Workspot service - pro? con? Others like it?

May 12, 2004 7:53 AM

Ever seen workspot? Know of any other services like this? Is this one any good? It looks good. I want to use it from the new job I'm moving to so that the company can't monitor my activities... email I'm reading, sites I visit, stuff I download. I'd rather not pay for this, tho if something free exists for my purposes.

I just want to start off on a clean slate at this new job. I would just VNC into my home box, but I have a dial-up, so that is impractical. Any other solutions to this problem? (I know I should be working at work, and I do... I also work at home and think about my job 24 hours a day.... however, I like to mix it up and don't want a record of my activities.)
posted by pissfactory to Work & Money (13 answers total)

Wouldnt it just be easier to, if you're on an internet connection at work, to NOT DO STUFF YOUR EMPLOYER DOESN'T WANT YOU DOING? After all, Internet access at work is a privilege, not a right....
posted by mrbill at 8:39 AM on May 12, 2004

Have you checked to make sure it works? It doesn't work through our firewall. And if it did, I would have fixed that up in a jiffy. Thats the problem with any of these places, as soon as someone notices and decides its a bad thing, its over.
posted by duckstab at 8:43 AM on May 12, 2004

Response by poster: mrbill, my current nor future employer have a policy on what you can and can't do at work with an Internet connection, thus I'd like to not find out the hard way that I shouldn't have been doing something.

I'm an exempt employee, so if I want to look at pictures of yellowstone at 2:15 pm and work until 8:00 pm that is what I do. I have never had a problem because I am an exceptional employee- I do, however, refuse to be an automaton that never ventures onto the WWW at work. I'm just looking to cover my butt, so to speak.

Technically I can make an argument for this.... to view web sites from outside the network.

duckstab, are you in a corporation? I'm in academia and they usually don't block anything. On an related note, do server logs for network traffic log MAC (physical) addresses or just IP addresses? I ask, because I'm considering vmware for this same purpose. You just fire up a virtual PC and grab a different IP via DHCP... that might offer some anonimity.
posted by pissfactory at 9:39 AM on May 12, 2004

what, exactly do you want to avoid, because that influences the solution you use? do you want to work on things other than "work", or do you just want anonymity surfng the web and privacy for email? you mention downloading too - what's that about?

if you just want anonymous web browsing and private email, then there should be simple solutions. "downloading" sounds much more troublesome - there might be legal problems. for "working" on something else i'd suggest either getting your own laptop (you could connect it to the network and ssh in if you need to be seen using a particular computer) or a permanent net connection at home (and, again, ssh across) (or the link you gave - looks neat; if it is blocked you can still connect at home, grab your data, and move to a different solution).

anonymous browsing is possible via web anonymisers. google. email is more tricky - do you want just the connection to be un-snoopable, or do you not want any files locally? the former is possible with imap over ssh, the latter suggests you need to use webmail with an https connection.

if you can stick to anon web browsing and private email, you're going to look a lot less suspicious than anything else. if you were found using vmware on an encypted partition, say, people are going to start wondering about kiddie porn, i suspect...
posted by andrew cooke at 10:02 AM on May 12, 2004

ps off topic, but as someone who has also used the "i'm too good to be fired, so i'll do what i want" argument - you need to remember that (1) you also have something of a permanent reputation on the net (although i see you, unlike me, are posting anonymously) (2) that it may fail in large corporations (or academia) where the people who know you are good don't have the status to decide you can stay and (3) that it plays both ways - you can end up working every waking hour (i eventually came to the conclusion that life was simpler and more fun if i kept work and real life firmly separate - largely because work was taking over my free time)
posted by andrew cooke at 10:12 AM on May 12, 2004

pissfactory, secondary education. You can't make any kind of connection to the outside world here without authentication.* So if you started up vmware and got another IP, that 2nd IP couldn't talk to the internet until you authenticated with it. Which is, of course, logged.
On a brighter note, we never ever go in and proactivly search the logs with the intent of getting people in trouble. There always has to be an incident.

*Actually, you could tunnel through the DNS servers, but it wouldn't go unnoticed for long... I'd actually be pretty excited if a student here was doing that kind of stuff.
posted by duckstab at 10:14 AM on May 12, 2004

All workspot really offers is the ability to vnc into one of their boxes. Have you considered just setting up vnc at home and using that?
posted by dotComrade at 10:14 AM on May 12, 2004

(s)he's on dialup
posted by andrew cooke at 10:30 AM on May 12, 2004

pissfactory: perfectly understandable. I myself run a SSH tunnel to my colocated machine at an ISP across town, and then run a Squid proxy on that machine, so that all my web browsing goes through the SSH tunnel and traffic actually comes from/goes into that colo box.

I do it for reasons of speed more than privacy though; our internet connection here at the office is a T1, but the peering connection to the ISP is much faster.
posted by mrbill at 10:53 AM on May 12, 2004

Response by poster: (he)

Primarily I am interested in "just want anonymity surfng the web and privacy for email". By downloading I meant, say, for instance, I am downloading a linux distribution ISO file right now that is 720 Megs. I simply can't do this at home with a dial up, but I can do it at work and burn it to a CD. Technically it is not for work, per se, though I'll use the applied knowledge there... and I'm not twiddling my thumbs while it downloads. Plus, I HAVE to have my mefi, man.

I'm not talking about anything like mp3s or... gasp... kiddie porn. I guess it isn't really that big of a deal, except that sitting next to one of the network admins at my current job has me paranoid as hell now since he got Packeteer and can see in minute detail everything that goes on over the network (and comments about it over the cube wall).

I don't know anything about web surfing anonymously (or even if it works) and I'll look into that.
posted by pissfactory at 11:33 AM on May 12, 2004

some links for info on web proxies: 1 2 3 4 5. note that there are two (at least) different issues - providing an encrypted link to a "neutral" address so that people near you don't know what you are reading (either from the content or the address) and removing identifying information from the data you send/receive. you're interested in the first of these, so make sure you're not getting only the second.
posted by andrew cooke at 12:29 PM on May 12, 2004

(basically, as long as you have https (with an S) in your browser bar, the data is confidential from anyone in the next cubicle - there are exceptions, but in practice, for casual snooping, that's the basic rule; going through a proxy in addition means that the address you are connecting to is hidden too. so for email you need a webmail account that can be read through an https connection - or vanilla webmail read through one of those proxies, just like any other web site.)
posted by andrew cooke at 12:34 PM on May 12, 2004

Response by poster: I must say, andrew cooke, you are a treasure trove of useful information.
posted by pissfactory at 4:27 PM on May 12, 2004