It's probably the firewall. The browser-based interface to IB seems to use port(s) other than 80 (haven't checked which one(s) specifically). Your network may be configured not to admit traffic on these ports. Check with your network admin.
And after figuring out how to bypass your firewall, consider whether the price you'll pay if caught is sufficient to continue using IB versus a broker you can access from Internet Explorer.
riggs, just a simple rule of thumb - EVERYTHING is trackable. The question is just how easy to track. All they would have to do is track or block access to gotomypc.com or whatever server IPs that are used by their system, which is trivial to find out.
The problem is with the implementation itself: Often the software of these companies requires the ability to randomly obtain a port number on which to either communicate or receive data over a particular block of port numbers.
These are very poor requirements: In a corporate network it would require - somewhere on either a router, firewall or both - a block of open ports with no security handshake. This is a BIG problem for network security.
A simple solution would be for the software to asssign SPECIFIC ports for use by a SPECIFIC account: believe me this is not hard to implement even in a very high volume scenario.
Most likely these companies have no talent - or budget to hire talent - to accomplish these improvements, and in an attempt to further cut costs and achieve margins they are unwilling to put any investments into their systems. As a result they lose customers - of course these dont appear directly on any financial statement and thus nobody on their boards objects.