Question for computer buffs (scared my MN addiction could be rumbled)

[Northerner]

I only have acess to MN at work, up until today we could acess the internet just by clicking on internet explorer. Today for a while our internet was down and the PC man was here. He has gone round to everyone's PC, to give us our new instructions. WE now have to get authorisation to access the web, and a little box comes up with a Gnat box number asking for a password.

What does this mean??!!!!

Don't know the motivation for this, but if I was paranoid, I would say that they are out to catch people.

They will always have been able to tell which computer accessed what over the internet by checking against the ip address, however that does give some leeway for people to say "that was someone else on my computer". If you have to type in a password that only you know, that excuse is no longer valid.

So be careful.

What they are probably after is to catch someone who is accessing porn, which is normally instant dismissal, so would have to be very sure to catch the right person. It is still very OTT behavior so could be someone accessing something even worse.

But this is purely guesswork on my side and I don't know how much your company trusts its employees. Alternatively it could just be a policy to scare everyone into not abusing their internet access

So from the IP address they'll see Mumsnet, but can they see how long you are on for and if you are posting messages?

They will see "traffic", and how much detail depends on what monitoring software they have.

Generally they will see you have sent a post (but probably not the content), and will see it is in use as each page refresh or swap between pages will bring new information to your pc. If mumsnet was just on in the background they wouldn't see much happening.

However it will all be stored somewhere in a database so they could see wha happens over the course of a day or so.