Employees are not robots. They are human beings. Sometimes human beings have human problems that need the assistance of other humans. This makes humans happier and more productive.

It's depressing to think that there are people who actually believe that optimal use of work resources is even worth calling out as an issue. In 2024.

Setting aside moral arguments, if it raises to the level of embezzlement, it’s a crime.

Using a small amount of that slack to keep another employee happy can be a good investment. In addition, it's good for someone like the CISO to poke around the innards of your network (etc) configs from time to time, just to stay up to date with what's going on in the company and to perhaps flag anything that smells suspicious.

You can do these kinds of exploration exercises completely free form, or you can take a little task like 'figure out exactly why this specific site is blocked' as a token of motivation.

I agree that all of this mostly only makes sense, if it doesn't take too much time.

Though if this specific task would take a lot of time, that would also indicate that either the CISO needs to upskill, or the network config is too complicated. In either case, that would be a valuable insight.

Sticking to your strict productivity line of thought, this kind of ask would:

1) be a great small teaching task for an intern, and

2) build goodwill elsewhere in a company, something good CISOs won't pass up an opportunity to do when the cost is relatively cheap.

But it's also likely that the CISO just wanted to help.

I have a +100 cel backlog that I need to catalog and photograph. Was planning to do it this holiday season so check back in.

Also the resources->galleries was useful, found some new but actually old sites to check out.

We're talking like 20 years back. Holy shit, my brain is getting jostled by this sudden tsunami of forgotten memories.

EDIT: Digging around on Wayback Machine (obviously NSFW, for the curious), apparently it was actually still around until somewhere between 2018 and '19 when it finally died. The snapshots from around 2007 are peak Web 1.5 design with stuff like affiliate buttons and table layouts. Man I miss that era.

Yahoo Auctions is more popular over there and proxy services (I use Buyee) make it pretty simple bid/buy and not too much more expensive if you wait for their (Buyee) coupons.

I had no idea such a thing existed.

If you can set up your own domain why would you need someone that specializes in a super limited non technical frontend for customizing prebuilt web templates?