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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26185 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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This happened to me years ago. A work computer refused to run executables that I made on that machine. Corporate security policies one ratchet click tighter than the Windows standard will cripple your ability to make your own programs as standalone executables.

Windows Defender Smartscreen shall decide when and if executables may run on your machine.

Buddy, a work computer is paradigmatically not yours. If your normal job function requires you to run executables on your machine, then the policy is just misconfigured.

I've listened to at least six hours of ranting on how a certain bank's security policies prevent their devs from working.

And how it's easier to actually develop software than to configure the system to build said software. Everything is MITM'd by security, mangled by weird proxies and getting something to even work requires 20x the effort of doing it at home..

I get that. And I'm a tech worker so this policy was indeed misconfigured for me. But IT was trained to ignore engineers saying they make their own scripts and obviously need to run and test them on local hardware. Which just resulted in a culture of engineers bypassing the controls in an extremely insecure manner in order to perform basic job functions. The computers in the hardware lab lacked the controls for instance.

It was anarchotyranny for IT security.

I mean, this is frankly just a breakdown in culture and management.

If you can't do your job function, your manager or their manager needs to talk with IT until an understanding is reached that harmonizes things.

I understand lots of firms are poorly run with shit policy, but that's not a reason to say "policy controls are bad". Policy is hard, it's still worth doing.

This is sensible. Given the nature of IQ 100-115 normies, allowing them to run arbitrary code on a machine is equivalent to allowing the GRU or Lockbit to run arbitrary code on that machine.

God did not intend every individual to have access to a universal Turing machine. On the other hand, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds did, and the GNU/Linux ecosystem isn't going anywhere because the internet backbone runs on it. In addition, a huge part of the value proposition of the Microsoft ecosystem (particularly relative to Apple) is that it supports organisations doing their own computing without needing to ask Microsoft's permission. Satya Nadella may not want every worker drone to have a universal Turing machine in their pocket, but he wants every enterprise customer's IT guy to have easy access to one. And in practice that means building machines which offer universal functionality to anyone who knows what they are doing.

God did not intend every individual to have access to a universal Turing machine. On the other hand, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds did

“God created men, Richard Stallman made them equal” —new motto of the Free Software Foundation, probably

“God created men, Richard Stallman made them equal” —new motto of the Free Software Foundation, probably

And Eric Raymond merges the Coltian and Stallmanian concepts of equality. Which is more dangerous to the irresponsible user is left as an exercise to the reader.

Eric Raymond merges the Coltian and Stallmanian concepts of equality.

Coltian? I got nothing searching for 'Eric Raymond Colt'. Help!

Eric Raymond (ESR) is an open source pioneer and also a libertarian activist and gun nut. The original version of the quote (which appears to have originally been a Colt Corp marketing slogan) is “God created man, Sam Colt made them equal.” Sam Colt invented the revolver, which was the first gun to be a practical sidearm.

Samuel Colt, the gunmaker, referred to in the older aphorism "God made man; Sam Colt made them equal".

The "God created men ..." quote is attributed to Samuel Colt (or John Moses Browning?)

I think it was just Colt's marketing department.

You're not going find anything, they're just speaking in metaphors. All he said was that Stallman is a utopian lefty hippie who thinks Free Software won't tend to be used for anything dangerous, while Raymond is the software equivalent of a libertarian gun nut, working hard to bestow firepower upon the masses.

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