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We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

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Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#51

Post by mcbits »

leephillips wrote: post #23
mcbits wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The writing is clearly AI-generated or at least AI-assisted, so I think it's safe to assume it's also a work of fiction.

I’ll take your word for that. I don’t know how to tell. But I did notice that the writing was conspicuously terrible throughout. Entire sentences make no sense, such as “I'd slip in suspiciously while they contemplated the email that clearly said not to let anyone in with your own card.”

The last two paragraphs are mainly what stood out. I've spent hours trying to get LLMs to stop writing like that. It's hard because you can't just say things like "don't write lists of three items" because sometimes you want a list of three items. The rest of the text could be written by a person as it's kind of disjointed, but that could also be the result of trying to prompt out the AI-isms.

Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#52

Post by hinkley »

Apreche wrote: post #3

I’ve been to many very large office buildings with turnstile systems, and I have never seen any kind of line, even during the busiest hours. Yes, they are security theater to a large extent, but they do legitimately help to make the elevators run a lot more efficiently.

I’ve only worked two places as big as OP described, but you probably see this more when your company leases a third of a floor on a giant office building. Or a floor and a half, or two half floors because it was easier to expand onto the 12th floor.

Elevators do back up, especially when everyone has to scan for their floor. Not like the author suggests, but you can lose a good few minutes a couple times a day that way. It does start some people on an exercise kick of using the stairwell to leave the building. Not great exercise though.

The one place solved this by not building parking garages. Flat parking that went to the horizon. By the time I got to work the spot I parked at was going to be over half a mile from my desk. I bought a grownup scooter with oversized wheels, first day I used it security tracked me down and said those aren’t allowed on company property (I had half a mind to use it on the sidewalks around the outside of the property but didn’t, since I’d still be carrying the stupid thing into the building). But I spent a lot on that scooter and had no other use for it, so I was mad.

My coworker had convinced me that this was billable hours (court precedent about a factory that had a bad setup for employees to get to the time clock) so I started phoning into standup when I was on site but still eight minutes from my desk.

When you’re walking half a mile to the security doors it tends to stagger the arrival times. Which is a feature, if the dumbest one.

Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#53

Post by mikestew »

Bad implementations do not "security theater" make. When I did some work for a large coffee company, they had turnstiles at their building entrances, and I don't remember any lines in the morning. The scan/auth/enter process went about as fast as if there was no turnstile.

I remember when I started at Microsoft decades ago that there were still "old-timers" who were pissy about having to use card keys to enter the building. With that attitude, man, did that ever explain Microsoft application and OS security in the early 2000s.

Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#54

Post by Izkata »

amluto wrote: post #10

Turnstiles have a genuine security benefit compared to door and elevator security: convincing people not to let their coworkers in the door or up the elevator is difficult because the actual request (“close the door behind you, this blocking the friendly person trying to go through, so their scan their card”) is genuinely obnoxious. But a turnstile really does fundamentally let one person through, even if it’s easy t…

And then there's full-body turnstiles. Ugly, but good luck bypassing that.

Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#55

Post by Rapzid »

CydeWeys wrote: post #27

I'm not really sure what the point of this article is. Yes, obviously, you need to implement systems that are secure and performant so that you don't get a backed-up line of people waiting an hour just to get into the office in the morning. But that's a notably flawed rollout; millions of employees go into badge-in-required offices every day without issue. And it's kind of hard to imagine running a large office while…

I thought the point is store your passwords in Redis because it's WebSecure.

Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#56

Post by kjs3 »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #40
hamdingers wrote: post #9

I worked at a company that had effectively no physical security during work hours until the second time someone came in during lunch and stole an armload of laptops. Then we got card readers and a staffed front desk, and discovered our snack budget was too high because people from other companies on other floors were coming to ours for snacks too. I never felt the office was insecure, except in retrospect once it was…

How the fuck nobody notices some randoms coming to steal snacks in the first place ?

We have nearly a 1000 people in my building. I don't track every rando that walks by, nor reasonably could I.

Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#57

Post by Rapzid »

leephillips wrote: post #23
mcbits wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The writing is clearly AI-generated or at least AI-assisted, so I think it's safe to assume it's also a work of fiction.

I’ll take your word for that. I don’t know how to tell. But I did notice that the writing was conspicuously terrible throughout. Entire sentences make no sense, such as “I'd slip in suspiciously while they contemplated the email that clearly said not to let anyone in with your own card.”

Turnstiles aren't theater and Redis doesn't make password storage secure so the entire thing seems a little el-el-emish..

But what about that sentence does that not make sense? They are describing tailgating..

Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#58

Post by leephillips »

Rapzid wrote: post #57
leephillips wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll take your word for that. I don’t know how to tell. But I did notice that the writing was conspicuously terrible throughout. Entire sentences make no sense, such as “I'd slip in suspiciously while they contemplated the email that clearly said not to let anyone in with your own card.”

Turnstiles aren't theater and Redis doesn't make password storage secure so the entire thing seems a little el-el-emish.. But what about that sentence does that not make sense? They are describing tailgating..

It doesn’t make sense as a whole. But, for example, what was he suspicious of?

Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#59

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

wildzzz wrote: post #25
robomartin wrote: post #14

Interesting. I have worked in ITAR environments with serious security and have never experienced 30 minute lines at the door. In fact, I can't remember lines at all. Hard to understand what happened here. Was it really a single turnstile for a building with over 10 floors? That's kind of silly, isn't it? Mass transit operations have this figured out. Most recently for me, taking the monorail in Las Vegas for the CES…

I don't see how any of this wasn't already a problem. In the story, everyone shows up to the office at the same time, how did they use to work out the elevator issue? This story has a bunch of AI telltales so I doubt it's real anyway.

In the story, they implemented table (building) and row (floor) level permissions simultaneously. So you had to swipe into the building, then in the elevator to get the elevator to stop at your floor.

I guess I could see contention possibly happening as described if everybody arrived almost simultaneously and both swiping points had very high latency. But why not keep the door checkpoints armed and disable the elevator swipes? That makes me think it's a contrived example.

Re: We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

#60

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

Izkata wrote: post #54
amluto wrote: post #10

Turnstiles have a genuine security benefit compared to door and elevator security: convincing people not to let their coworkers in the door or up the elevator is difficult because the actual request (“close the door behind you, this blocking the friendly person trying to go through, so their scan their card”) is genuinely obnoxious. But a turnstile really does fundamentally let one person through, even if it’s easy t…

And then there's full-body turnstiles. Ugly, but good luck bypassing that.

Put on a UPS/FedEx uniform, put somebody in a box, and drop them off at receiving.
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