Help me not get fired for reading the Dope at work....

Factual Questions
1

Help me deal with these 3 facts:
1- I read the SDope at work.
2- This is a no-no.
3- I don’t want to get caught red-handed.

Whenever I have a minute or two free, I open the browser, type “Straightdope.com” on the address line, and read a Dope thread, (or half a thread, if I don’t have time to finish it). Then I close the browser window. I do this many times a day. (2 or 3 times an hour)
So my question is : am I being careless with my “safety procedure”?

The procedure is simple: All I do is open the browser (IE 9) and use “In private” mode.

What kind of trail am I leaving behind?
The Windows help page says that with private mode, no history is kept, etc, etc…but that an adminstrator can still see where you have been.
Now, for the facts:
I work in a small company -one boss who owns the place, and 7 employees. We have 8 desks and 8 computers, hooked together in a simple network. The boss’s computer has administrator rights,(I think) and all the others are interconnected with a simple router (I think). All machines are PC’s using Windows XP, except for mine which is Win 7.

Recently the boss has reprimanded two employees who make too many personal phone calls and waste time at work. So it would not look good if he comes into my room and sees me reading the Dope instead of working. But I’m not worried about him physically walking in on me; that would just be a single moment of embarrassment. I’m more worried about leaving a long-term trail of evidence.

I don’t mind if a cookie or two is buried somewhere, or if there is a list of sites I visited (including the Dope) that might be found somewhere on the boss’s computer. Even though the word “dope” will not leave a good impression with the boss, I don’t mind if it shows up as a single mention, say, as one item among a list of other (work-related) websites… But I do not want to create a paper trail that might leave a log file, or a long list somewhere, showing a hundred visits a week to the Dope during working hours.

The atmosphere on the job is informal. The boss is less computer-savvy than I am, and I’m not worried about him using detective techniques or keystroke loggers, etc.
But what if we call a computer tech to come solve a problem (say, because the network is working too slowly, or whatever) , and the technician starts poking around? I don’t want him to find, I dunno, a long list of internet handshakes or something similar, all tied to my PC, and then find an incriminating list of how much time I was at each site.

So my question is: does using the “in private” mode provide enough privacy to keep my visits to the Dope anonymous from a casual snooper at work, or a visiting techie geek who might happen to discover something?

(and, despite the thread title, I’m not really worried about getting fired. My boss knows that I’m the key employee-- I just don’t want to give him a reason to get angry with me.)

2

Your boss will never find out, ever – not on his own.

Yes, “in private” mode will prevent any casual snooper from discovering your secret.

No, a techie geek will not “happen” to find “something.”

3

Open a bunch of threads on your lunch break and save them locally so you can read them later without going online.

4

When you do get fired, are we supposed to have sympathy for you?

5

Actually, when you do get fired, can we have your stapler?

6

I don’t spend much time at all visiting the SDMB at work, but when I do, I always access it from my smart phone using Tapatalk.

7

Actaully, when you do get fired, can I have your job?

:smiley:

8

I don’t have a stapler. But I do have a whole bunch of paper clips. :slight_smile:
But…I don’t think you’re gonna get 'em.
I’ve been working here for 25 years, so I’m not worried about getting fired…but I do want to avoid an unpleasant confrontation with the boss. He likes to keep up appearances of a no-nonsense worklike atmosphere.
(He is not a very jolly fellow.)

And reading the Dope helps me retain my sanity at work.
But I don’t want to leave a trail of evidence…

9

I’d be willing to bet your company’s connection to the outside world is through a home-grade broadband router, so the “trail of evidence” is somewhere between not existing at all and useless.

Those things do have the ability to log connections, but someone would have to know this, and be sufficiently interested to figure out how to read the logs.

The last time I messed with a “SOHO” router, you had to go into a config page to turn on logging, and then, about all you got was a huge pile of IP addresses and what router port they went to. Since your office has more than four computers, there’s going to be a network switch, so it would not surprise me if one port on the router is run to a 16-port switch and everything is connected to that.

10

If I were in your situation, I think I might be more worried about another employee catching me and ratting me out. Special bonus points if they catch you reading this particular thread.

11

If your boss does find out about the 'Dope, (which I doubt he will) inform him that the site contains pertinent information relating to your job. Which there undoubtedly is.

12

If you worked for a big company with an IT policy and a professional IT staff I’d say your chances are slim to none. I’ve seen different types of IT policies, but most just rely on content filtering that blocks most things the company doesn’t want you to look at while at work. At a big company everything is logged and could be analyzed, regardless of IE’s InPrivate browsing or not. But many companies do not routinely analyze traffic for misbehavior. Most large companies block all the stuff they don’t want you to get into, and then only punish if something major is brought to their attention. (Like a supervisor notices you checking personal email excessively and after repeated warnings they decide to take disciplinary action, they might pull logs of everything at that point as supporting evidence.)

