I had to run experiments that generate a lot of data (think hundreds of megabytes per minute). Our laptops had very little internal storage. I wasn’t allowed to use an external drive, or my own NAS, or the company share - instead they said “can’t you just delete the older experiments?”… Sure, why would I need the experiment data I’m generating? Might as well /dev/null it!
Access to change production systems was limited to a single team, which was tasked with doing all deploys by hand, for an engineering organisation of 50+ people. Quickly becoming overloaded, they limited deploy frequency to five deploys per day, organisation-wide.
I used to work with a guy who glued the USB ports shut on his labs. I asked him why he didn’t just turn them off in BIOS and then lock BIOS behind a password and he just kinda shrugged. He wasn’t security, but it’s kinda related to your story.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Security where I work is pretty decent really, I don’t recall them ever doing any dumb crazy stuff. There were some things that were unpopular with some people but they had good reasons that far outweighed any complaints.
I just wrote a script that let me know if usb devices changed and emailed me. It was kinda funny the one time someone unplugged a USB hub to run a vacuum. I came running as like 20 messages popped up at once.
When they did this for the stated reason of preventing data theft via thumb drive, the mice & keyboards were still plugged into their respective USB ports, and if I really wanted I could just unplug my keyboard and pop in a thumb drive. Drag, drop, data theft, done.
Further to this madness, half of the staff had USB hubs attached to their machines within a week which they had purchased at dollar stores. Like…?
At any time, if I had wanted to steal data I could have just zipped it and uploaded it to a sharing site. Or transferred it to my home PC through a virtual machine and VPN. Or burned it using the optical drive. Or come up with 50 other ways to do it under their noses and not be caught.
Basically just a bunch of dingbat IT guys in a contest to see who could find a threat behind every bush. IT policy via SlashDot articles. And the assumption that the very employees that have physical access to the computers… are the enemy.
Okay I’ll concede that SOMEWHERE in the world there exists a condition where somebody has to prevent the insertion of an unauthorized thumb drive, they don’t have access to the BIOS, they don’t have the password, or that model does not allow the disabling of the ports. No other necessary devices are plugged in by USB. Policy isn’t or can’t be set to prevent new USB devices from being added to the system. And this whole enchilada is in a high-traffic area with no physical security and many with unknown actors.
Here in Portugal the IT guys at the National Health Service recently blocked access to the Medical Doctor’s Union website from inside the national health service intranet.
The doctors are currently refusing to work any more overtime than the annual mandatory maximum of 150h so there are all sorts of problems in the national health service at the moment, mainly with hospitals having to close down emergency services to walk-in patients (this being AskLemmy, I’ll refrain from diving into the politics of it) so the whole things smells of something more than a mere mistake.
Anyways, this has got to be one of the dumbest abuses of firewalling “dangerous” websites I’ve seen in a long while.
Sluggy Freelance is one of the longest running webcomics in the world, and I think it is the longest running one where the author makes a living from it.
If it starts to make you do weird/senseless things like waving your cellphone in the air to stop the government from tracking you or similars, then yeah… that’d be a liiiiiiiiiiiittle too much.
You could try to fix this from a very different angle by buying those strips for the nose against snoring. Those strips can temporarily unobstruct the air flow in the nose.
Snoring is often a sign of sleep apnea, which is easily treatable. Your wife should take a sleep test to see if she has it. Can take years off your life if left undiagnosed.
I got to say after reading a couple stories here I can understand the frustrations and some very legitimate stories here make a lot of sense in the context of it teams fucking up. but I also think there’s a lot of ignorance about what people are actually trying to accomplish in some of these stories as somebody that does it security and a lot of compliance work sometimes we’re doing these things because we have to not so much that we want to.
Doesn’t matter to the end user whose fault it is. The spirit of this discussion is what was done to make your life harder. If you want to, go ahead and read it as “IT workers, what stupid things were you mandated to do that made your workers jobs harder?” The end user doesn’t know why a thing happens, just that IT did it. They’ll complain to IT and if it’s not their fault, it’s their responsibility to push back on whoever is calling these shots. The idiot in charge won’t know any better unless he’s called out on his bullshit.
I understand, I often have to explain to large groups of people why we make the choices we make as a security team and it’s not always a very popular thing I make a lot of people upset because security and convenience don’t really work well together.
My wife and I were (emphasis on WERE) raised in very religious circles and as such we were “saving ourselves” for marriage at the beginning of our relationship. I was already drifting away from the religious world and thought this practice was dumb but loved her enough for innumerable other reasons that I would go through basically whatever to wait for her.
4 years into our 7 year dating relationship I was very stupid and ended up having a drunken three way with two of her best friends in a public park. Long story. My S.O. never found out from any of us.
One of the women contacted me nearly a decade later drunk and crying in order to confess that she had gotten pregnant from the encounter and had gotten an abortion with her parents help but never told anyone else.
My wife and I dated for 7 years and have been married for just short of 9 years. I moved us to the other side of the country for work to limit the possible interactions with her former friends, and encouraged her in many ways to have as large a friend group as possible in our new life to curtail the desire to reach out to our old group. New address and new phone numbers to make it more difficult for people to find us out of the blue. This will never see the light of day in our relationship.
I love my wife to the ends of the earth and back, this is the one thing (other than the consistency of my bowel movements) I will ever keep from her.
Your poor wife. A terrible husband and two terrible best friends. I hope she find someone who loves her enough not to sleep with her friends, or sleep with her husband.
The network has been subnetted into departments. Problem: I, from development, get calls from service about devices that have issues. Before the subnetting, they simply told me the serial number, and I let my army of diagnosis tools hit the unsuspecting device to get an idea what’s up with it. Now they have to bring it over and set up all the attached devices here so I can run my tests.
Or configure a local port on the dev vlan… Sounds like a corporate environment where the many IT teams dont talk to each other, or network team are hiding out in a comms cupboard.
asklemmy
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.