🍃eating leaf🌿

JAR (Joel Arthur Rosenthal) sheep head hair clip

I would strongly recommend not trying to get around blocking rules on your work laptop because your work is almost certainly logging what happens on the laptop; if they check those logs at the very least you will no longer be allowed to borrow the laptop, and possibly you won't continue to have a work to borrow a laptop from.

Also, depending on how huge a deal anyone wants to make of this, it may be actually illegal to do this on someone else's computer (and even if they lent it to you, that is their computer, and what you are discussing is sometimes described as "unauthorized access" and is a no-shit crime; people also don't think that logging into an ex's email that they had the password to is a crime - it is. Don't do this shit)

You can do whatever you want on your own computer and your own network. If you are on somebody else's computer you have to follow their rules. This is annoying, but unless you are certain that you are good enough to do this in a way that will be completely undetectable to your employer, you shouldn't do this.

Do not torrent from your work computer, and yes I would delete everything that you've got on there. Stop doing anything non work-related now, remove anything you've installed or downloaded that is non work-related.

I'm torn about whether you should tell your supervisor or just not say anything until it's brought up. It's going to depend a lot on how on-it your company is. If your supervisor is cool and your company is chill, you might want to approach the company and say "hey, I did something thoughtless and I was treating the company computer like a personal device for a little while before I had a lightbulb moment and realized my mistake then deleted my personal information from the machine" and see what happens. If your company is not chill, remove everything and if anyone ever confronts you about this don't lie and say you didn't do anything - they've got logs - but say "I'm sorry, I was treating the work computer like a personal machine before I realized how inappropriate that was and stopped using it in that way; I removed my personal information on X date and have not used it that way since, my apologies."

Companies don't just track your activities on work machines because they want to know what you're doing, they do it because it can be a big security risk; if you've been torrenting on the work computer and you're not REALLY REALLY REALLY sure what you're doing, you can end up getting the machine compromised and then introducing a compromised machine into your work's network and infecting other machines or you can end up with a keylogger vacuuming up sensitive client data.

I and dozens of other attorneys would spend the day sifting by through emails, pdfs, event logs, browser histories, word docs, excel sheets, etc. looking for information relative to the case to hand over to the other party.

But sometimes, because they were already paying for our time, our clients would ask us to flag… interesting… documents that we’d find. Things that looked suspicious or illegal and might be important to know about that weren’t actually relevant to the case. They could do that because it’s their own documents we were going through or documents they had permission to go through.

Let me tell you, the amount of affairs alone you find on people’s work emails is insane. Casual discussions of bribes, embezzlement, etc. And a whole lot of private health information and porn use. And that’s not even touching the time we had an actual order from the FBI to let them know if we found CP while looking through documents in our corporate civil case that had nothing to do with pedophilia. Because the company our client was suing shared a server with a different company that was being investigated for that.

Basically: there is no such thing as privacy on a work computer. It logs every thing you do. And your bosses can access it any time they want. Because it’s their computer, not yours. And even if they don’t know how to extract that info or have time to sort it themselves, there are many very skilled professionals that do.