Home-Free Living

As a staunch advocate of Doing What You Love, I feel a sense of duty to inform those of us who have miserable office-based jobs to do as little work as possible for The Man.

I work in an office with three or four other people on computers. Furthermore, my boss comes in the door at random times to check up on me. So I spent much of the past few months at work trying to master the art of browsing with maximum stealth, and the fact that I haven’t been caught yet, despite doing about 1 hour of work per 8 hour day, is a testament to the success of my method. (In fact, I am writing this guide at work right now.) I feel I am a good candidate to write this because I am both insanely paranoid of getting caught and insanely devoted to wasting as much company time as possible.

There used to be a great product out there called Ghostzilla–-for PC only, sadly. It doesn’t exist anymore, but from what I’ve read about it it was essentially a version of Firefox maximized for stealthy surfing–-it hid inside other programs, was very subtle in its appearance, etc. I have discovered, however, that it is possible to replicate most of the functions of Ghostzilla using Firefox, if we tweak it a little bit.

So, what I have set out to do is create a browsing environment which is stealthy in the following ways:

-The icon and name of the program running is something subtle and  non-obvious (so not “Firefox”)

-The browser stores no history, passwords or any trace that anyone has been using it.

-The browsing environment resembles an official document and is only visible from within a few feet–-meaning white backgrounds, light text colors, and the option to turn off pictures and plug-ins, thus creating a browser that is invisible to everyone except someone right in front of it.

I started by doing google searches for this topic and found that there were embarrassingly few sites that devoted themselves to full coverage of something millions do every day; thus I have taken it upon myself to create the first complete reference. This represents the culmination of my research.

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Greedpeace approaches

I was approached on the streets of downtown Palo Alto yesterday by a young man from Greenpeace. He was about my age, a bit more masculine-looking, with cactus-like stubble on his face, a squarish, move-star jaw and penetrating green eyes. Given his styled short hair and J.Crew style, I mistook him at first for a yuppie-in-training (which he could have been). Still, he was quite passionate about the cause that he was promoting.

He caught me as I was parking my bike at the corner outside the Peet’s Coffee. After I’d locked up–he waited for me, graciously–he started talking to me about Greenpeace and their initiatives. Of particular concern were whales. In fact, I believe this was the primary cause at the moment for the organization.

Interestingly, his pitch was an attempt to hook me to donate to Greenpeace. When he had finished his spiel and handed me a clipboard, I looked at it and said, “well, I can’t really donate right now because I’m not doing too well financially.”

He was not nonplussed. “It would be pretty messed up if we didn’t let people become members for financial reasons,” he said. I would agree. “So, we let you donate as little as 15 dollars a month.”

This seemed to contradict what he had just said. Fifteen dollars is a tremendous sum–about 1.2% of my monthly salary or two hours of work. After rent and transit (about 70% of my income) I have had weeks where I finished with as little $28 in my bank account, and I really didn’t need another $15 docked. I told the man my little parable about having $28 at the end of last month.

“That means you can still donate $15 and have money left over!” he said.

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The point I’d hoped to get across to this brainwashed fool was that money shouldn’t really be necessary to support a social cause. Words, actions and volunteer time are, in a true social revolution, more important than money.

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