4 ms·

And let's not discount the moral of low paid, overworked employees, and companies that let low level managers run roughshod over lower level employees. My poin

And let's not discount the moral of low paid, overworked employees, and companies that let low level managers run roughshod over lower level employees. My point is don't discount inside corporate espionage by disgruntled any level employees. Thank goodness I didn't have access to a script that would lock up at least two of my past employers when coming up years ago? Then again, I personally haven't been that mad, but boy do I know employees who were. I could say that we are all choir boys, but you piss on an employee, especially during a recession, well let's just say I have seen unpstanding guys rub magnets over hard drives over pure apathy. (The guy didn't know about strength of magnents, and it did not hurt anything.) Plugging in a usb, or downloading a suspicious email is something I can see happening, especially to "those" companies. I imagine Xfinity employees dream about it?

gerdesj 5y ago
"I have seen unpstanding guys rub magnets over hard drives over pure apathy." Open up a spinning rust hard drive and you will find two very strong magnets inside, positioned opposite each other.
- XorNot 5y ago
  This isn't why it didn't work though: disks tolerate smooth magnetic field gradients just fine. To wipe them you want a chaotic, noisy electromagnet.
  - exikyut 5y ago
    Wow, interesting. How does that work?!
    - XorNot 5y ago
      Basically it's the transition in field strength, not the field, which flips a bit. So you need a moving magnetic field, and you need to cause a lot of changes because HDDs have all sorts of error correction.
sdoering 5y ago
I used to care for the security of my work machine. I was sole admin. No corporate crap- or spyware. I was responsible and I learned a lot. We got bought. Big corp enforced Endpoint Management and a whole barrage of corporate spyware. I am not an admin anymore. I can't even use an AdBlock solution anymore. And guess what. I don't give a damn anymore. If the device enforces an update, so he it. If I have to double approve every external mail address when sending, so be it. But I don't feel ownership or responsibility anymore. Should corporate overlords care. I am out.
- phaedrus 5y ago
  I have a direct A/B experiment on this: I have one work laptop which is centrally managed by big-corp IT (I'm not the admin), and one laptop which is a project machine which I manage and admin. Guess what? The big-corp IT managed computer which I only use to check email and edit Word docs is almost unusably slow, weighed down as it is with antivirus, surveillance software, centralized updates, etc. The project machine which I manage and have admin access to remains snappy despite its workload (Visual Studio) and older hardware. Also, you gotta love the "cost savings" of let's outsource our IT, not let developers be admins on their own machine: now we have to buy secondary machines that developers ARE admin of, so they can get their work done.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    If a developer needs to be admin to do their work the os needs a better security model.
    - 0x0203 5y ago
      That's highly dependent on the type of development work. I'm a kernel developer and I need regular access to privileged components of the system for a wide variety of reasons. It could be argued that all standard *nix/windows/mac systems need a better security model to better isolate specific tasks, but for much of what I need to do (e.g., create, modify file systems/boot loaders/kernels, ptrace processes, etc...), if I'm allowed to do it at all, I can get anywhere else anyway, so I may as well just have full admin and save everyone some headaches. And I'd argue this isn't only true for kernel development. In some cases, sure, but certainly not enough to make such a blanket statement.

gerdesj 5y ago

"I have seen unpstanding guys rub magnets over hard drives over pure apathy." Open up a spinning rust hard drive and you will find two very strong magnets inside, positioned opposite each other.

XorNot 5y ago
This isn't why it didn't work though: disks tolerate smooth magnetic field gradients just fine. To wipe them you want a chaotic, noisy electromagnet.
- exikyut 5y ago
  Wow, interesting. How does that work?!
  - XorNot 5y ago
    Basically it's the transition in field strength, not the field, which flips a bit. So you need a moving magnetic field, and you need to cause a lot of changes because HDDs have all sorts of error correction.

sdoering 5y ago

I used to care for the security of my work machine. I was sole admin. No corporate crap- or spyware. I was responsible and I learned a lot. We got bought. Big corp enforced Endpoint Management and a whole barrage of corporate spyware. I am not an admin anymore. I can't even use an AdBlock solution anymore. And guess what. I don't give a damn anymore. If the device enforces an update, so he it. If I have to double approve every external mail address when sending, so be it. But I don't feel ownership or responsibility anymore. Should corporate overlords care. I am out.

phaedrus 5y ago
I have a direct A/B experiment on this: I have one work laptop which is centrally managed by big-corp IT (I'm not the admin), and one laptop which is a project machine which I manage and admin. Guess what? The big-corp IT managed computer which I only use to check email and edit Word docs is almost unusably slow, weighed down as it is with antivirus, surveillance software, centralized updates, etc. The project machine which I manage and have admin access to remains snappy despite its workload (Visual Studio) and older hardware. Also, you gotta love the "cost savings" of let's outsource our IT, not let developers be admins on their own machine: now we have to buy secondary machines that developers ARE admin of, so they can get their work done.
- bluGill 5y ago
  If a developer needs to be admin to do their work the os needs a better security model.
  - 0x0203 5y ago
    That's highly dependent on the type of development work. I'm a kernel developer and I need regular access to privileged components of the system for a wide variety of reasons. It could be argued that all standard *nix/windows/mac systems need a better security model to better isolate specific tasks, but for much of what I need to do (e.g., create, modify file systems/boot loaders/kernels, ptrace processes, etc...), if I'm allowed to do it at all, I can get anywhere else anyway, so I may as well just have full admin and save everyone some headaches. And I'd argue this isn't only true for kernel development. In some cases, sure, but certainly not enough to make such a blanket statement.