Thwarting corporate monitoring software
Excerpt of a Wired.com news story titled "IM Users: Your Boss Is Watching":
"Instant messaging -- a tool many perceive as off-limits to the prying eyes of employers -- may soon be going the way of e-mail.
In the interests of record-keeping and tighter security, industry analysts say a growing number of companies that allow instant messaging in the office are also monitoring its usage."
It seems like the only way to ensure that your personal communications is secure at work when they are monitoring all kinds of stuff is to leave your home computer on that acts as an SSH server, boot up a CD-based distribution of Linux such as Knoppix at the place you work at or feel generally insecure communicating at, ssh into your home computer from there, and then tunnel all your stuff over it. (Tunneling your web browsing can be done by running a socks or web proxy on your home machine that only accepts connections from localhost, and then mapping a local port via ssh to be tunneled over the SSH connection to the port of the proxy on your home machine and then you would set your web browser's proxy settings to the local port you mapped over the SSH session.) That way your communications would be fully encrypted (at least to your home computer) and the boss or whomever is doing the monitoring wouldn't be able to snoop on what's being sent and received.
Then again, if you have something to say that you don't want your boss to see it is probably easier/best to just not say it at work at all.
Links:
A related story: TechTV: Message to Employees: Expect No Privacy
Anonymizer - Online Privacy and Security
More information on SSH:
SSH Features
SSH port forwarding features
Tunneling VNC over SSH (What is VNC?)