Public networks and foreign IP addresses

When you are working as a rater, you understand that you have to use your computer, and that the IP address, which is the numerical address that your internet service provider gives you, must belong to project locale, it means that you cannot work from abroad. Companies like Leapforce, Appen and Lionbridge do record your IP address. The main reason they do this is for security. The job is considered ‘work at home’ and that is where they want you to be when you are connected to their system and doing ratings. Let’s say that one day you decided to leave home with your laptop and go to a McDonalds or coffee shop with Wi-Fi and connect to dashboard for any one of those companies. Their servers can detect when your IP address has changed and that your IP belongs to a public network and will flag your account and you could lose access. We don’t need to go over how insecure Wi-Fi really is, especially in a public place. This puts their information and servers at risk and this is why they want you at home on a secured connection. If you’re on your laptop at home, you’re still behind your IP address, so they aren’t going to detect this. They will however detect when you go to a friend’s house, or library, etc.  

So you see, this really is a work at home job that doesn’t give you any flexibility at all. And it’s very important that you maintain the integrity of their security systems or you could very well find yourself suddenly terminated. It’s easy enough to lose a rating job for no good reason, and so it’s a good idea to not break the rules when it comes to their security.  

There is, however, a way that you can work remotely and securely from anywhere. You might be asking how that’s possible with everything we just talked about. But there is a way that you can control your computer remotely.  

Working from abroad via TeamViewer

Many of you are probably aware of the software TeamViewer which allows you to connect to any computer remotely, and then take control overt that computer as you normally would if you were sitting in front of it. TeamViewer is not something that is hard to setup and get going. There are just a couple of steps you want to take to make sure its setup correctly. Simply download the installation file from TeamViewer and install it. You are going to want to select the option: Installation to access this computer remotely. You’re just going to set it up for Personal/Non-commercial use. Don’t select the Company/Commercial use unless you want to pay for it and have extra features which you do not need for this setup, nor do you need for your job as a rater. In fact, you also want to install TeamViewer the same way on the laptop computer that you will use remotely. You need to make sure you are setting up unattended access for the desktop computer that you normally use to work. The installation is pretty straight forward and you just need to set a name and password to access the desktop or main computer you will work from. You probably want to access the device quickly and that is as simple as adding the computer to your list of computers and contacts.  

Once you have TeamViewer setup on both computers, it’s the perfect time to test everything and make sure that it’s all working. You don’t want to get remote and then find out it’s not working for some reason or another. There are many things to consider when checking everything out. If you have some problem with connecting, then the first place to check is your anti-virus. Make sure that if the anti-virus you use has the option to allow the TeamViewer program through its firewall.  

What about the smartphone thing?

At this point many of you are probably wondering about the smartphone thing. Some tasks are done using your smartphone at home, and some on your main work computer. But there is also a solution for this, and you can run an Android emulator right from your desktop.  

Lately there has been a need for Android emulators for PC’s, and mostly the need has come on from gamers. However, there are many good Android emulators out there for the PC and the Mac. For your smartphone tasks you just need something that is going to do the job, and most of these will work fine.  

The mainstream emulator is Bluestacks and has been around for quite some time and it looks as though it probably has the most active development team. The newest version is Bluestacks 4 and seems to work pretty good for many applications and will likely work for what you need.  

MeMu is another decent emulator that has a lot of good functions and works well with just about everything. Additionally, it supports Android Jelly Bean, Kit Kat, and Lollipop. That’s important working with some applications that Appen uses because their requirements are a smartphone running Lollipop. The nice thing about MeMu is you can run several instances of the program at once in case you are working on two different projects which can come in handy.  

In our experience, Nox is also another Android Emulator that works well and has good features. The nice thing is that this emulator is really forgiving on system resources which for slower computers might be an advantage. There are other Android emulators and there are plenty out there for Mac that run well. Nox is free and works just as good on a Mac as it does on a PC.  

Of course, you want to make sure to test out your system and make sure that everything is working. There is only one drawback to this system and that is when you want to work remotely, you need to leave your main computer on. You do not need the monitor on, and it can go to sleep. But this also brings up another problem, and if someone uses your computer, or turns it off, then that could be a problem. So if you live with your family, then you might want to make sure they understand your computer is off-limits. 

If you have any questions or suggestions on this topic, feel free to leave a comment bellow.