Slashdot Mirror
Browse All You Want At Work
choka writes "I came across a new Mozilla deriative known as Ghostzilla. It has the ability to open and hide the browser within most applications with simple mouse gestures, ensuring no one will discover what por^H^H^Hsites you visit in office ;) (i.e., if your sysadmins don't check the proxy logs...)"
This is one of the most devious things I've seen in a while! I love it!!. It reminds me of old shareware PC games, where you could hit the F9 key to escape to a DOS shell, so you wouln't get caught at work. Hugo's House of Horrors anyone?
Since most of these work spyware programs search for IE specific history, you're still pretty "safe" using normal Mozilla.
Even the humans do this, seems to me like most of the tech support guys searching for 'inappropriate' material are looking in the IE history anyways.
I hate that crap. My last job was like that, and productivity was very poor. You have to move fast, and delaying for a week to get IS to approve and install some kind of utility or program you need is rediculous. Those companies deserve what they get, which is probably bankruptcy.
Does anybody keep a list of such companies so we know who to avoid (when the tech econ improves and we have choices again)?
Table-ized A.I.
I run WindowMaker on Linux and I hot-key the switch workspace command to ALT-1 (next workspace) and ALT-2 (previous workspace). It's extremely efficient to simply leave terminal windows and applications maximized in their own workspace and just hop between the screens when you need to switch to a different app. It's like tabbed browsing, once you get used to it, it's hard to go back to the old way.
--It's Pimptastic!--
I can tell you've never been on the other end of this. When you run an IS organization for a large enterprise, you'd better not allow users to install software on their PCs.
Now, developers could be in a slightly different ruleset. There's no reason they cannot get a "fast-track" approval for software. Or perhaps what's best for them, being developers, is to be cordoned off into their own, isolated, little section of the LAN where they can install any damn thing they want with impunity so they can do their development and testing...BUT, they must know that those machines can and will be reset to IS approved configurations if necessary and anything lost because it was held locally is the developer's fault.
And not only that, but the policy would require those machines as being unsupported by the general IS infrastructure. The developers would have to support them themselves or a specific team would have to be dedicated as "lab" support.
I used to be a developer for a government agency and I wasn't allowed to move my PC. I could move the mouse and the keyboard a little...but that's it.
A lot of large organizations (gov't, hospitals, etc.) work like this. It may be a PITA for you as a developer, but it is manageable...and having an open policy, allowing anyone to install software on their PC is NOT manageable on a large scale.
http://www.javassh.org may be of interest them (assuming you can persuade an IS representative to install the J2SE 1.4 RTE with Java WebStart...)
Just try this lame attempt at subterfuge at my workplace and I guarantee you a trip to HR followed by a summary firing of your ass. Admins checking proxy logs? Give me a break, you should be worried about admins such as myself who sniff all outbound traffice through the gateway. If you wanna get some people fired in a hurry, install dsniff on a gateway and watch the fun begin. We use this with some nice little ngrep ( or even grep ) scripts to log dubious traffic. We have also used tcpdump to catch the little fuckers who try and circumvent our appropriate usage policy. Hell, even ntop will work if you like to click around stats.
Actually, ssh with the right switch can be a SOCKS proxy all by itself; no squid required.
'Course my /. threshold is high. Maybe someone already pointed that out.
Great, now thanks to Slashdot every boss knows of Ghostzilla's existence. Although what boss would have the nerve to suspect an employee of using Ghostzilla, and ask him or her to press CTRL-ALT-DEL in Windows to prove it. Is there also a "KILL" mouse gesture? I mean a way to kill Ghostzilla from memory so that there is no evidence? Thanks.
You could try working at work? After all, when I go to work, my boss expects me to work. Using the internet is not something that should need to be hidden. If you have a job, you go to said job to earn a paycheck. To earn said paycheck, perhaps you should try, you know, doing your job. It's what we normal people do.
Guns are like umbrellas and condoms. Better to have one and not need it, than need it and not have one.
win-d: desktop
win-m: minimize all
win-r: run
win-f: find
win-e: explorer
Hey, I'm totally with you -- but not everyone works for an "enlightened" boss (or bosses above your direct boss!). At my last job, I read Slashdot daily. (On slower days, at least once a morning and again in the afternoon.) I really considered it relevant and work-related too. I mean, sure, I skipped anything that was just a movie review or talk of a new arcade game....
But I was always the first to have knowledge of new updates and fixes for new security risks, as well as good suggestions for the occasional software for a special niche need.
Unfortunately, I also took a lot of flack from the "higher-ups" for my appearance of "doing nothing constructive" when people from other departments walked by and saw me "web surfing". I had to justify my usage time and time again, and it seemed like each time only quieted them down for a few weeks at the most.
Eventually, I ended up losing that job. Can't really say it was over reading Slashdot, but I have the sneaky suspicion it didn't help matters any. Given a similar situation at a new job, would I do it all over again though? Yeah, absolutely. The net's biggest problem is a lack of quality sites that cull through the really interesting and relevant news, and put it in one place. Sure, you can go read ZD stuff and get the "party line" opinions on everything - but beyond that, there's Ars Technica, Slashdot, and a handful of respectable sites for hardware benchmarks and reviews. Other than that, though, what do you have? Would a company think it's a better use of time and money to buy those multi-hundred dollar a year "Dr. Dobbs Journal" subscriptions and have you read those??