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Comment by 7748394773639 | Hacker News Reader

I have my own PC strapped under my desk connected to public Wi-Fi. I use it to do all my work. My company pc is left turned on but disconnected, sitting on top of my desk to dissuade suspicion.

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I have a WiFi router hidden so we can do some specific network testing. We also have a consumer DSL line so we can test on a network where IT doesn’t block random stuff. It’s not even much of a secret. Everybody local knows this stuff and every six months a guy at IT headquarters throws a fit, doesn’t provide an alternative and gets ignored. I have thought about sending them recordings of previous meetings so we don’t have to repeat the series of same meetings every six to twelve months.

We had the same kind of "hidden" router at my previous employer, as we had a team of ~10 developers who needed a lot of different access to different servers and between eachother. We put the name of another tenant in the office building as the SSID :).

After about a year the network through that router started to slow down. When we checked why we realized that we had more than 40 wifi clients, as other (non-dev) teams learned about the network through the grapevine and actually the new employees from sales (the neighboring office) were told to connect to that network directly - as the process to connect to the "normal" network was too much of a hassle.

The funny thing is that after a recent remodel the router got moved and we don’t know where it is. It still works but nobody knows the exact location. It may be in the ceiling or the floor.

LOL

reminds me of a very old bash.org

http://www.bash.org/?5273

That reminds me about the story of a University that an old DEC VAX that got walled up during a remodel. Machine kept running and no one notice. A decade later another remodel came along and they tore down the wall to find the machine just happily running.

I remember an old Netware version of that story.

You know, maybe it was Netware. My memory has some bitrot in it after all these years.

I hope it never needs to be reset.

I have a VM on my mac to go on the work network, using ethernet, while I do everything over wifi.

Don't you need shared drives, etc?

We can't connect to anything internal from outside, there is VPN access but it seems a step too far to use that all the time.

Does your company know you have their IP on your personal device (and are sending company communications over public WiFi)?

It’s not highly confidential information. Mostly its to use a machine with adequate ram. Besides I’m using end to end encryption instead of being MITMd by their third party ‘security’ gateway

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