My employer has recently developed a company home page that they are proud of, for some baffling reason. Probably because they poured a lot of money into it. They also installed some sort of software that changed my preferred home page (Google) to their corporate page. I keep changing it back to Google through Tools>Internet Options, but every so often when I open IE, their software kicks it back to their page. It doesn’t stop me from browsing, but honestly, the corporate line can get a little hard to take when it is being shoved down your throat.
Any way to lock the home page (through some sort of read/write protection maybe) so that this doesn’t happen?
Thanks for the suggestion. So far my company seems to be able to get around it, but I’ll keep trying.
Just as a note: I downloaded the MS Antispyware Beta, then scanned with no spyware found. I then ran Ad-Aware and it found 52 tracking cookies. I know the two aren’t synonymous, but I’ll definitely be keeping Ad-Aware.
This is often done via “group policies”. Anti-spyware will not stop these, as they are changes done by the systems administrator (or a server acting on his/her behalf).
Pretty common feature to Win2003 servers and environments. I’m subject to this in the environment in which I currently work, they are security/control freaks.
Unfortunately, unless you’re friendly with an IT guy/gal that can exempt your machine/user profile, your SOL, and will have to deal with the expensive home page.
One way you can work around this in a slightly less elegant manner is to create a shortcut on your desktop to load “http:\www.google.com” and click on this shortcut instead of the normal IE icon.
That’s because the default on MS is to not worry about cookies (which are a much smaller threat than other issues). If you switch to “Full System Scan” (the default is “quick scan”), MS Antispyware will find those, too.
I’d have a talk with management. Tell them that you’ve seen their masterpiece, you’re suitably impressed, thanks ever so much for the hard work, now get that sucker out of your face so you can get some real work done and earn your salary.
chances are it’s being reset by a login script which runs at login/restart. The IS staff has build this in order to connect network drives, update corporate software and virus protection etc. The side effect is that they can reset your homepage when ever they want and there’s basically nothing you can do about it short of removing your PC from the network or never logging it off. The latter isn’t even sure-fire, since many companies run scripts which log everyone off at, say, midnight.
I’d go with the suggestion of creating a shortcut on the desktop/taskbar which links to google and using it instead of the built-in MS provided shortcuts.
It’s really not all that inelegant, and the desktop shortcut seems to be the most expedient (and least inflammatory) way to bypass this. I guess I shouldn’t get too upset at their policies; it’s reading the SD message boards on the company clock that gets me through most days
