This is why keeping work accounts, machines, and activities separate is always a good idea. In this case Gary did have “something to hide”.
Nonsense! Calum is doing what Calum does at home. If the company doesn’t want to see it they shouldn’t be watching him like that when he’s at home.
Remember: Calum isn’t feeling well. Any doctor would say Calum is doing his part to get better and stay healthy!
Calum is using a work machine for personal actuvities, though. A little Youtube never hurt anyone but straight-up watching porn “between enquiries”, which sounds like during work hours or something, is kinda not on.
Work shouldn’t distrust employees this much and these measures never lead to increased productivity but Calum is also a complete fucking idiot.
I read it as likely to be a personal computer using a remote connection, mostly because Gary told Calum how to hide the screen on the remote connection instead of telling them not to do it on a work computer.
Either way, being called out for watching porn while apparently working from home due to something they need to recover from is priceless.
Work shouldn’t distrust employees this much
If he’s using an RDP connection then it’s not about work not trusting him, it’s about him leaving all the defaults on. Standard behavior for RDP connections is for the computer to essentially just take commands from a remote mouse and keyboard as if they are commands from the local peripherals.
The computer doesn’t know anything about the remote connection, so it’s just operating as usual which is why everyone can see the screen, because under normal operations that’s but a computer does.
The email is just advising him to maybe change some of the settings so that it doesn’t behave as default.
When I used to travel for work, I carried two laptops despite the hassle.
A decade ago, I watched a scientist at a conference plug his laptop in to the conference room, wake it up, sync to the Big Screen, load xvideos tab he had up, and then watched him flounder for a good 20 seconds to try to figure out how to close it and save face before loading a PowerPoint.
If BYOD was allowed I’d probably get a laptop with two M.2 drives and keep work and personal on separate OSs on separate drives, both encrypted so they can’t access each other’s files.
Best of both worlds.
I also work from home and use my work laptop for work only. Not even googling stuff, nothing. Just work. Never even opened the media player or went to youtubes website once.
I have my own computer running on a separate screen and I can do and watch whatever the fuck I want during working hours. I can play a game or watch a movie and nobody knows. Its that simple.
Same with phones. Never use work phone for personal stuff.
Its not even being tech savvy, just common sense ffs.
Same here. It also removes some hassle when changing jobs. All of your personal stuff is on the computer you own and all of the work stuff is on the the computer the company owns. Just turn in your work laptop and you’re done with that place and on to the next.
I work in the IT department for my company so I know for a fact that there’s no monitoring on the work laptops, which is super strange but whatever.
Still I wouldn’t use the work laptop for anything other than work activities because despite the fact I 100% know there’s no monitoring I still don’t trust it. Besides, It’s unprofessional, and although I don’t really care about that all that much, it’s good to get into the habit of not doing personal activities on a work laptop, because one day they might start monitoring, and this way I’m already in the habit of not doing anything personal.
Why is he watching it inside the remote connection window instead of his own browser?
Thanks Gary,
Now that I know you can see me, I can wank much better.
Best, Calum
I have been working from home for years and my employer is not watching our screen. However about a decade ago we received a company wide email from an admin reminding everyone that they can see DNS requests when we’re connected to the VPN.
Thats why i have a laptop for work, solely for work, nothing but work right next to my big rig
Wait they didn’t give you a laptop? If they want you to work remotely they really should be giving you a device.
Sounds like he’s remoting into the computer in the office from another computer at home (pretty common in IT since you probably have admin tools perfectly configured on that computer and specifically configured for its network config) but with Windows Remote Access it lets the person physically at the computer see everything by default. But i would really hope that someone in IT would be painfully aware of why you shouldn’t do sensitive personal browsing on a work computer or a work network
I don’t RDP that often to physical devices, but I’m pretty damn sure the default settings for RDP forcefully logs/locks out your user on the physical device and only your lock screen is visible. I have never tried it but I’m also pretty sure it’s possible to have two logged in users at once, one using RDP and one using the physical device.
pretty common in IT
I’ve never heard of anyone in IT regularly remoting to their work computer.
If we remote anywhere it is to a jump host, and those are terminal servers, so no monitor connected.