Secrets of the IT Department
Friday, August 10, 2007
Wall Street Journal reporter Vauhini Vara spoke to technology and security experts to find out how to get around the rules of your office IT department and why in some cases you may not want to. She explains her findings with Gina Trapani, editor of the Lifehacker blog and author of Lifehacker, 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day.
Lifehacker, 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day is available for purchase at Amazon.com
Lifehacker, 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day is available for purchase at Amazon.com
Comments [4]
I work in the IT field. What you haven't addressed is the number of users who download some tools (codecs) to watch videos and end up downloading viruses or spyware. These end up wasting a lot of everybody's time. The internet is a lot more dangerous today than it was in the past. Would you like to be in a hospital or deal with a bank where most computers are infected with viruses, password stealing trojans or spyware?
IT professionals work hard to protect companies from hackers. Please don't make their life more difficult.
A simple solution is to carry a U3-complaint thumb drive. You can run your own version of Firefox from the drive, and automatically load your saved tabs each time you start it. But it doesn't work on a Mac.
Plus, you're not affecting the Registry entries on the PC you're using. The Web sites you go to will see the company's IP address, but you can use a proxy service to mask this.
In case you lose it, it's password protected
While web-based e-mail was still blocked at my job, some co-workers found a clever way to get to gmail:
For some reason, our company's security settings cannot block Gmail if you launch it from within the Google "Talk" program.
Of course downloading Google Talk was also blocked, but I downloaded the setup file on another computer, and e-mailed it to my work address. But then there was another problem: my work e-mail security blocked the attachement! Refusing to give up, I burned that setup file onto a CD and brought THAT to my work pc. I was able to install Google Talk that way, and launch Gmail!
I honestly would have quit and gone to another company if I had stayed totally unable to use my web-based e-mail for eight hours a day. I hope this suggestion helps some listeners!
If you log in to a web mail service such as gmail using HTTPS, that only applies to the login page. Your login data is usually sent using HTTPS, but then the actual mail exchange can be viewed by many-a-savvy hacker
Be very careful using the comments the author on the radio is suggesting, she is leaving out a lot of details (I'm sure due to time constraints). IT professionals are good at what they do.
Leave a Comment
Register for your own account so you can vote on comments, save your favorites, and more. Learn more.
Please stay on topic, be civil, and be brief.
Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. Names are displayed with all comments. We reserve the right to edit any comments posted on this site. Please read the Comment Guidelines before posting. By leaving a comment, you agree to New York Public Radio's Privacy Policy and Terms Of Use.