Posts Tagged ‘work’
How to browse the internet at work stealthily and without your boss noticing (Mac & PC)
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.
Why not now?
What a horrible day at work. I feel like I’m kept alive by the last remaining thread of hope I have, which is this scheme to go homeless. The mangling of my daily free time at this job is the most disheartening feeling I have ever had. I struggle to find ways to maintain my cool at work, but my dispassion is starting to seep out. I have been fortunate to have been able to use the facets of social engineering to get away with avoiding a lot more discomfort than I would otherwise.
