I once sent a company wide email warning people about accessing inappropriate sites after finding that somebody had been accessing Rubbermaid.com - what you do in your own home is up to you, but don't follw your kink at work!

It turns out that Rubbermaid sells cleaning equipment!

So how did you sweep that one under the carpet?

Yep, 20 years ago I was doing some research into protocol stacks for a now mostly defunct telecoms company.

Boss says go onto freshmeat.com (which was like an open-source software site which I'd never heard of before) and there are some examples of things to look at... I rock up on a Monday and type in hotmeat.com and a whole parade of goatse like artwork filled the screen. Quite put me off my breakfast. Did own up immediately to IT about that...

I once sent a rather steamy love letter to my Boss, and a system status report to my girlfriend (now Wife). Thankfully, they both found it hysterical. No harm, no foul. An extra pint that evening helped :-)

Side note: Rubbermaid sells all kinds of things, not just cleaning gear.

It still puzzles me that anyone would access any NSFW sites from their work computer (except for mishaps with spelling). I mean, there usually are enough unattended and unlocked computers from colleagues around just waiting to be abused.

Why did all user accounts contain the browser history of his admin account?

Sounds fake.

Maybe this was long enough a go that there was only one account on each machine ie Windows 9x

Only if you are incompetent and didn't know how to configure Win 95.

But I guess it explains a lot if you worked in an IT department who were dumb enough to image 95 and install it on 100 machines with the same licence key and port sites stashed in the browser history.

With Win 95/98/Me you didn't need 1 licence key, the last 5 digits could be any number you liked. There was no phone home like today.

I worked for a company that made set top boxes to access the Internet before PC's became pervasive.

Occasionally, a customer would send back a box that "would not access a particular site".

They were unvaryingly a site of 'special interest'. 99% of the time the user content filter had not blocked them (it was not turned on!), but there was something dodgy about the sites HTML.

Other sites that the customer was not complaining about were used to stock the content filter that parents could turn on.

We had a lad straight out of University who was employed to test the content filter, but I'm not sure it was the plumb job he made it out to be.

Whilst at university, I vaguely knew a graphic designer who got a job working on the layout of these "speciality" publications, which he assumed was the ultimate job. It turns out he got bored of that kind of imagery very quickly...

"I worked for a company that made set top boxes to access the Internet before PC's became pervasive."

Eh? What country had set-top box Internet access before personal computers were pervasive?

There was a relatively common, 56k modem based STB pushed by a cable TV company in Ireland, a Unison Box, which were about a third or less of the price of a PC at the time. Lots of people got burnt buying those instead thinking it was a good cheaper option.

I've never got my hands on one to figure out what they ran but I'd guess WinCE on SH or ARM.

NTL provided mine, it was like teletext on steroids, all controlled by the, er, controller. About a year later they provided a proper box with an RJ45 on the back, into which I popped a linksys NAT router that would only work with my PC NIC MAC address cloned into it.

France did, sort of

Well, DUH!!! It was his assigned task! Get the content filter working. But don't visit any NSFW sites while doing it??? WTF???

I thought that the complaint from upper management would be that they could no longer get to Playboy.com...

I remember the times when Mr. Hefner's flagship publication had a very good computer/gadgetry section. Written by one of the technically-minded bunnies. They (bunnies) were not brainless at all, and I did read the magazine "for the articles" - honest!

The literary section was excellent.

"before browsers could be set to deny access to certain sorts of content" - oh really? Which modern desktop browser lets you block adult content on its own - without add-ons and such?

... seeing as we all know what content playboy.com has always hosted, what did our hero need from that site to set filters? The individual pictures wouldn't be of any help, nor would the names of the files said pictures were contained in, nor the directory names in the file system. Etc.

All he had to do was block the domain. Which didn't require a visit.

And no, in the days of Win95 there was no "machine learning" that could be trained on pR0n.

In the article he said he tried to visit the site and it was blocked- so the filters worked however the browser would still have the site in the history as usually most filters replace the content with a stop looking message or similar.

The problem is the machines imaged would still have the name in the history and autocomplete would probably catch you typing pl… and fill in a useful suggestion.

I missed that somehow. Mea culpa.

I simply MUST get a new prescription for my reading glasses ...

We occasionally had to temporarily add some "interesting" sites to the whitelist during my time employed at a mental health hospital, to help facilitate treatment. The old adage that "there's a fetish for everything" is pretty close to the mark.

But we did have to tell one beardy doctor exactly where to go when he demanded that one patient have access to some scarily illegal stuff (to help wean them off it, apparently...). Even if he had come back with a court order granting full exemption (he didn't), I'd still have said No way.

Many years ago a friend and colleague of mine was setting up a new content filter on the company network. He'd just finished configuring it as I went to grab him for lunch, so he thought he would give me a quick demo to show how it worked. Pasted in a dodgy link and hit go... unfortunately although the filter stopped the first page, it didn't stop the pages that automatically popped up from there, or the pages that popped up from them... and so on and so on. The screen filled up with bits and bobs faster than he could close them. The only way to stop them was to hit the power button.