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> Even my favourite Googler has 5 laptops at home, but only some of them work, even fewer are for work, and most of them are in the other room. That doesn't re
by danans 5y ago
> Even my favourite Googler has 5 laptops at home, but only some of them work, even fewer are for work, and most of them are in the other room.
That doesn't reflect my experience as a Googler. I have one corporate issued laptop that works great for everything from software development, flashing testing devices, managing production services, and browsing the internal meme boards. I don't have to switch devices. I'm not sure what relevance personal devices have. You are pretty restricted in using personal devices for work (phones being an exception).
I think BeyondCorp ended up working fantastically well during the pandemic as basically the entire company has been working via untrusted networks. It's hard to imagine using a clunky old corporate VPN from the past anymore.
- jsnell 5y agoThe quote is phrased awkwardly and is kind of a non sequitur, but I don't think you're actually contradicting it? It's not saying that the anonymous Googler has five work laptops. It's that out of the five laptops they have at home, some are broken, some are personal devices that can't be used for work, and one (maybe two?) is a work device used for work.
- danans 5y agoI understand that, but I don't understand how it's an example of BeyondCorp not working somehow. Maybe the 2 devices are a PC and Mac because the employee needs tools that only work on one platform or the other. But that's orthogonal to BeyondCorp.
- lupire 5y agoThe poorly explained point is that your users don't have 2 trusted devices at once, so if you don't like the device the user is using, there is nothing they have that you will like better, so there is no point in having one device vouch for a other, or splitting trust/privileges among two devices for the same user.
- jeffbee 5y agoWait, that's what that passage is supposed to mean? It does not seem obviously correct to me. Why can I not enroll several trusted devices?
- joshuamorton 5y agoAlso many/most users with a laptop do have a second trusted device: a phone.
- refulgentis 5y agoYou can. There's a focus on verbosity that's hiding the core of "many googlers only have one device!". I don't understand what the authors getting at though, its a non-issue at Google and they should know that? Trivially, let's say that a clear workaround is having a help desk for this situation that doesn't require device trust
- danans 5y agoThe second trusted device is a USB FIDO key. No second computer is needed.