Prox Sites

Factual Questions
1

Hi Everyone

I was hoping that someone could help me understand proxy sites, and whether or not they are safe to use.

Here is the background:

I travel a LOT for work. I love the job, but one of the things I hate is that I spend a lot of time in hotels in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do, after work is done for the day.

Work monitors where folks’ laptops go, and this puts me in the crummy position of not being able to go where I want online, for fear of getting noticed.

If I were to go online, NOT through the VPN, and go to a prox site, what freedom / protection would that afford me? I realize that work would know that I have gone to a proxy site, but interestingly those do not appear to be against policy. Are these sites ever / often “trojan horses” that can harm my computer?

For what its worth, most of the sites that I am interested in are not especially off the wall or nasty, but even little things that interest me like world war II can sometimes set off the religious or antisemitism filters. Besides, we are talking about my own time and so my personal interests are not work’s business.

At the risk of hijacking my own thread, I do realize that work owns my computer. And I have brought my personal laptop on trips, but that is pretty tough to manage, with the weight and security screening.

Thanks for any info.

2

…thus, the iPad.

A proxy won’t protect you from any keyloggers that IT may have loaded on your laptop. It will not erase cookies or your browser history. Then again, I don’t have good knowledge of this, but I thought the thread could use a bump.

3

If you can figure out a way to run a different operating system (booting from a flash drive or something) you can remove that threat, too.

As for proxies, different ones work differently. Some are truly anonymous, while others aren’t. And, of course, it could probably be detected that you are using a proxy in the first place (just like a VPN), and that in and of itself looks suspicious.

(I’m of course assuming you are using the company web connection. If you can use any connection, without using a VPN to them, you’re probably golden with the new OS suggestion. Just realize that it’s probably against the rules, and possibly illegal to use the laptop for something that is not authorized.