Internet browsing blocked at work?

[Mudderoy]

Many companies block Internet browsing or Instant Messaging. Some block "certain" website they consider to be a liability, like myspace. If you'd like to say "kiss my a$$" to their controls you can easily get around most of the blocks that corp I.T. lay in your path to happiness and lost productivity.

If you have broadband Internet at your house and a PC that you can leave on during the day you can "most likely" browse the Internet from work securely.

You need to be able to load a program on your company PC and some software on your home PC, and make a minor configuration change to Internet Explorer.

I've tried this from my work, actually I'm using it right now. I have an encrypted "tunnel" from work to my home computer, then I go out from my home computer to the Internet. No one can "see" what I am doing at least not by monitoring the network traffic. They could look over my shoulder, or run a keyboard/screen capture program.

If you are interested in setting this up for yourself you can find the easy instructions at this :link: (http://www.buzzsurf.com/surfatwork/)

If you have any questions about it feel free to ask and I'll try to help you.

[BlueXJ]

Sounds very interesting, but my question would be how to load software at work without causing some raised eyebrows in IT by somone?

[Mudderoy]

putty is a stand alone program. Installation consists of copying it to your hard drive. It is always possible that some IT guru will notice it, but it is highly unlikely. putty is a common program used to act as a terminal to access computer systems via TELNET or SSH, so it is not identified as a piece of software that is meant to cause harm.

99% of IT people would just see it as something they use day to day and harmless.

It's free software as well, so your company would not have to be concerned about being sued.

It also depends on the size of your company. As always don't put your anual salary up as a bet you won't get caught and fired. I think we all know what we can and can't get away with at work. This may be as simple as getting around the IT imposed restriction from using instant messengers, or being able to check your myspace page.

[COSXJFAN]

They have all of the administrative abilities turned off on the PCs whwere I work. In order to install any program, you have to have IT unlock the PC....bunk!! It would be sweet though!! My company is pretty cool in that sense though. I can surf without too many issues, other than questionable content, and the proxy blocks that stuff!!

[Mudderoy]

They have all of the administrative abilities turned off on the PCs whwere I work. In order to install any program, you have to have IT unlock the PC....bunk!! It would be sweet though!! My company is pretty cool in that sense though. I can surf without too many issues, other than questionable content, and the proxy blocks that stuff!!

putty is a stand alone program. So if you can put a USB memory drive in the PC you can run putty. ;)

I'll add, it is possible to lock down a PC so you can't run putty, but that would be like at a call center or something.

[dagr8tim]

Just use a proxy.

At my office, we also use a product by Trend Micro that monitors the amount of time you spend connected to any internet resource. If we see that you are connecting to a residential broadband connection for 8 hours a day, it's going to raise questions.

[Niac]

Another way but pretty archaic is to use an online html to pdf converter. You can't do forums but you can check on the game score or weather. You send an e-mail with the web address, and a .pdf will be sent back. You can even search EBAY or use Google once you figure out the Boolean algebra they use after their url.
We use [email protected] .
You just have to be desperate.

[Mudderoy]

Another way but pretty archaic is to use an online html to pdf converter. You can't do forums but you can check on the game score or weather. You send an e-mail with the web address, and a .pdf will be sent back. You can even search EBAY or use Google once you figure out the Boolean algebra they use after their url.
We use [email protected] .
You just have to be desperate.

lol that's pretty clever!

[dagr8tim]

Another way but pretty archaic is to use an online html to pdf converter. You can't do forums but you can check on the game score or weather. You send an e-mail with the web address, and a .pdf will be sent back. You can even search EBAY or use Google once you figure out the Boolean algebra they use after their url.
We use [email protected] .
You just have to be desperate.

Really, if I look at the exchange logs/reports and see that you are receiving a large number of attachments from the same email address. I'm going to start questioning it and start thinking the worst. IMHO, it's far better not to hide your surfing or not do it at all.

DISCLAIMER: I am a network administrator with 5 years as a windows administrator. Alot of what I do deals with security and log monitoring. I can tell you that unless you give your IT department a reason to sniff around, I've got better things to do than to monitor your internet usage.

An easy tip to jump on to say facebook while at work when it's blocked is to go to https://www.facebook.com. Adding the "s" to the url turns it into a secure encrypted connection. Most filtering software cannot handle secure connections due to the encryption, or because the firewall admin doesn't bother to add the secure URL. Another example is technically http://www.facebook.com & http://facebook.com are different websites that just happen to look identical or one is forwarded to the other on most web servers. If you can't hit it with the 'www', you can try it sans the 'www'.

[bluedragon436]

As much as I would love to run this so that I can actually surf xjtalk at work, I don't think the government would be very happy about me doing this on their systems.. not to mention not sure it would work from on base.. LOL..

[Dirt Dogg Rydas]

putty is a stand alone program. Installation consists of copying it to your hard drive. It is always possible that some IT guru will notice it, but it is highly unlikely. putty is a common program used to act as a terminal to access computer systems via TELNET or SSH, so it is not identified as a piece of software that is meant to cause harm.

99% of IT people would just see it as something they use day to day and harmless.

It's free software as well, so your company would not have to be concerned about being sued.

It also depends on the size of your company. As always don't put your anual salary up as a bet you won't get caught and fired. I think we all know what we can and can't get away with at work. This may be as simple as getting around the IT imposed restriction from using instant messengers, or being able to check your myspace page.
This is what I use on my iPhones when I have them jailbroken and I want to add files from my computer that would otherwise would be time consuming to do it right from the iPhone.
It's pretty easy but I've never used it to access another computer