some flexibility in the system.