Robert on Proxies

Robert wrote a great response to the previous post about proxies:

Just wanted to remind all you firewall busters out there that this doesn’t actually obscure your traffic at all. All this does is get around corporate firewalls with stupid restrictions. They can still see what you’re doing and you still get fired for looking at porn.

The reason for this is obvious after thinking about how the proxies work. The site mentions that some of these anonymize your traffic and thats true. The remote host may never know where you connected from. But in order to connect TO the proxy you still need to go through the firewall at work. That’s why they can still see what you’re doing.

There are several ways around this too, but the simplest way is to go to a site like www.megaproxy.com (I think I might know the owner of that site, so find another one if you want something unaffiliated).

They make you do something really inconvienent, type the address of your destination in a webpage form and submit. But then it asks you if you’re sure you want to go to a secure site and then redirects you to the supersecret page you were visit. Look at those titties!

BUT (downside #2)

Most corporate firewall people already block sites like megaproxy.com. (Megaproxy.com is one of many sites listed in websense’s “firewall avoidence” ruleset) so oftentimes you have to stay on top of the latest “firewall busting” webpages if you want to use these types of services.

There are other ways of getting around work firewalls, some of them much safer than the above, but all of them harder to setup.

If you’re getting around the work firewall just so you can send AIM messages to your friends, then you should be ok. If you’re looking at porn then remember that other people at work don’t always need a network sniffer to see what you’re doing. You could just as easily be fired from someone looking over you’re shoulder.

Hope you enjoyed the corporate ethics message, as well as the firewall crap.

Thanks,
Robert