I’m one of those IT/ICT people that switches computer rather often at work. The thing is that my boss doesn’t really have the ‘resources’ to give us all the most splendid laptop (the one that died last week was 7 years old and should be in a museum in my opinion). Despite that all-too-common fact in this industry, there is one thing most IT-companies enjoy to invest in: logging.
Whenever I browse for something personal at work (like checking my bank, doing a much needed lookup for company information or even looking at jobsites), wherever I go: it is logged, or at least do my colleagues and boss have the necessary access (both physical and right-wise) to my computer. Checking my browsing history or any other thing is theoretically possible.
I use a combination of google chrome portable (thanks to http://portableapps.com/) and OpenDns (opendns.com) to prevent the all-too easy things from leaking out to my boss’ computer should he be interested.
(I know there are far better things to do to really really be invisible to all, and encrypt every step you make,… but I’m just trying to get an easy solution for this, one that doesn’t cost me a lot of time or money and is really easy to use on different computers.
Chrome portable is awesome because I just carry MY own browser, with all MY stuff (like passwords; logins) on it … just on a USB stick.
I use an 8GB USB stick for it… but the Google Chrome portable only takes up about 150MB space at average.
This way, my work computer stays as clean and ‘unpersonal’ as a Apple Store’s floor on Monday morning.
I just unplug the usb-stick carrying my Chrome Portable with me… it syncs with my chrome sync account whenever I’m connected.
Two small disadvantages:
It’s slightly slower than the real Chrome browser and it doesn’t auto-update. Two small prices I gladly pay for carrying MY browser with me at work, friends, family or while traveling.
You can download Chrom Portable from:
http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/google_chrome_portable