I Am So Smrt

As I had anticipated, my employer made good on their promise (or threat) to install new blocking software from the good folks at Websense.

Sadly Websense is apparently on to the tomfoolery and skullduggery we engage in here at SP and the following Monday I came in to no access to simpleprop. In fact Websense blocks a number of things according to Wikipedia.

While I still have access to my Yahoo mail, I have lost access to my fantasy baseball team through Yahoo. I have lost access to photosharing sites like Kodak Gallery (nee Ofoto) and Flickr, video sharing sites like YouTube, and obviously sites like MySpace (although I never went there anyway). But most importantly I have lost access to any site resembling a blog.

Being the semi-defiant person I am, I vowed that I would find a way around this. Alex mentioned that most of the kids at his school have embraced a technique known as Proxy Avoidance. However, it\’s one thing for a kid in a school to use the technique when the network admin is both lazy and doesn\’t care. It\’s another thing for someone with a well paying job and an IT department of a couple hundred people watching to try and use this technique. It would be pretty obvious (if you look for it) when a person would be using an alternate proxy server. Additionally these servers are being discovered all of the time by Websense and once they blocked it, I would really stand out. Probably not a good idea.

I then stumbled across a more involved but safer technique. A really dedicated network admin might notice the unusual traffic, or might even be aware of this technique, but since it is encrypted and would look more or less like a connection to an https, it just might work. But I couldn\’t shake the though that it might be something that network admins could snoop around and discover.

So this got me thinking. Along the same lines, couldn\’t I find a way to access my home computer from work and surf unfettered? PC Anywhere is a tool that allows you to connect to another computer and control it as if you were sitting right in front of it. But it is a little pricy, and I couldn\’t install it on my work computer. Then it hit me. WebEx!

For those of you who aren\’t familiar, WebEx is a tool many companies use to execute training and meetings over the internet. It allows you to share an application or your entire desktop with another user anywhere on the internet to view documents and presentations. And recently I had sat in on a WebEx presentation where the host gave control of the application to another user who was a participant.

It took me awhile to work out the bugs, but I found a method for pulling it off. I am testing it out today at work, and it seems to be working like a charm.

It\’s sad that finding a way to defy the powers that be here at work has given me a better sense of accomplishment than anything I\’ve done at work in the past year. What does that say about me? And my importantly, what does that say about my employer?

At any rate, I\’m glad to be back up and running and I couldn\’t be more pleased with myself! Happy surfing!!!