131–140 of 264 posts
> Currently the service uses both McAfee and Tanium software packages to scan and protect service-issued endpoints like laptops
In my experience McAfee alone will do exactly what this thread describes. But you then combine it with another security solution, and you end in on contention hell.
They can even scan one another during scans of underlying files/processes unless they're both correctly excluded from one another.
I will never understand when a company/government entity pay people a high salary then give them crap or low-end hardware. You should be maxing out dev machines and the rest of the company should rarely see a spinner or have to wait on their tech. It's a huge waste of time that you are paying for. I once calculated how much time I wasted waiting on slow processes at a job and then multiplied it by my effective hourly…
I've heard an alternative, proposed often at Google: give devs the weakest systems possible: slow flaky net, slow machines with minimal memory so they are forced to make efficient systems for people in third world countries (key to rapid growth for many products). Personally I don't care much about my laptop except htat it can drive a large external display and does fast networking. I only use it to connect to a VM I…
Testing on slow devices is important but using a slow device as primary dev machine would just waste too much time.
At every agency I've worked at, people were given sub-par machines. The joke was, "We bill by the hour, don't we?"
McCann, AKQA, Digitas... was always standard to give people 5+ year-old laptops, often without even wiping them between staff members. We had one new hire, a junior UX designer, try and screen share with a client only to realize all of the bookmarks were packed with porn sites.
I remember in 2018 getting an 11" MacBook Air with 2 GB of RAM on it... as the team lead for a $25M project. Just a total joke. It was on par with what the devs were given. "Be happy they gave you a Mac!"
Meanwhile, 50% of the CPU was taken up with some BS security scanning program IT installed that require you be on the company VPN, and junky VPN software that hadn't been updated in 5+ years and only supported like 15 people trying to use it across the whole company... and it seldom worked from clients' offices... the moment I got on-site, my laptop was nothing more than a paperweight. And even if I could log in, all my bandwidth and CPU would be spent trying to backup the computer.
And... when I fought for better machines for my staff, at AKQA I was told by the MD, "Just drop it, we aren't going to spend any more money on hardware. You're being obnoxious and there's no benefit." Meanwhile my team was bringing their own external keyboards, mice, and monitors (and dongles) because the company wouldn't supply them. Ever try and design for 4k screens on a 11" MacBook Air with 2 GB of RAM? Ha. Most everyone just resorted to bringing personal equipment when they had to go on-site. It was too painful to use the company-issued junk.
It's a lack of understanding. Some bean counter who only uses his computer for checking Facebook all day assumes that nobody else does anything else, so 2 GB of RAM seems like enough. Meanwhile, the IT guys -- who aren't ever client facing and seldom needed the powerful machines -- all got top of the line equipment. "They're IT, they need it..." Um... wait what? At a time when I couldn't get my designers even 1 4k monitor, the IT guys were all rocking dual Apple Cinema Displays. Yay agencies!
Anyway look, it's all maddening. Make sure it's easy for anyone to put in for the tools they need to do the job well. Give everyone a new computer ever 3 years, keep staff happy and productive. Give the old ones to charity, get a tax write-off. Seems like that would work fine.
It's becoming more and more difficult to write an initial access file for every single EDR and anti-virus combination out there. But if you know what you're working towards it's a breeze :)
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I'd love to know WHY it takes over an hour to load Outlook? Can anyone enlighten me as to what takes the time? Is it connecting to something and periodically backing off when it can't? Scanning something? What?
I worked at a internship one time where by the end of the two month stint my machine would take upwards of 45 minutes to login because there was something that was running on login that had to timeout (because it was broken). Sometimes IT pushes policies that conflict with other stuff and rarely do they check every configuration (or setup alerting for these bad cases). There's lots of reasons it can happen though (es…
I didn't know what this meant, so I looked it up on DuckDuckGo.
The first relevant result was from... a DoD website.
I will never understand when a company/government entity pay people a high salary then give them crap or low-end hardware. You should be maxing out dev machines and the rest of the company should rarely see a spinner or have to wait on their tech. It's a huge waste of time that you are paying for. I once calculated how much time I wasted waiting on slow processes at a job and then multiplied it by my effective hourly…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And let's tie one hand behind their backs and cover one eye as well while we are at it. I think the idea of giving devs trash hardware because "it's what our users use" is the worst solution possible to solving that problem. Have the devs or another team test on lower-end hardware before pushing a version, don't hobble them while they are creating.
Well, that would help with making technology more accessible. Developers, especially highly paid ones, are as selfish as anyone else on the planet. If you have a strategy to make them care about literally a single other person, I suggest you go for it.
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I think that's a very rosy view of US intervention. In particular, the US has helped overthrow numerous democratic governments because they were not ideologically aligned with the kind of free trade maximalism the US favours. Indonesia and Chile are particularly notable examples here. It's unclear if US actions have created a more stable world, but they have certainly created one more aligned with the US ideologicall…
Wasn’t the military which overthrew democratic governments though. It was the CIA.
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I'm in security, and one thing I always try to stress is that if the security software is causing work stoppages, it should be treated with the same importance as an outage. Just as you wouldn't tolerate an internet connection that went down all the time. Outages from security measures are still outages.
I’d love to get my hands on some of this crap, just to watch what all it’s actually doing. God knows I can’t afford that bloatware though. I’ve got a hint that a lot of it is doing stuff that the OS might even consider malicious.
Then they also inject themselves into processes and 'hook' into operating system routines to check things the feeds to not provide: which files are being accessed, how often, what memory is allocated, what type of memory is allocated, which threads are running, where they are running and what they are doing, if there's mismatches between what the operating system told are the modules loaded, and what it can find in memory.
Most of this software can be configured so that the resource usage is relatively tame, but then on the next pentest the security people will notice all sorts of ways the products did not catch them (this is the usual case). And then things are tuned to max in short order :) And then you have security software running multiple rules and scans on each file any process opens. And processes open a lot of files, all the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And let's tie one hand behind their backs and cover one eye as well while we are at it. I think the idea of giving devs trash hardware because "it's what our users use" is the worst solution possible to solving that problem. Have the devs or another team test on lower-end hardware before pushing a version, don't hobble them while they are creating.
Well, that would help with making technology more accessible. Developers, especially highly paid ones, are as selfish as anyone else on the planet. If you have a strategy to make them care about literally a single other person, I suggest you go for it.