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No, thats just stupid. A good solution would be a guest WLAN that is, for example, on a separate VLAN. There is no reason to force people to use the slow and ex

No, thats just stupid. A good solution would be a guest WLAN that is, for example, on a separate VLAN. There is no reason to force people to use the slow and expensive cellular network -- both your employees and the people who actually need to use the cellular network will thank you. Also, the GP companies no-peer-to-peer-at-all policy seems... not well thought out, even thought it might be a pretty common policy. That an application is p2p has nothing to do with wether or not it can be trusted. (If the application wanted to steal data, wouldn't it be easier to just go for some central dump server?)

mcculley 14y ago
The P2P app could make itself more trustworthy. On OS X, it could opt into the App Sandbox such that it could not read files unrelated to what it has downloaded. If you run fs_usage against Spotify on OS X, you will see that it is reading files in other places than where it downloads to.
- csense 14y ago
  Isn't it the norm on UNIX-like OS'es for things to use tons of dynamic libraries and spew pieces of themselves all over different directories?
  - mcculley 14y ago
    I would not say this is the norm. If you look at Sandbox-enabled third party applications such as Google Chrome, it is well defined what libraries it dynamically links to outside of the directory it is installed in.
  - ohazi 14y ago
    Native OS X apps either statically link everything, or shove all of their dynamic libs into a single .app package... that's why their binaries are so big. This avoids shared lib versioning nightmares and makes everything "just work" (including drag-and-drop installs), but it also means you have 30 bajillion copies of libXYZ on your disk.
freehunter 14y ago
We do indeed have a guest WLAN, going out a separate circuit with a different ISP and different IP block. The problem is, people want Skype and Spotify on the same laptops they're using for work, and we don't allow split tunneling with our VPN. P2P applications have security risks associated with them, but they also have network constraints associated with them. It doesn't take many P2P users to choke legitimate users out of a network. When some of the network monitoring tools we use are licensed based on how much data is flowing through the network, P2P gets expensive real quick. Move that stuff to a network we're not monitoring as extensively.

mcculley 14y ago

The P2P app could make itself more trustworthy. On OS X, it could opt into the App Sandbox such that it could not read files unrelated to what it has downloaded. If you run fs_usage against Spotify on OS X, you will see that it is reading files in other places than where it downloads to.

csense 14y ago
Isn't it the norm on UNIX-like OS'es for things to use tons of dynamic libraries and spew pieces of themselves all over different directories?
- mcculley 14y ago
  I would not say this is the norm. If you look at Sandbox-enabled third party applications such as Google Chrome, it is well defined what libraries it dynamically links to outside of the directory it is installed in.
- ohazi 14y ago
  Native OS X apps either statically link everything, or shove all of their dynamic libs into a single .app package... that's why their binaries are so big. This avoids shared lib versioning nightmares and makes everything "just work" (including drag-and-drop installs), but it also means you have 30 bajillion copies of libXYZ on your disk.

freehunter 14y ago

We do indeed have a guest WLAN, going out a separate circuit with a different ISP and different IP block. The problem is, people want Skype and Spotify on the same laptops they're using for work, and we don't allow split tunneling with our VPN. P2P applications have security risks associated with them, but they also have network constraints associated with them. It doesn't take many P2P users to choke legitimate users out of a network. When some of the network monitoring tools we use are licensed based on how much data is flowing through the network, P2P gets expensive real quick. Move that stuff to a network we're not monitoring as extensively.