Never trust software that doesn't trust you.
(And yeah, I know. That's a whole lot of software to never trust.)
Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
11–20 of 62 posts
Re: Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
#12Normalizing this would start a game of cat & mouse, no?
Yea, this seems to be sort of analogous to companies who check whether you have a rooted device in order to take some kind of action (usually preventing the software from running). If that's a shitty thing to do, then this is, too.
Software should not be in the business of trying to (badly) guess whether the user is the right sort of user, based on inexact signals from the operating system. As others pointed out, the false positives will be annoyed, and the true positives will sidestep your efforts.
Re: Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
That, and a lot of false positives. People that run an AD domain for their home lab, people that use apple configurator to create profiles for their own devices (can enable some settings/features that are otherwise gated behind using an MDM profile - like shared iPads), etc. On the flip side, you are also missing all of the solopreneurs using your software for commercial use but obviously aren't spinning up a whole e…
> People that run an AD domain for their home lab, people that use apple configurator to create profiles for their own devices (can enable some settings/features that are otherwise gated behind using an MDM profile - like shared iPads), etc. That's a tiny minority of your user base. You'll live. They'll live. > So who are you going to catch, really? Enterprises that are big enough to manage their fleet, but small eno…
The minority are typically also enthusiasts who serve as a multiplier. Alienating them isn’t the best strategy.
Re: Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People that run an AD domain for their home lab, people that use apple configurator to create profiles for their own devices (can enable some settings/features that are otherwise gated behind using an MDM profile - like shared iPads), etc. That's a tiny minority of your user base. You'll live. They'll live. > So who are you going to catch, really? Enterprises that are big enough to manage their fleet, but small eno…
The minority are typically also enthusiasts who serve as a multiplier. Alienating them isn’t the best strategy.
Below the code snippets the post states this is not a silver bullet, but only a starting point.
Re: Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
The minority are typically also enthusiasts who serve as a multiplier. Alienating them isn’t the best strategy.
Below the code snippets the post states this is not a silver bullet, but only a starting point.
The code snippets are the easy part here. Too easy to blindly deploy, because it might work for 95% of the cases. You know how these things go: KPM increased, move on to the next thing.
Re: Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
#16I use MDM on my own systems because it gives me a bit more control. It's also a superior form of device oversight for kids.
Re: Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
#17As with every similar heavy-handed approach to enforcement you are making life difficult for the 99% of regular, honest users while the remaining 1% can trivially bypass it.
The post doesn't say what you should do with this information. You could just remind the user that they're supposed to buy a license for commercial use.
Re: Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
#18As with every similar heavy-handed approach to enforcement you are making life difficult for the 99% of regular, honest users while the remaining 1% can trivially bypass it.
The post doesn't say what you should do with this information. You could just remind the user that they're supposed to buy a license for commercial use.
additionally with the proposal "put together a list of known corporate MDM server URLs in a public repository" I think the idea could be to only block users with an MDM server from that list. of course that would have to be quite a large list and maintaining it fairly could be a challenge
Re: Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
#19Normalizing this would start a game of cat & mouse, no?
(Anecdotally) I don't think most big corps using commercial software without a license are doing it intentionally/maliciously at an organizational level. Most of the time it's just individual employees downloading supposedly "free" software without reading the license and not realizing it isn't free for commercial use.
Re: Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
#20I heard folks here used MDM to give themselves more control over Apple security features that they otherwise don’t. This code example and scenario penalizes them by side effect
This happens in a lot of software in the Windows world, too. As soon as you run it on a non-Home SKU you’re suddenly The Enterprise, even as a home-gamer.
Windows is gating a lot of basic configuration shit behind enterprise configs like Group Policies now, specifically so that the people slumming it on Home get all the ads, spyware, mandatory updates, stealthily enabled AI features, etc.