Happy to see that your IT department is reasonable! Does instant messaging remain below the radar? If they ban that, all work might stop. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

Original poster here again...

A coworker just pointed out to me an excellent solution. I can use rdesktop to open a "remote desktop" into a Windows NT server elsewhere on campus. I get a window that is a virtual screen on the other computer, in which I can do anything I'd do on an ordinary Windows machine outside the hospital firewall. I believe the remote desktop link is encrypted as well, so the IT people can't snoop anything, and I'm even running rdesktop on a shared machine, so they wouldn't even be able to associate the bandwidth with me.

It's nearly as fast as web browsing directly on my own machine. The only disadvantage I've noticed so far is that graphics appear limited to 256 colors.

I'm happy. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

I have access to FT from work. I am restriced from entertainment sites like casinos and the such. As long as FT and a few others are allowed, I will continue to be pleased.

I don't care if work blocks my FT access.

I usually access FT only in the evenings from my hotel room when I'm seriously working anyway.

I do have an issue with Hotmail blocking, since I do use that for personal email. It'd be like someone telling you that you can't use the company phone for personal purposes. ya right everyone obeys that rule!

Work is blending into our personal time, and our personal stuff is blending into work. It's the new paradigm of the new world. For employers to ignore that would be pure stupidity.

My work allows us to look at websites that aren't "objectionable" or some such language, but you can't post anything. So I can read FT, but can't post. On the other hand, somehow my assistant can spend 6.5 hours a day bidding on Ebay and posting feedback and that's ok.

I'm with a GE sub and FT is blocked as well as my AT&T Personal e-mail account. Can't dial up; the phone line is digital and would fry the modem (except that my laptop is programmed to detect digital lines).

When I'm elsewhere (including home), I can get to any site I want with the company-issued laptop by connecting to the Internet but not to the network (we have vpn and I have to use a SecurID token to connect to the network).

I take the philosophical attitude that the blocked sites I tend to use are bulletin boards such as this which can be a huge time-waster on days when my mind wanders, and I can catch up in the evenings. My husband and I keep in touch during the day on my office e-mail (no more than 1-2 a day, nothing salacious or incriminating)- I figure that's the price the company pays for not letting me use my personal e-mail address at work.

Being responsible for IT within a large(ish) company I have a large input to blocking of websites etc... We are quite lenient in fact, blocking only adult/teen sites which are frequently viewed by staff. We also monitor people who do excessive downloading and, to date, quiet chats have stopped most of that. We allow hotmail, yahoo, FT and news sites - in fact we allow most stuff.

However if we were a business where data protection was an issue in a litigous environment (e.g. USA) things would be tighter. Imagine if a junior admin officer emailed confidential bank data of high net worth clients out to the media for example?? Or in a utility company someone in the debt recovery department emailed out a famous peron who was in arrears on their account? I am based in Eastern Europe where nobody gives a stuff about data protection, but I know if I worked in the UK or USA I would be paranoid. If you allow access to hotmail you lose almost all control of data in and out of an organisation. Even with a normal email system it is difficult, but with daily backups you maintain some sort of audit trail of information flows.

webwarper
 

My employer also blocks FT :(

I have been using webwarper.net as a pass-thru proxy for a while. Then, when webwarper was included in the black list, I noticed, that if I use IP address nstead of domain name, it works :D

You can try this...
http://64.203.129.94/ww/~GZ/www.flyertalk.com/?*

I recommend to install a popup blocker (Google Toolbar is cool). You also might get 2 or 3 message boxes displayed from time to time, but hey, you get access to FT :cool:

hmmm...another point of view
 

As a manager in a small business I was involved it setting our web use policies.

We haven't had to set up to block anything to date. We allow employees to use company computers to access the web and their personal e-mail during breaks and if off the clock. We do have a No Porn policy (yes, even during breaks and when punched out).

We did fire somone who seemed to be rather unproductive.... after we checked his machine (this happened before we put the monitoring software in place) we discover he was on 100+ porn sites a day (and not smart enough to dump the history).

These days we do have monitoring software in place and the employees are aware of both the software and our policys.

We are trying to be fair and reasonable while still protecting our business from the productivity losses that many suffer due to employees using the web personally while at work.

Employers lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in productivity in the US alone due to emplyess using the web for non business purposes during business hours!!

I would not use the web for personal use during business anymore than I would steal from petty cash..in my mind they are both wrong.....

good thing they dropped the reputation points thing, I'm afraid I'd get flamed, but seriously, aren't you supposed to be WORKING at work?

cjbryant, I agree that you're supposed to be working at work, and I give my employer a fair share of my time- right now I'm in the office 10 hours a day and I frequently work through lunch. Maybe you can run on all cylinders for 10 hours straight- I can't. So, yes, I have a little down-time and I choose to spend it checking news sites. Well, I WAS on an unproductive teleconference yesterday and sold 300 shares of stock, but that's rare.

No flame intended- I just think that rational employers should evaluate their employees by the quality and quantity of their work. If a happy, productive employee of mine is spending maybe half an hour a day on non work-related Web surfing (assuming it's innocuous sites), I don't care.

My high school taught Basic, Cobol, and Fortran. We had one computer, and it filled an entire room.
Don't feel TOO old. I understand some of our air trafic control systems still use those technologies. :eek:

@:-)

Don't even need to do that. Secure remote access to heterogeneous networks is one of my specialities so this is my proposed solution.

If you can SSH out you already have the problem solved very easily without any additional software because www.flyertalk.com doesn't use HTTP 1.1 and it uses relative links in the HTML

Connect to your remote machine that can access FT by SSH with maximum compression set and port forward a local non-privileged port (such as 8000 - just make sure that port isn't already in use) to either of the IP addresses of www.flyertalk.com - currently 64.78.185.85 and 64.78.185.92

Then simply connect your browser to http://localhost:8000

It should work right away. If it doesn't, port forward to the other www.flyertalk.com server IP address.

I've done similar things many times in the past myself and have just tested that this works and it does. I'm sitting in San Diego accessing FT through one of my SPARCs (which doesn't run any web proxy) at home. Good luck :)

If you get this message then you'll know that it's a viable solution!

The URL in my browser location bar is currently;

http://localhost:8000/forum/newreply...eply&p=1811926

If you want to make this a bit tidier you can add an entry on your local machine to /etc/hosts or on a Windoze machine c:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

that looks like this;

127.0.0.1 localhost www.flyertalk.com

Then you would connect to http://www.flyertalk.com:8000 but remember the port number every time!

If the website you are trying to contact via SSH uses HTTP 1.1 or absolute links rather than relative links then you MUST add an alias for 127.0.0.1 for that site's name. If you don't have root / Administrator privileges on the local machine you won't be able to do this. Having said that, security is usually set up so badly on Windoze machines that unprivileged users may very well be able to edit the hosts file.