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Hey-Supposedly my boss or "the company" can read your e-mail or see what sights you are looking up on the company computer. What if I brought in my own laptop and plugged into the DSL port or whatever? Would they still be able to trace what web pages I visited or what e-mails I wrote? and no, I am not planning on looking up anything 'bad', I just want to visit some sights the company has blocked. (E-bay, Amazon, etc). We are allowed to use the web, and I work at night so it's not a biggy, just don't necessarily want the head honchos reading my e-mails. Sorry, I'm not much of a computer techie.
No, they wouldn't be able to read your e-mails as far as I know. But be sure it's okay; some companies take a dim view of people bringing in their personal laptops to the office.
Here's the legal deal: if you use ANY equipment which is provided by the company, which includes their acquisition by purchase, leasing, renting, borrowing, or any other means, you are using company property. That includes the DSL port, the electricity, the wall, the floor, the chair, the desk, the lights, the air conditioning, the rest room, you name it. THEREFORE, since you are using company property, the company is legally allowed to, and entitled to, observe, in whatever manner they see fit, what you do while you are using their possession(s). That's the legal deal.
The technical deal is that yes, they almost certainly have all the DSL ports monitored. Somewhere every single connection made through their DSL ports is printed out on a log sheet and retained. So it makes no difference what hardware you use; the internet connections made using that hardware are what matter.
Alleycat is quite likely right that they wouldn't be able to read a specific email, or a specific web page content. What they WILL have is all the URLs you visit, printed out on that monitor sheet.
If you use their network, it will pass through a router, switch or server that has the potential to capture your traffice and log your data. In any case, the blocking of sites is normally accomplished at the network firewall, not your workstation so if you use your own laptop it will likely still be blocked.
You will most likely be forced to use a wireless air card or tethered cell phone to bypass the company firewall to access those blocked sites. Then you will on your own hardware and network and not subject to their tracking.
As others have indicated - the monitoring/access control is not done on the machine.. but the pipe itself. Also - many companies have policies against plugging a non-company owned laptop into their network without permission. I know my policy strictly prohibits that (this includes vendors and contractors).
In essence, I have no clue what is on your laptop... you may have something on there that may threaten our network. So its a huge no-no here. But, your mileage may vary.
My suggestion is to read over your Information Security Policy....However, since your original intent won't solve anything, it may not even be worth the trouble of bringing your laptop in. Who knows, some will even reserve the right to look at the contents (why? because you may have copied confidential info onto it).
As others have indicated - the monitoring/access control is not done on the machine.. but the pipe itself. Also - many companies have policies against plugging a non-company owned laptop into their network without permission. I know my policy strictly prohibits that (this includes vendors and contractors).
In essence, I have no clue what is on your laptop... you may have something on there that may threaten our network. So its a huge no-no here. But, your mileage may vary.
My suggestion is to read over your Information Security Policy....However, since your original intent won't solve anything, it may not even be worth the trouble of bringing your laptop in. Who knows, some will even reserve the right to look at the contents (why? because you may have copied confidential info onto it).
As two other posters have pointed out, the blocks are not on the company PC, thus your laptop won't do you any good.
Secondly, as Macroy here points out, most companies get upset if you plug YOUR system into a company jack, because of the data that is available through the company 'intranet' (internal network). I got in trouble once because I was unaware that I had bypassed a router with my laptop by hooking into a specific jack.
I'd recommend you just surf the pages that your company allows you to surf, and check your ebay bids on your own time.
Assuming your email is going through the company's Exchange server, then it can be easily arranged to trap copies at the server level of a user's incoming and outgoing mails that pass through that account. If it's an external email account accessed by web page, then something might be accessible via a browser cache. Of course, if the laptop has (unknownst to you) a rootkit and/or keylogger on it, to which your employer has control, then you're wide open wherever you went with that machine.
But can they actually READ my e-mails? Or just know that I visited an e-mail site? (Yahoo, hotmail, AOL, etc)
If you are my employee and you are sending email across my network (yahoo, hotmail, google, or the companies email system) I can actually READ those e-mails, make copies of it, and even change the contents of it before it is sent off to your e-mail carrier if I really wanted to.
The ONLY way you can get around that would be to use your own encryption (i.e. PGP). And since your laptop is on my network... if I can find a way in there and steal your encryption keys... I'm golden again. Even SSL encryption... I have accelerators that will decrypt that stuff if you are using MY network.
But can they actually READ my e-mails? Or just know that I visited an e-mail site? (Yahoo, hotmail, AOL, etc)
Yes.
(post lengthened for CD)
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