so, the latest hot rumor here at work is that they're going to start (if they haven't already) monitoring internet usage. i'm not too worried about it, since apart from the occasional aim usage, i don't really do anything that i wouldn't want people seeing. i wondered further if it was going to be some sort of terminal services monitoring, where someone could just log in and see everything i was seeing on my machine. that got me thinking about ways i could get around that... i started thinking about the end of cryptonomicon, where our protagonist randy has some data on his machine that bad people really, really want to look at, but they don't know how to decode the encrypted information, so they have a device set up to do a little bit of van eck phreaking and see the data when it is on his screen. so, he writes a little program to send the contents of the file in question in the form of morse code to his computer's LED lights, thereby reading the contents without anyone knowing, albeit very slowly. (i guess even that technique wouldn't be safe nowadays.) so, in short, if they're "screen eavesdropping" then i've got no hope, but if they're just checking what goes through our proxy server then i think i'm ok. i changed my browser preferences to skip using the proxy and connect right to the net, and they haven't turned off non-proxy internet access (yet). even if that happens, i'll probably be ok.

if we step in the wayback machine to my days at my former employer, they deployed a very restrictive internet access policy after i had started. i couldn't get to a lot of the sites that i read on a regular basis, like suck, among others. what's a poor web surfer to do? well, i had just gotten dsl from bell atlantic (now verizon), and since i was in early enough to be a beta tester, i had a static ip address for myself. what did that mean? it meant that i could install a copy of pcanywhere at work and at home, log into my home machine and surf out from my home machine! granted, it was 16 colors and fairly slow... but i still felt like a world class hax0r.