Download At Work

Employees that have their own computer with Internet access sometimes have the great urge of doing things that are not related to work. They might be reading online news, playing games, listening to music or trying to download at work. Everyone must have been in the situation that he needed to download a specific file at work which was blocked by the company’s firewall because of its file extension.

Download at Work (link, via Technostop) steps in by routing downloads through their own server changing the file extension of the download to one that will slip through the company’s security systems. The principle is simple but effective. The user needs to paste the file url of the file that he wants to download into the Download At Work form. The Download At Work server downloads the file when the user clicks on the Do It button and provides a link to the file on the same page of the website.

Users can customize the file name and extension before clicking the Do It button. Downloading uTorrent.zip might be less suspicious than downloading uTorrent.exe which might get blocked but if an administrator spots the download it might still be problematic to explain what the file did and why it was downloaded.

Available file extensions are zip, doc, pdf, xls and aaa. Download At Work will use the original file name of the download which can be edited by the user as well.

Downloading the file does not mean that it can be executed on the computer and it also might cause some alarm bells to ring if the user downloads several files from a service called Download At Work but it can be a lifesaver for an important file that could not be opened otherwise.