It always seemed weird to me when people call shell binaries from the middle of a desktop app. What's wrong with finding the actual OS API instead?
Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
31–40 of 62 posts
Re: Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
#32Having a device enrolled in an MDM package does not make it a corporate device. Many corporations require personal devices be managed to support remote wiping. If I install a productivity or developer tool on my personal phone or laptop for personal non-corporate use I would get mistaken as a corporate user by this process.
If you want to collect this information you should be clear about it and know and understand your edge cases before you start attempting enforcement actions based on it if that is the intent.
In general in my experience, personal tools are a VERY hard market to sell into for corporate environments (I took a peek at what the software on OPs site requires a commercial license to use). I would bet most if not all of what you're catching here is unauthorized installs in a corporate environment and you're more likely to loose interested users than sell more commercial licenses.
Re: Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
#33I 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
much like https://sso.tax/ , if you need enterprisey features... someone thinks you can pay for it.
Re: Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
#34I 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
That's fine, there's no enforcement suggested though, maybe they get a popup asking about licenses, not necessarily a brick.
If it gets normalized for software to notice when there's MDM in play, do you really think it won't be treated as a strong signal and used to break things?
Re: Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
#35Having a device enrolled in an MDM package does not make it a corporate device. Many corporations require personal devices be managed to support remote wiping. If I install a productivity or developer tool on my personal phone or laptop for personal non-corporate use I would get mistaken as a corporate user by this process. If you want to collect this information you should be clear about it and know and understand y…
>Many corporations require personal devices be managed to support remote wiping.
Corporations cannot require you to have your personal devices be managed by them. If you're surrendering your own gear to a company, it stops being your own device.
Re: Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
#36As 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.
Given that paying for WinRAR is still a popular meme, these percentages look inaccurate.
Re: Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
#37Having a device enrolled in an MDM package does not make it a corporate device. Many corporations require personal devices be managed to support remote wiping. If I install a productivity or developer tool on my personal phone or laptop for personal non-corporate use I would get mistaken as a corporate user by this process. If you want to collect this information you should be clear about it and know and understand y…
>Many corporations require personal devices be managed to support remote wiping. Corporations cannot require you to have your personal devices be managed by them. If you're surrendering your own gear to a company, it stops being your own device.
But they can require things of devices connected to their wifi or being brought to their premises. You are welcome to leave the device at home if you don't want to consent.
Re: Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people use MDM for managing their kids devices (pinning DNS for filtering etc.)
First time I've seen "a lot of people" used to mean "practically nobody." Just joking, but seriously, I've never heard of anyone doing this, and I think maybe 1 in 100 people would even know that it's possible.
I mean, “many” people use SaaS apps which utilize MDM on end user devices, but many parents I know who are in tech roll their own to filter the net for their kids devices and (to a much lesser extent) monitor them proactively.
Re: Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
#39It always seemed weird to me when people call shell binaries from the middle of a desktop app. What's wrong with finding the actual OS API instead?
It's a lot harder, and for these sort of things maybe not even possible.
But yeah generally it is better if you can do it.
Re: Normalize Identifying Corporate Devices in Your Software
#40Normalizing this would start a game of cat & mouse, no?
I don't think so - most organisations and employees don't actively try to violate licenses, but if the path of least resistance is "eh" then individual employees definitely aren't going to bother. I bet there are thousands of people using the free version of MSVC commercially for example.
Depending on what action you take with this, I'd say it has a pretty good chance of tipping people into emailing IT to get a license.