You know those silly corporate IT security rules? The ones that they say are there to prevent you from accidentally turning your company computer into a spam bot or exposing company data to thieves or infesting the corporate network with viruses? Well, since that’s just gobbledygook to you, obviously you can subvert those rules with impunity, right?
Ten Things Your IT Department Won’t Tell You – WSJ.com
I’ve got an idea – try all 10 of those ideas and see how long you keep your job. If you’re lucky, you won’t end up in jail for it, but good luck getting another job that involves a computer more sophisticated than a McDonalds cash register.
I’ve done all ten, if you substitute Gmail for the “online storage” websites, and ignore the Blackberry rules (never had one, never want one).
In my defense, it was usually because I was required or instructed to do so. Which is a different problem entirely…
Yes, let’s give advice to the people who don’t understand WHY the rules are in place so that they can create more work for the rest of us.
Mind you, I have occasionally broken several of these rules (specific rules that are policy guidelines rather than enforced in stone) for specific reasons, but I am actually careful about it.
E.g. I download and install open source products such as Firefox and ssh clients on my system, as it’s recognized that the “rules for everybody” don’t apply the same way to IT staff, but I am choosy about what I use, and I don’t disable or subvert the existing security to do it.
Also, it’s amazing how unobvious stuff can be even to so-called power users.
Back in university, one of my friends (and he was a unix power user) set the permissions on his home directory to drwx-wx-wx on the grounds that he wanted people to be able to put files in his directory, but at the same time he was very protective of his privacy and didn’t want anyone to see his files.
It took a demonstration (me putting nasty things in his home directory while arguing about this with him in the lab) before he established that this wasn’t a great idea.
“Hit Alt-Tab to quickly minimize one window (say, the one where you’re browsing ESPN.com) and maximize another (like that presentation that’s due today).”
YOU KEEP USING THOSE WORDS etc.
*headdesk*
On the upside, people doing things like the WSJ is recommending is what pays my salary.
Check out the comments back at one of the contributor’s homes, Lifehacker:
http://lifehacker.com/software/productivity/10-things-your-it-department-wont-tell-you-284192.php
Hey Paul, when I tried to post this comment using my OpenID identity, WordPress told me:
Sorry, “cmdoptesc”, there still seems to be some interaction between the Spam Karma 2 plugin and the OpenID plugin. I haven’t figured it out yet, but it looks like the OpenID plugin somehow eats the form variables that Spam Karma 2 puts in. It seems to work well for some people and not others.
I found one comment on the lifehacker site to be particularly funny: “I’m a sysadmin and if I saw you doing that I’d fire you!”
Since when does anyone give the BOFH authority to fire people? Even the dumbest manager has enough sense to listen to their “DANGER! DANGER!” alarm when such a thing is proposed.