This article about “Cyber Monday,” what is supposed to be the biggest online shopping day of the year, is mostly about how more and more people are doing their online shopping at work. Apparently, companies are growing more tolerant of such behavior:
Where many companies once blocked access to high-volume shopping sites, for example, they now use threshold software that simply limits an employee’s time on such sites, said Susan Larson, vice president of global threat analysis and research for SurfControl, which makes filtering software for workplaces. Today, she said, companies are more worried about employees bringing viruses into an office network by shopping online than they are about reduced productivity.
I love this quote, because it indicates how utterly clueless most people are about how computer viruses are contracted and spread. There’s no chance of getting a computer virus by buying anything online–the danger there is in giving your credit card number out, but that’s the employee’s problem, not the employer’s. The only way anyone can get a virus by “shopping online” is by clicking on an email whose subject is “fr33 v14gr4 4 ><-m45″ and whose sender is named something like “Dalmation Poinsettia.” And I think at that point we’re really stretching the definition of online shopping.
I did learn something from the article, though, which is that “Black Friday” is not named that because people routinely get trampled in Walmarts and department stores all over the country; it’s called “Black Friday” because it is the day when retailers have traditionally first shown a profit for the year (putting then in the black, get it?). And now you know, too.
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