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.

How to Browse the Internet at Work Without Your Boss (or anyone else) Noticing.

1. Get an “alternative” browser like Firefox or Opera.

If you are nervous someone is going to be checking up on you at work, or possibly checking your browsing history-–you never can be too safe–-it behooves you to first get an alternative browser, something other than the default Internet Explorer or Safari. If someone is going to be randomly checking up on your history, they’re going to check to the default browser, obviously. Even though Safari and IE have “stealth mode” or “private browsing” options, you can’t take the risk that you might forget to turn these on. Many of us use browsers in our official work business, such as for email. By using an alternative browser for surfing, we can keep an official-looking history on our default work browser and not have to worry about an overseer witnessing something funny popping up in the search or address bar.

(Note: This guide details how to convert Firefox into a mega-stealthy work browser; however, some shrewd employers have all their employees use Firefox as the standard. If this is the case, I would recommend using Camino on a Mac, or Opera on a PC, as you can do all the same functions I’m about to detail.)

After you’ve installed Firefox on your work computer, you can proceed to step 2…

2. Making Firefox look stealthier.

a. Change the icon.

That little icon in the corner too often gives one away. You can minimize, but you can’t hide the colorful blue-and-orange fox logo that peeks from the corner, alerting your boss and coworkers to your real interests.

ON MACS:

1. Go to the application folder.

2. Get info for the icon. You can do this either by selecting the icon and hitting Apple-I, or  right-clicking (control-click for a one-button mouse) the Firefox icon, and clicking on “Get Info.”

3. Mouse over the image of the icon in the upper-left corner of the “Get Info” box. This should look like a blue and orange fox as the default.

Click on it. A blue halo should appear around it, indicating it is selected.

Now, we need to choose another icon to replace it with, something subtler. I chose the icon for a program called iSync that came with my computer. I don’t know what it is, but it looks pretty system-y and boring, and definitely doesn’t look like a browser; furthermore, it is something I would never be inclined to click on, nor would any of my co-workers I think.

4. “Get info” on iSync (or whatever program has a desirable, subtle icon). Now mouse over the icon and click on it. The blue halo should appear around it, indicating it is selected.

Click copy. Now click back on the infobox for Firefox, mouse over the icon so it is a blue halo, and click paste. This should replace the icon so now Firefox appears in your dock as a subtle, silvery circle.

b. Change the name.

In the application folder, change the name of the application from “Firefox” to something more benign. I chose “iSync Updater” for synchronicity. Just a random name I came up with.

Now for the harder parts. We’re going to change the settings in Firefox so that it looks more like a word document and less like a web browser. Furthermore, we’re going to edit it so that it never saves any history and leaves no trace of anything we’ve done on it. Finally, we’re going to add the option for proxy-browsing. For beginners, this is essentially a method of rerouting your internet traffic so that your boss cannot see where you’ve been, nor can they block you from the web (some employers block Facebook, Twitter, gmail, things like that).

3. Download the following Firefox add-ons.

You can get all these add-ons from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/. Simply type in the name into the search bar and click on “add to Firefox.”

1. Stealther. This is a wonderful little add-on that deletes any trace of your browsing history, saved forms, cookies (I think?), etc. as soon as the session closes. You can edit these settings in Stealther’s preferences, which can be accessed by going to Tools–>Add-ons then clicking on Stealther, then on preferences.

2. Ad-block Plus. Not only will this save loading time by reducing the amount of data downloaded, but it will also prevent many pop-ups from jumping out and surprising you while you and the supervisor are looking at an Excel spreadsheet.

3. Whitehart. This is a theme that makes your browser look very white and plain. I like it because it is very understated and doesn’t draw attention to itself. There may be other browser themes that are even better, but if so I haven’t found any yet.

4. (optional) a proxy-jumper. FoxyProxy is one such add-on, though there are many. I have an incompetent employer who is both naive about employee browsing as well as computer-illiterate, so I don’t know much about proxy-hacking, but a quick google search could reveal all to you.

4. Change the default page colors and text colors.

Browsers can force webpages to adhere to their own standards if you make them. Our goal is to prevent a bright flashing red fanpage with size 99 text from alerting the whole office to our activities. How to do it:

1. Go to Firefox preferences (Apple-, [that's a comma] on a mac and control-comma on a PC). Click on the “content” tab. Click on “Colors.”  Change the text color to something more subtle, either black or gray. I chose a light gray that is just readable enough for my eyes. (The lighter it is, the harder to see from afar). Now, click on background, and change the background to white. Change the link colors to something light–-powder blue and light gray, say. Finally, UNCHECK the box that says “Allow pages to choose their own colors.” You don’t want them to do this anymore. Click OK.

2. (optional) Back in the content tab, change the default font to something nice, like Times at 14pt. Click on the “Advanced” icon. This changes your browser fonts to something standardized. If for some reason you are on sites with large text, such as headlines, you may want to tweak these functions, but with colors turned down I haven’t found them necessary.

5. Get rid of the annoying icons that appear next to pages in tabs, sometimes called “favicons.”

These little icons, though small, can theoretically ruin you. We want to eliminate anything that looks even slightly suspicious.

Fortunately this is a very simple process. Simply enter this into your address bar: “about:config”. This lets you get at the guts of firefox, so there should be a warning that appears telling you that you are screwing with something vital. Click through it.

In about:config, in the filter bar, type in “favicon.” One hit should appear: browser.chrome.favicons. Double-clicking this should set the value to “false” which is what you want it to be.

6. Prevent Firefox from loading images.

Go to firefox preferences again. In the content section, un-check “load images automatically”.

Voila! Your work browsing experience is now completely stealthified. Here’s a screenshot of the New York Times on my work browser, as it appears in Safari and in Firefox:

7. Acquaint yourself with the “Hide” command.

Okay, programmers must have had procrastinating office workers in mind when they designed this command. It doesn’t simply minimize the program-–it hides every trace of it except for the tiny dot in the dock indicating it’s open. Normal minimize puts a small image of what’s open in the corner, but hide doesn’t even do that. To hide a page: when it is open, hit “Apple+H”.

I was told by a friend that in Windows, the command is Control+D, but I can’t corroborate this with anyone.

I can’t count how many times this has saved me, particularly when I have images turned on. If you have fast reflexes, by all means, you can get away with resorting to “Hide” to hide your pages.

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There are other browser elements you may want to tweak depending on what kinds of sites you visit and your own preferences: Turning javascript on and off, or Flash elements, for instance. With current settings, Youtube videos will play in Firefox, though you may want to remove videos entirely.

Note that the icon-swap method can work with other programs too. I currently have a Torrent downloader installed at my work computer, disguised by the Address Book icon. I keep it running and hidden all day at work so I can download torrents while I’m “working.”