Comment Re:Security team (Score 1) 517
I worked for a company that had similar policies - they installed tons of spyware on their system. The spyware would monitor what files got written, what files got opened, and so on, and it would visibly slow down the PC. (The tons of other management apps they had on it didn't help, either).
And these were brand new i7 laptops, running Windows 7.
A few weeks into the deployment, and people were complaining about sluggishness or other odd behavior, and ended up getting their antivirus swapped out which seemed to fix some of the oddities. The others suddenly got BSODs constantly - they coudln't go through a whole day of work without a BSOD in the middle of it, and it turned out the old antivirus was having a conflict with the disk encryption software. (One effect of being switched to new antivirus was they also switch encryption software to Bitlocker), and I remember that the machines without BSODs had their encryption and antivirus swapped out.
And yes, they spied on you. If you copied source code to a USB drive, you could expect either an email the next day from IT asking why you did it (CC'd to your manager), or have IT security and your manager come up to you and ask what you did it for.
They also spied on what you did - employees have been fired for playing a pirated movie on their laptops at home, on the off time. And I'm sure it was heavily scrutinized, given there were perfectly legitimate reasons to have stuff like VLC on your PC, or movie files (you needed them for testing).
Heck, the source code thing caught a few people who needed to do testing - testing USB hardware by doing basic file I/O (they copied the source tree to serve as test files). And it was especially fun since one of the processors had firmware and you had to copy the firmware you just compiled using USB for testing. It was all too easy to include a few source files in there...
About the only good thing was they had a backup utility so when you connected over VPN or to their network, the backup would run and get you most of the way should your hard drive crap out. But that was the only good slowdown that happened. You learned to connect to the VPN when you got into work, let it backup your PC while you get your coffee etc,