1. Can you access your business email while on the road?
2. Are you restricted from using yahoo and hotmail while in the office LAN only or while using your office notebook while on the road as well?

Next thing you know, it'll be: "You are restricted by hospital policy 1.29.2.17 from using the light provided by hospital resources for reading non-work related material."

'86 actually... but the mainframe did have those cool 12" floppies at that time...

... lets not forget those wonderful usenet newsgroups... ahhh the good ol' days

in the past i have had luck bypassing using the proxy server www.megaproxy.com

It's free for awhile, then if you clear cookies you can go back in ... or you can pay. that is of course if that's not blocked

I work at military bases, and both the Army and Air Force have Flyertalk listed on their ban list as a travel and chat site. The Navy, on the other hand, allows access. Go Navy! hehehe

PS - I also do work at clinics and hospitals and there is no HIPAA regulation stopping laptops from plugging in the network. That is just local policy.

This may help...?

My last employer blocked access to almost all websites. To get around this, we used our AOL accounts (if you have one). We accessed AOL via TCP/IP (as opposed to dialling in), and we would get to AOL. From inside AOL, we could surf anywhere undetected.

My work is extremely anal with the internet.. FT was blocked for awhile but seems to let me through again (maybe they just blocked that particular machine).. but hotmail/yahoomail have been blocked for several years now. Outgoing FTP, SSH and telnet have been blocked. They even blocked access to usenet newsgroups but that caused an uproar. Time for a new job if I didn't get 4 weeks a year vacation..

1. Yes, I can access my business email account... which I am not supposed to use for personal reasons.

2. We are restricted from using any outside email souces while on the office LAN or dial-up. The catch is, however, that we aren't allowed to install alternate dialers on our notebooks... so I can't just circumvent and use a dial up to my internet provider, for example.

This is one of those policies that wasn't thought through at all. I spent a bit of time on the phone yesterday with our MIS head yesterday and then chatted with my boss too. They are going to find a way for the overnight travelers (and there aren't that many of us as a percentage of the company... maybe 10% of our company travels more than once a month) to handle personal email. It seems, however, that the only current solution is to use my work email address for any urgent personal business.

I had the same BASIC course as a swab (freshman) at the Coast Guard Academy in 1975 and similar remote terminals. No FT to connect to at that time, but did play the old text-based Star Trek with people on terminals at who-knows-where.

With regard to ethanb's dilemma, as ethanb stated, though he may not work for the hospital, "his network access goes through their firewall and thus their filters", so finding some backdoor way to bypass this, while I think would be possible, could have repercussions if discovered given the "concern" nowadays by sysadmins with security issues.

Please don't tell me I'm getting so old we have to explain what BASIC and FORTRAN are. Tell me it's not so.

The old Star Trek game was a classic - I haven't thought about it for years. I used to play it in the early 1990s dialing into the VAX/VMS machines at my dad's work (first with a genuine VT52, later with a VT100 compatible terminal, then towards the end with a 386sx/16 PC). Of course I had to go look it up now:
http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/startrek/
http://www3.sympatico.ca/maury/games...star_trek.html
[URL=http://www.decus.org/libcatalog/document_html/v00282_1.html]

If I didn't have so much other stuff to do, I might try recompiling it and running it right now. Brings back good memories...

In any case, as for reading flyertalk, I've mostly been doing it using a text-based browser (lynx) on an off-site unix machine. They allow outgoing ssh and it's fast in lynx. For the first day, I just used a graphical browser in an xterm, but it was frustratingly slow. At some point perhaps I'll try setting up a proxy at my home machine, but I'd rather not piss off the security guys too much. The text-based solution is entirely encrypted, and I believe that the xterm is as well (since I started it over ssh). Since we do 3D medical imaging research (each exam I do generates around 200 MB of raw data and at least 670 MB of processed images), web access is a drop in the bucket when it comes to bandwidth, so I doubt they'll ever notice. Perhaps at some point I'll try setting up a proxy on my home computer.

Thanks for all the suggestions,
Ethan (my first two page thread!)

Edited because I was incapable of formatting things correctly when writing in lynx.
[This message has been edited by ethanb (edited Feb 19, 2004).]

Edited because it takes two tries to do anything right.
[This message has been edited by ethanb (edited Feb 19, 2004).]

Edited to add a link to the real VAX/VMS version.

[This message has been edited by ethanb (edited Feb 19, 2004).]

Neither had I. The only reason I wanted access to our remote terminals (we got them in 1978) was to play! We played against other hish schools in the district, and some jr. highs. We talked the administrator into letting us start our own federation (after that, our kills skyrocketed).

While you're on the road are you allowed to use high speed connections in hotels or at the Admiral's Club? What about if you're using your notebook from your new home?

My company is kinda anal about blocking sites also. FlyerTalk...no way, AOL thru TCP/IP...no way, I think that the list of blocked sites probably works out to about 50% of the web, or at least it seems that way.

We are not even allowed to stick a wireless card into our laptops, even if we buy it ourself.

Peace

Yep... we can use high speed and I also have a LAN connection to the office. In addition, they have offered to install a wireless card for me and are going to come help me put a wireless hub in my house.

I think this shoots holes in the argument that them blocking the sites is to prevent folks from getting things that aren't scanned through the network server. They are now rethinking the policy, which was a quick decision made from the executive offices, not by the IT department. Their department head said they are saving all these pieces of user feedback to help formulate a more reasonable policy. I also heard some feedback that our company e-mail usage shot through the roof earlier this week when this policy went into effect. Gee, I wonder why?!