Anybody got anything I can try to sidestep my firewall at work so that I can get to youtube, photobucket, Ahat Radio, chat, etc? I prefer a solution that WON'T get me run out of my job before my 2 weeks is up...

PM if you don't want the world to know that you know this kind of thing.

Thanks

uhm. hmmm...the question is - do you understand that quite often, circumvention of your firewall and any filters they use at the office is grounds for immediate termination in most places? they put those filters in there for a reason.

whether or not you can bypass it is really dependent on how your work is setup. you may be able to surf using a proxy, but your work may have you setup to run through a proxy already (proxy and firewall are two separate things). your work may also be blocking your ability to hit proxies :D

if you can install software on your system you may try using Proxy Way: http://www.proxyway.com/www/anonymous-web-browsing/UsingProxyModule/Connections.html

Otherwise, there are several sites like this one that you can find anonymous proxies to use (be careful what information like usernames and passwords you submit!) : http://www.hidemyass.com/free_proxy_lists.php

otherwise, you could try to Remote Desktop into your machine at home and surf through it - assuming they haven't blocked Remote Desktop ports also :D

uhm. hmmm...the question is - do you understand that quite often, circumvention of your firewall and any filters they use at the office is grounds for immediate termination in most places?

Yeah, I get that. Reading this site while at work is grounds for immediate termination, too.:lol: I also understand that unless I'm mistaken, I'd probably have to do something to attract attention, like download some sort of virus that crashes the entire international network, before it would be a problem. Until then, its just in place to serve as grounds for termination if they want to get rid of an employee for other reasons.

For example, they had a guy lying on his timesheet, so they checked into his internet useage and found out he was running an eBay business in the precious few hours he actually DID spend at work...

You know better than I do how the firewalls and filters are likely to be setup, is there some IT geek soemwhere sitting in a room looking at all the websites that the thousands of employees of the company are looking at everyday, or is there a report that gets e-mailed to someone daily of the sites that get hit that shouldn't be?

The filter spit the proxyway site back at me as being blocked because it was classified as a proxy, and I'm fairly certain that the "azz" in the second link would trip it out as well. If I had internet access at home, the remote access thing could work, but since I don't I guess I'll just have to suck it up...

You know better than I do how the firewalls and filters are likely to be setup, is there some IT geek soemwhere sitting in a room looking at all the websites that the thousands of employees of the company are looking at everyday, or is there a report that gets e-mailed to someone daily of the sites that get hit that shouldn't be?

Typically speaking, yes, sort of.

For example, I have our firewalls at the office setup with rather "verbose" logs of all incoming/outgoing activity. It logs all this information to another server in the office using 'syslogd' (won't explain that one). Anyways, I have a script that parses those logs and basically gives me a list of all websites visited and how many "hits" it got, so I can get an idea of how heavily trafficked the site was. Naturally, working for a geek company with programmers, Slashdot and Fark are freaking inundated all day - that's to be expected. I watch out for other stuff. If someone hits an objectionable site, I can then get the data and time it occured if it's something "bad" and track it to a specific network user rather easily.

Whether or not your admins are this diligent or automated is another story.

I you were surfing through a proxy/using a proxy, all that would be much harder to track, if not impossible. Most admins wouldn't know what to look for as long as you didn't abuse the hell out of it.

The filter spit the proxyway site back at me as being blocked because it was classified as a proxy, and I'm fairly certain that the "azz" in the second link would trip it out as well. If I had internet access at home, the remote access thing could work, but since I don't I guess I'll just have to suck it up...

Yeah, that is why you would need to use an anonymous proxy that your software may not know about. I posted a link to a list above...but your work probaby blocks that as well :D