How does big brother stuff really work?

[lilith]

Friend works for city and they were told that city hall had started monitoring their internet usage and if they go to a particular web site too much, they will lose access. So, let's say you have your browser set to open to 4 or 5 tabs and you leave it on all day... does it register 1 visit each time you open your browser, or each time you click on a tab, or each time you actually click on something on a page? Or, does each site refresh at its own rate and it registers as a visit on regular intervals during the day? Would regularly deleting your history help? How about having it set to delete history every time you log out? Does monitoring get logged somewhere? Or, do they have to catch you real time? :confused:

[shifty]

It's probably more of a quantity-of-http-requests issue. Secondarily, it may an issue of actual bandwidth transferred (ul/dl). It doesn't make sense to measure the time connected; nobody competent would even attempt to do something like that. NOTE: There are a LOT of incompetent people working in IT.

[lilith]

So, let's say they log in to yahoo email and leave the tab open all day to check it every now and then. Would an IT person shut them down?

[shifty]

That is a gerat question. I don't use Yahoo mail. I don't know if the page routinely refreshes or "polls" for updates. I'm guessing there is probably a meta refresh somewhere in the page. I see how it would cause a bunch of http requests, but ... it's requesting the same page over and over, which I don't think would flag a lot.

[lilith]

Okay, I'll tell him not to worry then! Thnx! :)