Hacker News

points by adrian_b 1 day ago | hide | 0 comments

While the title may be misleading, this is an excellent discussion of the security problems of HTTPS.

Of his complaints about misguided security, this one has resonated the most with my experience:

"Regarding my new enemy, ...

• The absolute shits that have locked down corporate computers with the assumption that the user can’t have a legitimate reason to change settings on it, put in a USB stick, use the command line, run an “untrusted” application like emacs or something that I just wrote and compiled myself, or basically any application other than a web browser, even if that user has been programming for 40 years and has a Ph.D. in computer science and was hired for that very experience."

The result of being given this kind of corporate laptops is that I have never done any kind of work on them, but I have kept them open on my desk just for reading my e-mail messages in Exchange, or for using Teams and the like, while doing all the work that I had to do on my own device, over which I had the control needed for productive work.

Here's the thing. Now you're putting wear and tear, no matter how slight, on your device, you aren't being compensated for. Furthermore, you're opening yourself to legal exposure where your drives and data could be seized under reasonable suspicion you might have something on an unauthorized device. I make an ultimatum to people who employ me. You get me a workstation. You give me admin, you put your MDM or whatever on it, and you let me do what I need, and it gets back to you on cessation of employment unless they decide to sell/gift it to me as an acknowledgement of deprecation/whatever. Do not cross the streams. They employed you, not the other way around.