Use the work computer for work stuff and get your own for everything else. The company has reasons for locking down the machines and mucking about with that can get you into deep doodoo very quickly.

If you have physical access to the hardware, the world's your oyster. Until you get caught anyway.

Probably best to give a nice gift to one of the top IT folks - or be buddy-buddy with them - for the Admin password with the assurance that you'll take care of it if you mess the system up. Or better, that you won't in the first place.

This got me a good deal of leeway once upon a time, but then, maybe things are a lot harder to circumvent these days.

One of my other employers had all company functions on an RDP server and staff could do whatever they needed, heck, wanted - within reason - with their desk PCs with everything else securely away in a window on their desktops. The solution doesn't scale well though, especially when the company server can't use the processing power of the desk PCs, so that might not be right for your company. Indeed, the company in question eventually had people doing their work on the bare metal, so to speak.

By that point I was VNCing to my home PC instead in a weird reversal of the previous setup.

A second computer? Maybe a tablet or so. A holder for your phone.

If all you want to do is watch or listen to stuff while you work that might be easier.

If you’re at home, set up pihole or use an content-blocking DNS on your router. But then if you’re home, you should be using a personal device for non-work stuff. There are also a bunch of alternative (and some sketchy) front-ends for various websites.

I’ve honestly given up on getting around corporate controls and just completely separate personal stuff from work devices, especially nowadays when companies are going full big brother because of people using AI tools/agents and the chances of someone accidentally uploading stuff that shouldn’t be out there is getting increasingly common. So they are locking down stuff more and more, and increasing monitoring/surveillance.

Don't underestimate how much liberty you can get if you just install it via Microsoft store.

Many companies will allow ad blocking extensions if you just ask.

There are a lot of frontends you can use to access services:

https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends#youtube

Portable Firefox/Librewolf might be able to be pulled off.

Portable apps in general.

I was able to add a lot via Scoop: https://scoop.sh/ but your work computer might be too locked down.

can't install anything, or add extensions, etc.

Can you install user apps (which don't require admin elevation) or is it truly nothing?

Firefox, for example can be installed as a user by just declining the admin prompt.

Otherwise you can snag a portable version.

May also be worth checking if the company maintains a list of approved software anywhere. Firefox probably won't even raise an eyebrow, but other software might, depending on your use.

Install a vm (or use wsl) and just work in Linux in there.

You get root, and can use software that respects you. For a speed penalty of course.

I think that DuckDuckGo do this for video but I’m not sure