It’s been a long time since people could easily browse porn at most worksites, and that used to be the biggie for getting people fired. But when you actually go to a blocked page, if you were trying to access porn or something I could see that getting you in trouble.

Now, in your situation with no professional IT staff, no actual IT administration, an owner/boss who would be the only one who might monitor it and who hasn’t bought any of the hardware or software he’d need to adequately monitor usage and doesn’t have the expertise to do so anyway, your chances are basically 0%.

13

Saving them in printable format (under the thread tools menu) works very well for that - it’s almost all just plain text, so it looks like “work”.

14

Perhaps you could use a portable firefox browser on a usb thumb drive. No history would be saved on the main drive, then.

15

Why not pick up a cheap netbook or tablet and completely sidestep the problem? It’s a lot safer approach.

16

He’s in private browsing mode. No history is being saved, anyway.

Summarizing what others have said, there are four places you leave traces when you use Internet services:

  1. On your local machine: This is the one folks usually think of: cookies, internet browsing history, bookmarks, that sort of thing. This is easy to take care of: don’t use bookmarks, and turn on your browser’s private mode to prevent it from caching the rest.

  2. On your local router/proxy server/bridge/gateway/etc. This is where companies usually institute policy. It’s basically a record of what sites (or IP addresses) are visited by which machines. It almost always requires someone actually turning it on, and definitely requires a little technical knowledge to get to and use. If your local machine is using DHCP (that is “Get an IP address automatically” in Windows), then these records are even less useful, since they often won’t tie to a specific local machine. If this is being monitored by someone who knows what they’re doing, there’s nothing you can do about it unless you have physical access to the logs, in which case you could delete them. (Of course, that might be a felony, depending on the business need for those logs.)

  3. Your ISP. Same sort of deal here; it’s possible to turn on logging and keep track of what connections go where, when. You have absolutely no control over this, but most ISP’s take a fairly hands-off approach this this: they’ll only actively monitor if the police bring them a warrant and ask them to. You might get fired, but it doesn’t sound like you’re committing any actual crimes, so there’s unlikely to be a warrant out for your data.

  4. The site you’re visiting. Using Javascript, HTML puts, or just server-side programming, the site can keep track of incoming requests, site visits, etc. For example, the SDMB keeps track of logins and times (you can see your last login at the top of the screen). This can be anywhere from benevolent (like the SDMB offering you a service) to malign (like websites attempting to compromise your browser). You can minimize this by turning off javascript (although I find that causes more problems than it fixes), don’t use logins or passwords anywhere, and/or using an anonymizing service that “bounces” your IP through somewhere else and hides the incoming trail. This is the domain of the seriously paranoid, and frankly if you need that level of privacy, it’s better to stay off the net altogether. Again, you have basically no control over what they do with the information you give them.

17

Honestly? I will tell you the best way. Work really, really hard. Don’t just do your work, do extra work. Be cheerful and pleasant at all times and be eager to take more work. Do more than your share.

Then, when someone catches you reading the Dope, as will inevitably happen, you can legitimately that you use it for downtime and it doesn’t interfere with your work. When they have seen the quality of your work, it will bother them less that you surf, too.

BUT if they think it’s interfering with your work, if you’re not getting projects done, then you have no recourse.

18

Procedure to get this authorized:[ul][li]Get your boss’s company listed on Wikipedia, either as an entry on its own, or named as an example of 'a small firm in the field of <whatever field it is>.[/li][li]point out this listing to your boss. Then casually mention that you will keep an eye on this to make sure it’s kept accurate.[/li][li]change your SDMB user name to something that includes the firm’s name.[/li][li]then, before reading SDMB, open an IE tab to the Wikipedia page, and leave it open.[/li][li]proceed to read SDMB to your heart’s content. If the boss or another employee comes by, swap to the tab with the Wikipedia article. If you don’t do that fast enough, and they catch you at a SDMB page, claim that this page popped up when you searched the Internet for your company name, because a username includes your firms name. [/ul]Finally:[/li]* ask for a salary increase, because of your increased duties in maintaining the company reputation online! :slight_smile:

19

[quote=“t-bonham@scc.net, post:18, topic:645309”]

Procedure to get this authorized:[ul][li]…[/li][li]change your SDMB user name to something that includes the firm’s name [/ul]…[/li][/QUOTE]

I think this against SDMB policy.

20

I’m too important at work now to care but the answer used to be Ghostzilla, the invisble browser.

Softpedia Ghostzilla